A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  And it was slow. After eight of the eighteen years Cassini had initially estimated would be needed to complete the survey, only two maps were published, those of Paris and Beauvais. In the summer of 1756 Cassini III was granted an audience with Louis XV to present him with the map of Beauvais, fresh from the engraver. Initially, the meeting went well. Cassini recalled that the king ‘seemed astonished by the precision of the detail’ of the map. But then Louis dropped a bombshell. ‘My poor Cassini,’ he said, ‘I am terribly sorry, I have bad news for you: my controller-general doesn’t want me to go on with the map. There’s no more money for it.’36 The project was way behind, and costs had escalated, Cassini now estimating that each map would cost nearly 5,000 livres. Based on current progress, the entire project would not be completed until well into the next century. Machault’s reforms had predictably foundered in the face of aristocratic opposition, and, given the parlous condition of the state’s finances, his replacement, Jean Moreau de Séchelles, was clearly unprepared to sanction further expenditure. Whatever Cassini III’s immediate reaction, he later recalled that his response to Louis’s news was characteristically determined: ‘The map will be made.’37

  Cassini III was a geographer who insisted on absolute perfection, and the dilatory progress of the survey which resulted had put its existence in jeopardy. But, as a businessman, he now moved quickly to ensure its survival. Cassini had always hoped that the private sector would invest in his previous survey of 1733–44, and he now hit on a plan to test his belief and save the new survey. With Louis’s backing, he formed the Société de la Carte de France, an association of fifty shareholders who were asked to provide 1,600 livres per year to support his estimate of the 80,000 livres per year which would be needed to complete the survey in just ten more years. In exchange, they received shares in the projected profits, as well as two copies of each completed map. Politically and financially, it was a brilliant move. Leading members of the nobility and the government publicly allied themselves with the project by subscribing, even including the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and Cassini raised even more money than he actually needed. Despite this effective privatization of the enterprise, Cassini also stipulated that the Académie des Sciences would retain overall control of both the survey’s management and the publication of its maps. Within a few weeks, Cassini III had rescued the survey from potential oblivion, ensured its future funding, and freed it from the interference of either the state or its shareholders.

  Cassini’s actions galvanized production of maps based on the survey. Within days he announced that the first maps of Paris and Beauvais were for sale, each costing 4 livres – considerably more expensive than other regional maps, which sold for as little as 1 livre. Cassini promised to release one map each month: Meaux, Soissons, Sens, Rouen, Chartres, Abbeville, Laon, Le Havre, Coutances and Châlons-sur-Marne quickly followed and within three years, 39 of the anticipated 180 maps had been published (although they were all concentrated in the northern and central areas around Paris). The print runs were substantial (500 for each sheet), and sales were impressive. By 1760, more than 8,000 copies of the first forty-five sheets printed had been sold.38 By the end of the decade tens of thousands of individual sheets were in the hands of people living the length and breadth of the country. Although the number of printed maps published by Cassini was smaller than in Blaeu’s Atlas maior, the cumulative circulation of all the published map sheets certainly eclipsed sales of the earlier, more expensive Dutch atlas. Maps were circulating on an unprecedented scale.

  The publication of the first maps in 1756 made it clear for all to see that this was a staggering achievement. Having obsessively supervised every stage of their creation from survey to publication, Cassini III had created a series of maps that were unparalleled in their precision, detail, accuracy and standardization. Each map was produced using only the finest materials available. They included German black ink from Frankfurt and aqua fortis which gave the maps their characteristically sharp but durable lines, as well as a soft, silvery aura. Cassini had demanded that the maps be ‘laid out with a certain taste and clarity’. He understood that the ‘public hardly judges but by this inconsiderable point’. The crisp exactitude of the finished product resulted in the kind of aesthetic beauty not normally associated with maps. Mapmaking might have become a science, but Cassini was also anxious for the public to regard it as an art.

  Capitalizing on the public interest, Cassini took another innovative step: in February 1758, he offered a public subscription to the entire map of France. For 562 livres, subscribers would receive all 180 maps as they were published, representing a saving of 158 livres. One hundred and five subscribers took up the offer, rising to 203 by 1780.39 Unlike the company’s shareholders, very few of these subscribers were part of the Parisian elite. They included provincial farmers and businessmen, many drawn from the middling sector of French society that had previously been so opposed to the survey. Although their numbers were relatively few, these bourgeois subscribers represented an inadvertent ‘nationalization’ of the survey as a consequence of its putative ‘privatization’. Just as Cassini III’s obsessive demand for accuracy allowed local people to contribute to the national survey and regard it as representing their country, so his attempt to ensure its continued financial support enabled others to invest in a small piece of France.

  Having delegated the funding of the project to the private sector, the state still retained an active interest in the progress of the reinvigorated survey. In 1764 a royal proclamation was issued requiring all unsurveyed regions to contribute to the outlay involved. The subsequent revenue provided Cassini III with nearly 30 per cent of the estimated costs for completing the entire survey. It was a timely boost for him. His original projections for finishing the survey had been wildly optimistic, as he must have realized when he had struggled to raise the revenue required to keep the project afloat. The new capital enabled him to employ a further nine engineers, but it was still not enough. Surveying and mapping the highly populated and unforbidding terrain in the country’s central and northern regions was straightforward enough, but working in the vast, mountainous areas in the south and south-west was proving as difficult as ever. The expected completion of the survey in the late 1760s came and went; between 1763 and 1778, fifty-one further maps were published, mostly in the central and western regions, but that still left well over a third of the country to be mapped, including Brittany, where the conservative aristocratic authorities impeded what they regarded as the survey’s centralizing demands.

  Transferring the results of the survey’s fieldwork onto engraved maps hundreds of kilometres away in Paris had the potential for endless minor errors. Cassini’s response was the introduction of obsessive checks, tests and inspections. Even the paper on which the maps were printed was exactly measured to ensure that, on a standard sheet measuring 65×95 centimetres applying a uniform scale of 1:86,400, each discrete section would represent exactly 78×49 square kilometres. Having established a method of verifying the survey’s results with the local population, Cassini then turned his attention to the problem of engraving. The florid italic of Mercator and Blaeu’s maps and atlases was no longer sufficient to cope with the mass of data produced by the prescribed scale of 1:86,400. ‘As regards the engraving of the sheets,’ Cassini complained, ‘one would not believe how this art, taken so far in France, has been so neglected in its geographical aspects.’ In response, he was ‘obliged to train engravers, to make a selection of models for them to follow in representing woods, rivers, and the conformation of the country’.40 Still not satisfied, Cassini found it necessary to train two sets of engravers: the first to engrave the topographical plan, the second to complete the lettering. Pierre Patte, one of Cassini’s main engravers, described how the black-and-white engraving aimed to reproduce the sensual detail of the natural world. ‘As for the manner of expressing the different parts that make up a map,’ he wrote in 1758,

/>   the whole art lies in grasping the general expression of nature and giving its spirit to what one wishes to be represented. From high on a mountain, consider the tone of the different objects that are on the surface of the surrounding terrain: all the woods seem to stand out in brown, bush-like, against a background that also seems a little brown . . . As regards mountains, unless they are peaks, they never seem to be clearly delineated, but their summits always seem on the contrary to be rounded, more or less elongated, and giving on the shadow side a velvety tone without crudity.41

  Cassini and his engravers were building up a new grammar of mapping, developing signs, symbols and lettering that would translate the land’s topography into a new language of cartography. The results can be seen in the most popular and iconic of all the survey’s maps, the first sheet representing Paris. Its lack of decoration is immediately noticeable. There is no cartouche, no table of contents or explanation of symbols, and no extraneous artistic flourishes: just a topographical map of Paris and its environs. The triangular, geometric skeleton of previous Cassini maps has disappeared, subsumed by the wealth of local detail. The subliminal geometry of the map is hardly visible at all, just discernible along the Paris meridian which runs right down its middle, with the perpendicular forming a right angle at its dead centre: the Paris Observatory. But on this map, there is no great celebration of egocentric geography; instead, the eye is drawn to its precise toponymy and lovingly rendered topography.

  Everything on the map is standardized. Cassini improved the established signs and symbols (such as the traditional hierarchy of city, town, parish, château and hamlet symbolized by different oblique perspectives), and added his own – an abbey was represented by a bell-tower with a crozier, a country house with a small banner, a mine by a small circle. Administrative divisions from the national to the regional level were distinguished by a variety of dotted and stippled lines, while hatching symbolized relief. In sheet after sheet, the same standard conventions and symbols were used. The message was unmistakable: whatever the terrain, every corner of the kingdom could now be mapped and represented according to the same principles. In a direct challenge to the country’s defiant regionalism, the map established that nowhere was exceptional. It was a powerful message of unity echoed in the growing opposition to monarchical rule expressed by lawyers like Guillaume-Joseph Saige, who wrote in 1775 that ‘there is nothing essential in the political body but the social contract and the exercise of the general will; apart from that, everything is absolutely contingent and depends, for its form as for its existence, on the supreme will of the nation’.42

  Paradoxically, this ‘will’ was conveyed loudest through the maps’ most obvious feature. In eighteenth-century France, the king’s subjects spoke a diversity of languages, from Occitan, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Italian, German, Flemish and even Yiddish, to a variety of French dialects.43 On Cassini’s maps, the purely descriptive language – ville, bourg, hameau, gentilhommière, bastide, and so on – is written in Parisian French. With geographical standardization comes linguistic conformity. If everyone looking at the map is being asked to imagine the place where they themselves are as part of a unified France, they must do so in the language of its rulers in Paris.

  The 1780s brought many momentous changes, both to the survey and to France. As Cassini approached his seventies, he was joined on the completion of the survey by his son, Jean-Dominique, comte de Cassini (Cassini IV). Efforts were redoubled to complete the work, but in September 1784 Cassini III contracted smallpox and died, aged 70. His achievements had been immense, from restoring the family’s authority after the debacle over the shape of the earth in the 1740s, to the completion of yet another geometrical survey, first initiating then rescuing the most ambitious survey ever envisaged, and steering it towards a conclusion. Now the onerous task of completing the national survey was passed to Jean-Dominique, who also assumed the role of director of the Observatory. Named after his great-grandfather, born and brought up in the Paris Observatory that the family now saw as their home, and firmly established as part of the Parisian nobility since the 1740s, like Cassini I and II, Jean-Dominique regarded himself as an astronomer rather than a geographer (a title which, in the circles within which he moved, still brought far greater prestige). He chose to see himself as a patrician scientist and academician, loftily surveying the mechanical work done in the field by his engineers from the confines of what he believed to be his observatory. The completion of the survey, as his father acknowledged, would never produce the kind of scientific breakthroughs achieved by Cassini I and II. Assessing the impact of science on the study of geography, Cassini IV later wrote that:

  Thanks to the multiple voyages undertaken by educated men all over the world; thanks to astronomy’s, geometry’s, and clock making’s easy and rigorous methods for determining the position of all places, geographers will soon find that they have neither uncertainty, nor choice, nor need of a critical faculty in order to fix the principal positions of the four parts of the globe. The canvas will fill itself bit by bit as time passes, imitating the procedure that we followed for the production of the general map of France.44

  Geography was dismissed as a method rather than a science, bereft of ‘a critical faculty’, its practitioners reduced to painting by numbers, rather like Cassini’s own engineers in the field. Cassini tacitly accepted that the survey would be a huge achievement, but for him, completing it simply consisted of a mechanical filling in of gaps, and needed to be finished as quickly as possible to allow him to pursue more ambitious astronomical research.

  Ever mindful of his family’s reputation, Cassini IV dutifully pursued the surveying and printing of the final maps, publishing another forty-nine throughout the 1780s. But as work continued and the decade drew to an end, larger political events began to overtake it. The bitterly cold winter of 1788–9 and subsequent drought sent food prices rocketing, leading to riots across the country. The monarchy was no longer able to trim its parlous financial situation, and turned the issue of political and fiscal reform over to the Estates-General, a representative assembly of three tiers – the Church, the nobility and commoners – which convened for the first time since 1614, at Versailles. When reforms foundered in the face of aristocratic opposition, opponents of the ancien régime finally took matters into their own hands. After being barred from a meeting of the Estates-General on 20 June 1789, the members of the Third Estate met to sign the ‘Tennis Court Oath’, which demanded a new, written constitution. It triggered the beginnings of a revolution, which would quickly see the creation of a new legislative assembly and a failed constitutional monarchy, culminating in the proclamation of a French Republic in 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793.

  In the late 1780s the opposition to the king’s rule demanded sweeping political reforms in language which repeatedly invoked the ‘patrie’ (‘the fatherland’) and the nation. Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, as the Cassini surveyors toiled across the country, both the royalists and their increasingly vocal political adversaries fought over the term ‘patrie’. Initially, the king’s supporters claimed that to be patriotic was to be royalist, but the opposition responded by referring to itself as the parti patriote from the early 1770s, and argued that, until the monarchy was swept away, France possessed no ‘patrie’, and could not truly be called a nation. The debate can be discerned in the titles of books: between 1770 and 1789, 277 works were printed with variations on the word ‘patrie’ in their title, and in the same period 895 titles used ‘nation’ or ‘national’.45 These ranged from pamphlets with titles like Les Vœux d’un patriote (1788) to Pierre-Jean Agier’s anti-monarchical treatise Le Jurisconsulte national (1788), and the Abbé Fauchet’s more conciliatory De la religion nationale (1789). As the supporters of the Third Estate seized the political initiative in 1789, their language repeatedly invoked a new idea of the nation. ‘If the privileged order were removed,’ wrote one of its supporters, ‘the
nation would not be something less, but something more.’46 In a pamphlet entitled ‘What is the Nation and What is France?’ (1789), the writer Toussaint Guiraudet described the political situation as if he were looking down on Cassini’s maps: ‘France is not a compound of Provinces, but a space of twenty-five thousand square leagues.’47 Another prominent supporter of the Third Estate, the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès, wrote of the need to make ‘all the parts of France a single body, and all the peoples who divide it into a single body’. ‘The nation’, he argued, ‘is prior to everything. It is the source of everything.’ His book What is the Third Estate? presented its deputies as the nation’s true representatives, and in June 1789 the Estate drew on Sieyès’s rhetoric in declaring that ‘the source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’.48

  As the political situation deteriorated daily, Cassini IV raced to complete the map of a country descending into revolution, adding the Carte des Assemblages des Triangles, increasing the project from 180 to 182 sheets. In August 1790, as the National Assembly began to reorganize the diocesan boundaries and departments surveyed by Cassini’s engineers, Cassini presented a report to a meeting of the shareholders of the Société de la Carte de France. Fifteen maps remained to be published. The survey was finished, and the entire map agonizingly close to final publication. As the new regime prepared itself for war with its hostile neighbours, the army turned its attention to the map. The head of the military engineering corps, Jean-Claude Le Michaud d’Arçon, summarized the dilemma facing Cassini in assessing the dangers of publishing the last few remaining maps which contained potentially sensitive information about the vulnerable mountainous regions. ‘It is essential that neither their strengths nor their weaknesses be indicated to the enemy, and it is of the very greatest importance that any knowledge of them profits us alone,’ insisted d’Arçon. ‘The privilege granted to M. de Cassini’s engineers should exclude those parts of the frontiers knowledge of which should be reserved to us.’ His conclusion captured Cassini’s situation with brutal honesty. ‘His map may be good or bad. If it is good, it will have to be banned, and if bad, it would hardly deserve favour.’49