Historic Map : Meyer Map of France, 1849, Vintage Wall Art

This is a fine 1849 map of France by Joseph Meyer. It covers the Kingdom of France showing its various provinces. It covers from the Flanders in the north to Roussillon in the south and from Brittany in the west to Alsace in the east. It covers from the Flanders in the north to Roussillon in the south and from Brittany in the west to Alsace in the east. Also includes Corsica. An inset on the bottom left quadrant details Paris and its vicinity.

France was organized into provinces until March 4, 1790, when the National Constituent Assembly reorganized the Provinces into Departments. The change was an attempt to eradicate local loyalties based on feudal ownership of land and focus all loyalty on the central government in Paris. There were roughly 40 provinces in France before they were abolished. Nonetheless, the province system was so engrained that most cartographers felt obliged to include two maps of France in their atlases, one showing the current department system, and another defining the defunct provinces.

This map lists the 86 French departments along the right border. It covers France just prior to the December 2, 1851 coup d'etat that brought about the Second Empire. The Second Republic transformed into the Second Empire, established by a referendum on November 7, 1852. President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, elected by the heavily Bonapartist French people, officially became Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, from the symbolic and historic date of December 2, 1852.

This map was issued as plate no. 49 in Meyer's Zeitung Atlas. Although all the maps in this atlas are not individually dated, the title page and maps were often updated while the imprint with the date was not, causing confusion to the exact date for some of the maps. Moreover some maps in the atlas were taped in at a later date as an update to the atlas. We have dated the maps in this collection to the best of our ability.