A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The history of Blaeu’s atlas was probably also not what its creator had envisaged. Having failed to complete his project, but tailoring so many copies of its first part for individual recipients, Blaeu inadvertently sparked an entirely new approach to atlas consumption: what became known as ‘composite atlases’. Late seventeenth-century buyers began to copy Blaeu by supplementing their copies of his atlas with new maps and drawings. The Amsterdam lawyer Laurens van der Hem (1621–78) bought a Latin copy of the Atlas maior, and used it as the basis for amassing an extraordinary forty-six volumes with 3,000 maps, charts, topographical drawings and portraits, which he carefully organized and bound professionally as if it were a gigantic extension of Blaeu’s original work. Van der Hem’s atlas was so impressive that the grand duke of Tuscany offered to buy it for 30,000 guilders – quite a return on his original investment of 430 guilders, even though he had expanded it enormously.52 Others similarly customized their Blaeu atlases according to their personal tastes in navigation, cosmography, even orientalism. Rather like Blaeu’s own atlases, these customized examples were endlessly extensible and potentially infinite: only the collector’s death signalled their completion.

  Ironically, because Blaeu concentrated primarily on the marketing of his atlas for a commercial audience at the expense of geographical or astronomical innovation, subsequent atlas publication moved away from the publisher/geographer as the organizer of the text, and instead put the decision of what to include in the hands of the purchaser. Italian printers began to publish maps in standard formats, which customers could then buy and assemble into their own atlases. Subsequently known by map-dealers as IATO atlases (Italian, assembled to order, first made in the sixteenth century), they can be more accurately called Italian composite atlases, as it was the collector and not necessarily the publisher who selected the maps. The emergence of these composite atlases was a symptom of the dilemma experienced by mapmakers and printers at the end of the seventeenth century: the sheer amount of geographical data they possessed had never been greater, and the print technology at their disposal had reached such a level of speed and precision that it could reproduce such information in the finest detail, but no one was clear how it should all be organized and presented. When could geographical knowledge be regarded as complete? And how could such projects make money? Surely this was an endless task, best left to individuals to make their own decisions about the geography they required.

  • • •

  With its beautiful typography, elaborate decoration, exquisite colouring and sumptuous binding, Blaeu’s Atlas maior was unparalleled in seventeenth-century printing. It was the product of a Dutch Republic that, following its violent struggle to break free of the Spanish Empire, created a global marketplace that preferred the accumulation of wealth over the acquisition of territory. Blaeu produced an atlas that was ultimately driven by the same imperatives. For him, it was not even necessary to place Amsterdam at the centre of such a world; Dutch financial power was increasingly pervasive but it was also invisible, seeping into every corner of the globe. In the seventeenth century as today, financial markets make little acknowledgement of political boundaries and centres when it comes to the accumulation of riches.

  In fact, the Atlas’s success hindered rather than helped geographical developments towards the end of the seventeenth century. It represented the end of the classically inspired tradition of acquiring universal geographical knowledge that had driven mapmakers since Ptolemy. The sheer scale of Blaeu’s publication could not compensate for its inability to offer any new geographical methods for creating an image of the world, as it catered for a map-buying public who were more interested in the decorative value of their maps and atlases than in their scientific innovations or geographical accuracy. It offered no new method of seeing the world in terms of scale or projection, though it did subtly present a world no longer positioned at the centre of the universe. But for Blaeu, the heliocentric theory was only as good as its sales figures. The Atlas maior was a truly baroque creation, which decisively broke with its Renaissance lineage. Where earlier mapmakers like Mercator sought to produce a singular scientific vision of the place of the world in the cosmos, Blaeu simply accumulated ever more material on the world’s diversity, driven by the market rather than by a desire to establish a particular understanding of the world. Bereft of a defining intellectual principle, the Atlas maior grew and grew, a flawed and unfinished masterpiece, driven by money as much as knowledge.

  9

  Nation

  The Cassini Family, Map of France, 1793

  Paris, France, 1793

  On 5 October 1793, the National Convention of Republican France issued a ‘Decree establishing the French Era’. The edict introduced a new calendar designed to mark the official proclamation of the French Republic just over a year earlier on 22 September 1792. It was part of a series of reforms designed to sweep away every vestige of the recently toppled ancien régime, from its methods of absolutist rule to the way it marked the passage of calendrical time. According to the National Convention, the date was now officially 14 Vendémiaire II, or Year II of the Revolution (the first month of autumn, named after vendange, the grape harvest). Just weeks before the calendar’s inception, the Convention received a report from one of its more radical deputies, the actor, dramatist and poet, Fabre d’Églantine. Having already voted in favour of King Louis XVI’s execution and featured prominently on the committee entrusted to create the new calendar, d’Églantine now turned to maps. He drew the Convention’s attention to ‘the general map of France, called the map of the Academy’, which he complained ‘had been produced in very great part at the expense of the government; that it had then fallen into the hands of a private individual who treated it as his own property; that the public could only have use of it by paying an exorbitant price, and that they even refused to send maps to the generals who asked for them’.1

  The Convention agreed with d’Églantine, and ordered that the plates and sheets related to the map be confiscated and transferred to the military office of the Dépôt de la Guerre. The decision was greeted with triumph by the Dépôt’s director-general, General Étienne-Nicolas de Calon. ‘By this act,’ he announced, ‘the Convention snatched back from the greed of a company of speculators a national achievement, the fruit of forty years of work by engineers, which had all the more to be completely available to the Government as its loss or abandonment would reduce its resources and increase those of the enemy.’2

  D’Églantine’s attack and Calon’s glee were aimed at confiscating the map of France and bringing down Jean-Dominique Cassini (1748–1845). Jean-Dominique had the misfortune of being the last of four generations of the distinguished Cassini mapmaking dynasty, and putative owner of the map of France, a vast project which was tantalizingly near to completion when the National Convention sequestered it. For the staunchly royalist Jean-Dominique, the nationalization was a political catastrophe and a personal tragedy. ‘They took it away from me,’ he lamented in his memoirs, ‘before it was entirely finished and before I had added the final touches to it. This no other author has suffered before me. Is there a painter who has seen his painting seized before having put the final touches to it?’3

  The struggle for ownership was over what the revolutionaries referred to as ‘the general map of France’, and what, to the obvious annoyance of d’Églantine and Calon, Cassini and his associates proprietorially called the Carte de Cassini. It was the first systematic attempt to survey then map an entire country according to the science of triangulation and geodesy, or the measurement of the size and shape of the earth’s surface. On its projected completion, the Carte de Cassini would consist of 182 separate sheets, all on a uniform scale of 1:86,400, which once joined together formed a map of the entire country that was almost 12 metres (40 feet) high by 11 metres (38 feet) wide. This was the first modern map of a nation, using innovative scientific surveying methods to comprehensively re
present a single European country; but by 1793 the question was: who owned it? The new revolutionary nation it represented, or the royalists who spent four generations making it?

  The map’s origins stretched back to the early 1660s, beginning with Jean-Dominique’s great-grandfather Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712), or Cassini I.4 Giovanni was de facto the first director of the Paris Observatory founded in 1667 by the King Louis XIV. For more than a hundred years Giovanni’s heirs – his son Jacques Cassini, or Cassini II (1677–1756); his grandson César-François Cassini de Thury, Cassini III (1714–84), and finally his great-grandson and namesake Jean-Dominique (Cassini IV) – worked consecutively on a series of nationwide surveys operating on the strict scientific principles of verifiable measurement and quantification. Despite the practical, financial and political vicissitudes of the project, and the different directions pursued by each generation of Cassinis, their method of unifying geodesy with surveying would affect all subsequent Western mapmaking. Their principles still define most modern scientific maps, from world atlases to the Ordnance Survey and online geospatial applications, all of which are still based on the methods of triangulation and geodetic measurements that were first proposed and practised by the Cassinis. What began life as a survey of a royal kingdom would provide the template on which all modern nation states would be mapped for the next 200 years.

  The proclamation of 1793 was the first ever state nationalization of a private mapmaking project. The intimate relationship between each generation of Cassinis and the French royal family who part-funded the project made it an obvious political target for the revolutionaries, but individuals like d’Églantine and Calon had also grasped the greater value of appropriating the Cassini survey for their own particular political agenda, and despite their royal associations, the maps printed from the surveys would eventually become a symbol of the new ‘French Era’, a blueprint for fashioning a conception of France as a modern, republican nation state. Everyone saw the military value of the maps. At a time when the fledgling republic faced imminent invasion from hostile neighbouring kingdoms, the Cassinis’ detailed maps of each region of France and its borders would prove vital in defending the new regime. But the National Convention had already sought to rationalize the country’s administration by reforming its bewildering assemblage of ecclesiastical provinces, parlements, chambers and dioceses into eighty-three départements, and the nationalized Cassini maps would also play a central role in enabling the state to define and administer these regions.5

  It would also have a deeper, more intangible impact. In the hands of the Republic, the Cassini surveys would foster the belief that this was a map of the nation, for the nation. It would enable the French public, invoked by d’Églantine in his demand for the survey’s nationalization, to ‘see’ their nation, and identify with it in one of the first cartographic manifestations of national consciousness. The surveys both responded to and drew on the emergence of what thinkers like Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) began defining as ‘the general spirit of nations’ throughout the eighteenth century.6 The Bourbon monarchs had encouraged the survey as a way of celebrating their rule, centred on Paris. Under the Republic it would be seen as defining every inch (or metre, following the Convention’s adoption of the metric system in April 1795) of territory mapped as French, binding people and land together in allegiance, not to a monarch, but to an impersonal imagined national community called France.7 Political rhetoric would now claim that the physical territory of the nation and the sovereignty of the state were one and the same thing, an idea that would be exported across Europe and ultimately the rest of the world.

  The Cassini surveys were not primarily interested in producing maps of the world, although their endeavours utilized geodesy and the accurate measurement of the earth’s shape and size. By implication their ambition was to map France and then extend the established principles of surveying and mapmaking throughout nation states right round the globe. But their contribution to the history of mapmaking has also been neglected beside that of the story of the British Ordnance Survey, to which it gave rise. Although the Ordnance Survey has become widely known, it was the Cassinis who first established the enduring principles of Western cartography, and who were responsible for the perception and function of maps within the administration of modern nation states.

  • • •

  Mid-seventeenth-century France was an unlikely place to transform the future of mapmaking. Spanish and Portuguese mapmakers had dominated the field throughout most of the sixteenth century, and the shift to the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century had largely bypassed France, which had little involvement in the seaborne discoveries or joint-stock company initiatives which flowered to its south and north. Its monarchy had been ruled since the late sixteenth century by the Bourbon dynasty, which came to power through a series of protracted internecine wars over religion. In response both to these internal threats, and to the powerful regional independence of the kingdom’s provinces, the Bourbon monarchs established one of the most centralized political states in Europe. This centralizing tendency and the regionalism which resisted it clearly needed management, and one obvious method was to map the realm outwards from its political centre. Other European monarchies would come to similar conclusions: the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I (1678–1711) commissioned large-scale survey maps of Hungary, Moravia and Bohemia in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and throughout the 1770s the Comte de Ferraris (1726–1814) produced a Carte de Cabinet based on detailed surveys of Austrian possessions in the Low Countries. But in France the inherent difficulty of the task was compounded by the kingdom’s sheer size. At around 600,000 square kilometres, France was the largest country in Europe. Over half its total boundary length of more than 6,000 kilometres was made up of land borders, many of which were shared with rival dynasties; it became obvious to the monarchy’s ministers that an effective mapmaking strategy was required not only to administer the interior, but also to defend the kingdom from invasion.

  More than any other country in early modern Europe, France was preoccupied with drawing consistent and enduring political boundaries on its maps and atlases. In Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, 45 per cent of the maps contained irregularly marked political boundaries, but by the time of the publication of Nicolas Sanson’s atlas Les Cartes générales de toutes les provinces de France in 1658–9, 98 per cent of his maps applied a new, systematic method for representing political boundaries using standard colours and dotted outlines that distinguished parlements or judicial regions from more traditional ecclesiastical divisions.8 Sanson (1600–67) was the géographe du roi, the Bourbon monarchy’s official geographer as it began to consolidate its authority over its provinces. He was understandably interested in drawing dividing lines between countries and their subdivisions, whether his maps depicted France and its regions or the various kingdoms of Africa.

  The genesis of the Cassini map of France lay not in the measurement of the earth and its man-made divisions, but the observation of the stars. In December 1666, the young King Louis XIV (1638–1715) formed the Académie des Sciences at the instigation of his controller-general of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The first meetings involved a select group of twenty-two astronomers and mathematicians including Jean Picard (1620–82) and the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens (1629–95). The foundation of the Académie also included plans for a scientific observatory, and the following year work started on a site in Faubourg Saint-Jacques, south of central Paris. By 1672 the Paris Observatory was operational.

  The founding members of the Académie were joined by Giovanni Domenico Cassini (Cassini I), who would become the observatory’s first unofficial director. Cassini I was a brilliant Italian astronomer, internationally famed for his research in Bologna and Rome. His work on the movements of Jupiter’s moons expanded on Galileo’s research, and also offered a way of determi
ning the age-old problem of longitude. Astronomers and geographers understood that longitude is a measure of distance corresponding to differences in time. The problem was how to record such differences accurately. Cassini understood that if the time of a celestial phenomenon such as the eclipse of one of Jupiter’s moons could be recorded simultaneously in two places, the results could lay the foundation for determining degrees of longitude. At an astronomical level, these calculations could help to determine the exact circumference of the earth; at a geographical level, they could provide statesmen like Colbert with the information they needed to map an entire country comprehensively.

  Colbert’s plans for a scientific academy grew out of a new understanding of the role that science could play in the management of the state. In England and Holland, empirical observation and experimentation were challenging the classical certainties of natural scientific enquiry. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) envisaged an academy of experimental scientists that prefigured the creation of the Royal Society (founded in 1662). Colbert’s interests in science were more pragmatic. He wanted to sponsor scientific research projects that would directly benefit his attempt to build a French state apparatus that would be the envy of Europe.9 For Colbert, absolute information would inform and strengthen political absolutism.

  One of the Académie’s secretaries, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, later wrote that Colbert

  supported scholarship, and did so not only because of his natural inclination, but for sound political reasons. He knew that the sciences and arts alone suffice to make a reign glorious; that they spread the language of a nation perhaps even more than do conquests; that they give the reign a control over knowledge and industry which is just as prestigious and useful; that they attract to the country a multitude of foreigners who enrich it by their talents.10