2 - Creating Map Readers: The Rise of Geography and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century France

Summary

Notre enseignement supérieur ne tend à autre chose qu’à former un peuple de dilettantes et de beaux esprits, d'avocats diserts, de penseurs de salon et d’écrivains agréables. Aucune des connaissances modernes n'a pu franchir le seuil de nos Facultés: ni la géographie vraiment scientifique, ni l’économie politique, ni l'administration comparée, aucune enfin de ces sciences contemporaines, nées depuis un siècle au plus, et déjà adultes aujourd'hui. De là vient l'esprit superficiel qui, du sommet à la base, se répand sur toute la société française; de là viennent aussi cette légèreté et cette imprudence pratique qui nous ont précipités dans de si terrible désastres.

—Paul Leroy-Beaulieu in Le Journal des débats (1871), qtd in Ozouf 25

After considerable retrospection, politicians and military officials came to believe that France had lost the disastrous Franco-Prussian war in part due to the inability of French soldiers and commanders to perform such simple tasks such as read a map. Through providing insufficient support for education, industry, and science, they believed that Napoleon III had not prepared the nation for the confrontation, and that the rapid, humiliating defeat caused by ‘l'ignorance des officiers français qui auraient été incapables à lire une carte d’étatmajor’ (Fierro, Dictionnaire 222). Regaining the nation's lost prestige required a critical self-examination and a change in how it viewed and understood itself. One way to address these weaknesses was to improve and reform education. The current system's creation of ‘dilettantes’ and ‘penseurs de salon’ did little to help the military defeat of its neighbour rival, so France needed to incorporate more science into its national curriculum. As part of this drive, geography, once marginalized as a subset of history, became a vital component to improving national security and throughout the Third Republic the nation introduced the discipline to school children on an unprecedented scale. Once very rare, by the start of the First World War maps appeared more frequently in textbooks, travel guides, newspapers, and official government documents.

It is under these circumstances that France witnessed the birth of the French map reader, whose rise can be attributed to many factors. First, the average Frenchman became better educated. As education minister from 1879 to 1881 and again from 1882 to 1883, Jules Ferry instituted major educational reforms.