From L'État, c'est moi to L'État, c'est l'État: Mapping in Early Modern France

Abstract

Using the printed works of two French cartographers, Alexis-Hubert Jaillot and Guillaume Delisle, I investigate how the changing interests of the government directed not only the process of map-making but the rhetoric evident in printed maps and atlases. Jaillot, a commercial map publisher flourishing during the second half of the seventeenth century, produced maps that participated in the fabrication of the image of Louis XIV. Maps served this “cult of image” and contributed to a multimedia show to glorify the reign of the Sun King and to support his personal state – l’état, c’est moi. In the eighteenth century, while a rhetoric of image was still present on printed maps, the “cult of image” was dead and mapping appealed to the rise of the impersonal or bureaucratized state – l’état, c’est l’état. Delisle produced maps as instruments of statecraft that aided the state in furthering its domestic and international interests. In particular, printed maps of the Americas served the government's need to acquire greater territorial control. While images were still powerful on New World maps, the French boundary claims, egregious to some, if uncontested could be produced time and again as a true representation and legitimization of territorial control.

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