Chet Van Duzer
Lazarus Project, University of Rochester, United States. | GEOPAM
The assertion that there is a close relationship between maps and political power has become a byword of the history of cartography in recent decades. For example, J. B. Harley and David Woodward wrote that maps are “specialized intellectual weapons by which power could be gained, administered, given legitimacy, and codified,”[1] and Harley in his famous essay “Maps, Knowledge and Power” writes that maps “facilitate the technical conduct of warfare, but also palliate the sense of guilt which arises from its conduct: the silent lines of the paper landscape foster the notion of socially empty space.”[2] And indeed, Yves Lacoste had stated earlier (in 1976) in the title of his book, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976), that “Geography exists, first of all, to make war.”
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was one of the greatest military leaders in history, and Carl von Clausewitz called him “the God of War himself,”[3] but somehow little attention has been paid to Napoleon’s powerful interest in maps as tools to help him achieve success on the battlefield.[4] In this short contribution I will bring forward some quotations that show Napoleon’s obsession with large maps, which went so far that he was fond of lying on large maps and studying the details of future battlefields for hours; and also examine the use of maps and globes to symbolize Napoleon’s territorial ambitions.
In 1808 Napoleon ordered the production of a Carte militaire de l’Allemagne on a scale of 1:100,000. This manuscript map was completed in July of 1809 and was called La carte de l’Empereur;[5] Colonel Henri Berthaut reports that the map was on 420 large sheets that when assembled measured 168 square meters (1,808 square feet), the size of a volleyball court.[6] Napoleon rejected the map because of its inaccuracies, but nonetheless took it with him on his campaign to Russia, and this exemplar fell into Russian hands during Napoleon’s chaotic and disastrous retreat from that county in 1812. The whereabouts of the original are unknown, but from 1822 to 1830 the Prussian general staff made a copy of the map which is kept at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.[7] The copy is on 254 sheets (Fig. 1), which, if assembled, would measure 8.8 x 7.3 meters—about the size of a typical classroom.
Figure 1. The index map of the 254 sheets of the Carte militaire de l’Allemagne, from a copy made 1822-1830. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kart. F 6278.
Napoleon had demonstrated his love for large maps earlier in his career. Ernst Otto Innocenz Odeleben in his Mit Napoleon im Felde 1813 writes:
If Napoleon stayed at the bivouac with the troops, an adjoining one for his cabinet was immediately set up right next to his own tent, meticulously arranged time after time. In the middle of the room stood a large table on which the best map of the theater of war was spread out. In Saxony, it was Petri’s map, because Napoleon had become accustomed to it in the year 1806 and held it in high esteem. It was still the same exemplar of the map, usually properly oriented before his arrival, and adorned with pins, whose tips were colorful, placed everywhere to mark the positions of the various army corps and the enemy. This task was handled by the director of his topographical bureau, who had to work almost incessantly with him and was most familiar with the positions. If this map was not ready, it had to be brought immediately after his arrival, as it was his portable home, seeming to him to be more dear than other necessities of life. At night, it was illuminated by perhaps 20 to 30 lights, with a compass placed in the center. When he mounted his horse, the Grand Equerry Caulaincourt carried the necessary sheet of the map fastened on his chest, because he was always closest to Napoleon, so that he could offer it to him when Napoleon said, “The map!”[8]
Odeleben’s statement that the map, carefully arranged, lit, and updated, “was his portable home, seeming to him to be more dear than other necessities of life,” is very telling indeed.
Jacques de Norvins, in his Souvenirs d’un historien de Napoléon, reports that just before the Battle of Heilsberg (now Lidzbark Warmiński in Poland) on June 10, 1807:
After arriving on the large flat plateau which crowned the height, the Emperor reined in his horse and leaped to the ground, calling out, ‘Berthier—my maps.’ Immediately, the Grand Equerry made a sign to the staff orderly bearing the portfolio of maps, opened the case and handed it to the Chief of Staff, who, hatless, spread an immense map on the turf; onto this the Emperor advanced on his knees, then on all fours, and lastly at full length, using a small pencil to mark it up. In this position he remained for a full half hour, in deep silence. In front of him, awaiting a sign or an order, stood the motionless grand dignitaries, their heads uncovered despite the blazing sun of the northern summer.[9]
A painting by Emanuel Bachrach-Barée (1863-1943) of Napoleon Before the Battle of Jena, which took place on October 14, 1806, shows a similar scene: Napoleon stretched out on a map that has been set out on the floor, studying its details (Fig. 2).
Figure 2. A postcard of a painting by Emanuel Bachrach-Barée (1863-1943) of Napoleon Before the Battle of Jena, which took place on October 14, 1806. Author’s collection.
Jean-Jacques Scherrer (1855-1916) painted a similar scene titled Napoléon à Brünn, en Moravie for the Salon des artistes français in 1907, representing Napoleon in Brno (Czech Republic) during the period November 20-28, 1805, preparing for the Battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805), in which his army defeated the army of the Third Coalition (Austria, Russia, Great Britain and Sweden): again, Napoleon lies on top of the map, the better to study its details (Fig. 3). This unusual method for engaging with the details of a map clearly demonstrates the value Napoleon assigned to the closest possible engagement with the cartographic details of the battlefield.
Figure 3. A postcard of Jean-Jacques Scherrer’s painting Napoléon à Brünn, en Moravie, showing him preparing for the Battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805), which Scherrer painted for the Salon des artistes français in 1907. Author’s collection.
In addition to Napoleon’s use of maps to study battlefields, artists used maps to commemorate Napoleon’s military successes and reflect upon his ambitions. A political cartoon by Jean Pierre titled Le Triomphe des Armées françaises, printed in 1797, celebrates French military successes during the War of the First Coalition (Fig. 4).[10] At the left there is a triumphant obelisk engraved with the names of victorious French generals; to the right of the obelisk the general Lazare Hoche (1768-1797) holds a map of Quiberon in Brittany, where he had repulsed an attempted landing by the counter-revolutionary British Royal Navy in July of 1795. To the right is General Jean-Charles Pichegru (1761-1804), who had commanded a French force that had overrun Belgium and the Netherlands and then fought on the Rhine front; next to him is General Victor Marie Moreau (1763-1813), who had helped Napoleon rise to power, and had won fame in the Battle of Tourcoing in 1794, and in the next year he was given the command of the Army of the Rhine and Moselle. He holds part of a map of Europe based on one by Jean Baptiste Poirson (1761-1831),[11] carefully rolling down the corner to cover and obscure the British Isles. The map shows the parts of Europe where he and Pichegru had achieved their military victories. Further to the right, Napoleon, standing apart from and looking back at the other three generals, holds the part of the map showing the lands where he had been victorious, particularly northern Italy, and the text below the map addresses him, saying:
And you, young hero, last year you counted 14 Battles and 60 Combats without a single defeat. This year all your steps have been Victories; you have carried French arms where they never penetrated before. At the gates of Rome, you gave peace to Italy; at the gates of Vienna, you gave it to Europe.[12]
Further to the right, in the relatively unscathed part of the map, the remaining Hapsburg territories are in the grasp of an eagle holding a broken saber, clearly signaling Hapsburg weakness. Napoleon dominates the scene, and his location at the rupture or tear of the map of Europe emphasizes his disruptive influence.
Figure 4. Jean Pierre, Le Triomphe des Armées françaises (Paris, 1797). Getty Research Institute, Prints Collection, P980009* (bx.10,f.5). Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/p980009b10f5.
On March 27, 1802, the Treaty of Amiens brought a fragile peace in the Napoleonic wars, which Napoleon used to strengthen his hold on the territories that he had conquered, raising new concerns in Britain about his further ambitions. In 1803 Piercy Roberts (active 1791-1805) published a print titled A Stoppage to a Stride over the Globe that reflected these concerns (Fig. 5):[13] It shows Napoleon sitting boldly and confidently astride the globe, but a globe distorted to focus on Europe, his legs reaching from Switzerland to Italy. He has a huge saber in his hand, and he looks down towards a little man by his foot and says, “Ah, who is it dares interupt me in my Progress.” The character John Bull, a personification of Britain, much smaller than Napoleon, stands on an island labeled Old England, brandishing his own saber at Napoleon, and says, “Why ‘tis I little Johnny Bull Protecting a little spot I clap my hand on, and d--n me if you come any Farther that’s all.” The cartoon paradoxically emphasizes the power of Britain by depicting it as able to stop Napoleon despite his much larger size.
Figure 5. Piercy Roberts, A Stoppage to a Stride over the Globe, first printed in 1803, this exemplar from G. M. Woodward, Caricature Magazine, or Hudibrastic Mirror (London: Thomas Tegg, 1808), vol. 4, leaf 82. Yale University, Lewis Walpole Library, Folio 75 W87 807 v.4. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/16192427.
In 1805 James Gillray (1756-1815) designed one of the greatest political cartoons ever published, which involves Napoleon and a globe. The print is titled The Plumb-Pudding in Danger: - or - State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper – ‘the Great Globe Itself, and All which it Inherit,’ is Too Small to Satisfy Such Insatiable Appetites (London: H. Humphrey, 1806), and it shows Napoleon facing the British statesman William Pitt (1759-1806) across a table (Fig. 6).[14] Between them is a steaming plum-pudding globe that they are both cutting into. Pitt, while looking nervously across at Napoleon, cuts for himself (and for Britain) the Atlantic west of Britain, and particularly the West Indies, while Napoleon, intent on his portion rather than on Pitt, cuts for himself—with a saber rather than a knife—all of Europe from the Netherlands and France southward to the Mediterranean.[15] Napoleon’s intense focus, the fact that he is standing, and his saber all communicate very clearly his powerful territorial ambition.
Figure 6. James Gillray, The Plumb-Pudding in Danger: - or - State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper – ‘the Great Globe Itself, and All which it Inherit,’ is Too Small to Satisfy Such Insatiable Appetites (London: H. Humphrey, 1805). PJ Mode Collection, 1032.01. Courtesy of the PJ Mode Collection. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:3293761.
In the Battle of Leipzig in October of 1813 Coalition armies decisively defeated Napoleon’s Grande Armée, Napoleon was forced to retreat west of the Rhine, and Coalition forces then invaded France. An anonymous German print of 1814 titled Das Lied vom Ende (The Song of the End) (Fig. 7)[16] shows the eye of God looking on from a flaming pyramid as the globe, with all of its peoples risen up in arms, rolls towards Napoleon, who flees to the left, exclaiming “Helft, die große Kugel erdrückt mich” (“Help, the big ball is crushing me”). He is about to fall into an open grave, with a broken symbol of France on the ground in front of him; in the background there is a city in flames, alluding to the destruction he wrought, and in the foreground to the right are symbols of death. The reversal is complete: now instead of controlling maps and globes, Napoleon is being pushed into his grave by one.
Figure 7. Anonymous print Das Lied vom Ende, 1814. Cornell University Library, Album of German Caricatures against Napoleon I, 1813-15, No. 31, RMC2008_0889. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:550967.
Notes
[1] J. B. Harley and David Woodward, “Concluding Remarks,” in J. B. Harley and David Woodward eds., The History of Cartography, vol. 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 502-509, at 506.
[2] J. B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge and Power,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277-312, at 284.
[3] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), Book 8, chap. 3A, p. 583.
[4] For general discussion of Napoleon’s use of maps see Anders Engberg-Pedersen, “Paper Empires: Military Cartography and the Management of Space,” in his Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 146-183; and Jos Gabriëls, “Mapping Out Future Victories: Information Management by Napoleon’s Dépôt général de la Guerre, 1800-14,” European Review of History 26.2 (2019), pp. 258-283.
[5] Hanspeter Fischer, “Die Carte de l’Empereur (1808-1812) und die Carte militaire de l’Allemagne (1822-1830), 1:100 000,” Cartographica Helvetica 31 (2005), pp. 15-20.
[6] Colonel Henri Berthaut, “La carte de l’Empereur,” in his Les ingénieurs-géographes militaires, 1624-1831: Étude historique (Paris: Service Géographique de l’Armée, 1898-1902), vol. 2, pp. 71-124, esp. 122.
[7] Carte militaire de l’Allemagne, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kart. F 6278.
[8] Ernst Otto Innocenz Odeleben, Mit Napoleon im Felde 1813: eine treue Skizze des französischen Kaisers und seiner Umgebung (Leipzig: G. Wigand, 1910), pp. 127-128.
[9] Jacques de Norvins, Souvenirs d’un historien de Napoléon (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1896-97), vol. 3, p. 190. This passage is quoted by David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 567.
[10] On the print Le Triomphe des Armées françaises see The History of Cartography, vol. 4, Cartography in the European Enlightenment, ed. Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020), part 1, p. 477.
[11] There is no surviving map by Poirson that has the same title and date (1797) as the map in the print, but the model seems to be Poirson’s Carte de l’empire d’Allemagne distingué suivant l’étendue de tous les Etats, Principautés, et Souverainetés avec les Etats de Bohême, dressée d’après la carte de l’Académie Royale de Berlin, et d’après plusieurs autres; par H. Jaillot. Où se trouve la frontière du nord de la France, divisée en départemens et districts, suivant les décrets de l’Assemblée Nationale Constituante, aux années 1789, 1790 et 1791. Où toutes les routes sont tracées (Paris, 1792). On Poirson see Daniel Bullot and Danielle Bullot, “Plans, cartes, globes terrestres et globes célestes, succès et désillusions dans la vie de Jean-Baptiste Poirson,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de l’arrondissement de Provins 166 (2012), pp. 55-112.
[12] The original French reads: Et toi, jeune héros, l’Année dernière tu comptais 14 Batailles et 6o Combats sans un seul revers. Cette année tous tes pas ont été des Victoires; tu as porté les armes françaises où elles ne pénétrèrent jamais. Aux portes de Rome tu as donné la paix à l’Italie; aux portes de Vienne tu la donnes à l’Europe.
[13] On Roberts’ print see F. G. Stephens and M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1870-1954), vol. 9, p. 139, no. 9981; and Little Boney and John Bull: Napoleon and his Era in Caricatures and Prints (London: Bernard Quaritch Limited, 2015), no. 7.
[14] On Gillray’s print see Thomas Wright and Joseph Grego, The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist; with the Story of His Life and Times (London: Chatto and Windus, 1873), pp. 316-317; Draper Hill, Fashionable Contrasts: Caricatures by James Gillray (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), cat. no. 39, p. 153; and Tim Clayton and Sheila O’Connell, Bonaparte and the British: Prints and Propaganda in the Age of Napoleon (London: British Museum Press, 2015), pp. 184-185 .
[15] At the time Napoleon was threatening to invade Britain using forces he had encamped at Boulogne, but there is no sign of this threat in Gillray’s image.
[16] On this anonymous print see W.A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985-1993), vol. 1, p. 293; Jérémie Benoit and Philippe Kaenel, Napoleon I in the Mirror of Caricature (Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1998), pp. 552-553; and Dagmar Burkhart, “Heldensturz: Deutsche, englische und russische Napoleon-Karikaturen zur Völkerschlacht von Leipzig: Visualisierung eines Desasters,” in Marina Dmitrieva and Lars Karl, eds., Das Jahr 1813, Ostmitteleuropa und Leipzig. Die Völkerschlacht als (trans)nationaler Erinnerungsort (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), pp. 215-226, at 226.
About the author
Chet Van Duzer is a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps; his recent books include Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence, published by Springer in 2019, and Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends, published by Springer in 2020. His book about cartographic cartouches, titled Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps, was published by Brill in Open Access in 2023, and is available here.
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