Nouveau plan complet de Paris avec ses fortifications: divisé en 12 arrondissements & 48 sections avec les principaux monuments en elévation, donnant la distance légale en mètres des forts détachés aux murs d'enceinte & aux murs d'octroi indiquant la population & les fêtes patronales des environs de Paris
J.N. Henriot
A. Bes et F. Dubreuil
1855
map
Railways
The railways are drawn on the map in thick lines, labelled by their destinations, and emphasised by side-on engravings of trains. In these ways they are placed ahead of other forms of transport: roads and canals are shown, but they do not specifically link Paris to other parts of France, and visually merge with the background of the map. In part this seems just to be an attempt to flag up an exciting technological innovation, and one that must have been very recent: the trains to not lead to names stations but to small, sparely depicted “embarcaderes,” which suggests that formal large railway stations had not yet been built—indeed each line leads to a different, single embarcadere. The depiction of the railways is comparable to that of the monuments (both break the 2D visual language of the map) and that of the forts, which also link Paris with areas not depicted on the map. Railways are highlighted in red on a small accompanying map of the surrounding area, which also shows nearby towns, fortifications, rivers and roads, none of which are marked in colour. It is interesting examining the interaction between the railways and the other layers—the lines circle Paris between the Murs d’Enceinte and Murs d’Octroi, and only enter central Paris to reach their terminuses, perhaps indicating which areas were most densely populated and had the most powerful residents.
I ran out of tracing paper so I traced these lines on the same sheets as the Monuments. They don't overlap.
Monuments
Important monuments such as Notre Dame and the Louvre are identified by large engraved depictions, which contrast with the two-dimensional design of the map. While these pictures seem to be scaled to fit roughly in the area on the map the building they depict occupies, they still dominate the surrounding area. It is interesting to look at which buildings make the cut: functioning medieval relics such as Notre Dame and the Hôpital St. Louis, former royal palaces such as the Louvres and Tuileries, administrative buildings such as the town hall, senate and legislature, monuments to the revolution (place de la Bastille) and famous cemeteries at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise. On my layer I categorised these places accordingly. It is difficult to identify a particularly political project in this selection, though the equivalence of representation seems to tie these disparate sites together, both serving as a guide for tourists and as an expression of a unified national tradition.