34. Reims.

"A rare, early, set of Carte de France de l'État Major, attractively housed in thirty-four contemporary marbled paper boxes. This was the clear successor to the Cassini family's earlier mapping project, the Carte de France, which was the first scientific survey of the country. The Cassinis' maps (published from 1678 to 1815) had taken so long to produce that, by the time the project was finished, it was already long out of date. As such, Charles X issued a royal ordinance in 1827 allowing the Dépot de Guerre to begin work on this new project, which was published between 1832 and 1876. The État Major improves on the Cassini family's practice of scientific surveying by using the most up-to-date technologies and methods available for astronomical and trigonometrical observation, allowing for a more extensive, accurate, and detailed set of maps. The major changes result from the État Major being mapped on a scale of 1:80,000, and including a wealth of new information, both administrative, as well as topographical. It even shows certain buildings such as churches (the church towers that were used as triangulation points are separately marked), various freestanding buildings, windmills, post houses, and more. Some of the most striking maps show, with an incredible amount of detail, the topography of the Alps and its glaciers, and the maps also include forests, swamps, salt marshes, agricultural fields, and vineyards. The maps of metropolitan France were completed by around 1868, but certain additions were added later. This set of the Carte de France de l'État Major includes many of the additional maps published between 1870 and 1876. These final maps show the Alps along the Swiss and Italian borders, the Comté de Nice, and the Mediterranean island of Corsica. A later edition of État Major maps was published in 1889, and more editions appeared throughout the twentieth century, with the most recent being the 1972 edition." (Doyle Auction, 2024) This set has manuscript railroad updates showing lines and stations, ink on top of pencil for the sheets published before 1860. Of the total 273 sheets, this set lacks only 5 and we have added digital images of those 5 from Yale Library. 1854 is shown as the Pub Date, which is the average of the sheets dated from 1832 to 1876.