Dresser la cartographie napoléonienne d'Italie : comment et pourquoi ?

Abstract

Anne Godlewska, To draw up the Napoleonic cartography of Italy : How and why ? In my earlier publications I have documented the emergence in the early 19th century of a new spatial interest in the writings of the topographical engineers and Chabrol de Volvic. It would be logical to assume that a new spatial curiosity would also manifest itself in the cartography of this period. To explore this question I studied the Napoleonic cartography of Italy (a recently French territory under political, economic and social integration). Given the huge number of maps to be studied, the difficulty of a comparative study of maps, and my physical distance from the maps, I began by analyzing the possibility and utility of an electronic atlas of Napoleonic cartography. In this paper I show the results of my work to date and I discuss critically the difficulties, the validity and the limitations of this type of work.