L'Atelier Delisle: L'Amerique du Nord sur la table a dessin (review)

This is a wonderful book about the noted Delisle family of Old Regime historians, cartographers, and astronomers and about their family mapmaking business. The first part depicts the world of early eighteenth-century cartography as experienced by the Delisles, with chapters devoted to their family history, to the social and political settings of contemporary France, and to the all-important role of patronage. The connections of the Delisles to the court, especially during the Regency, is rightly emphasized.

The second part focuses on the Delisles as mapmakers and their critical, scientific approach to cartography. As city-bound géographes de cabinet, the Delisles depended on collecting, processing, and evaluating information from others in the field. Hence, they developed refined literary and historiographically critical skills, and they built up impressive networks of informants, including especially Jean Bobé, a Lazarist priest, whose correspondence is reproduced in an appendix.

The Delisles made politicomilitary maps, regional maps, and historical maps, but they were especially on the cutting edge in their maps ofthe New World. A colonial slant strongly informs this book, not leastbecause it uses the Delisle Carte de l'Amérique septentrionale of 1703 as a case study of the family method. The subtitle similarly shifts the orientation to North America, whereas all the action is centered in Paris. These editorial choices may reflect the fact that this is a Canadian publication.

A last chapter examines in detail how the Delisles used their networks and their critical method to create their 1703 map of North America, including the collection of ethnographic information. A separate forty-five-page section reproduces drafts made by the Delisles and presents an annotated list of the sources used in creating their 1703 map. This is fascinating material, but its connection to the chapter in question or to the book as a whole is not entirely apparent.

Dawson has impressively mined a range of archival sources (his collaborator's role is not specified). As a result, he paints a lively and fine-grained picture of the Delisles, contemporary cartography, and French science and society during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. (Amazingly, however, the 1703 map of North America itself is not fully reproduced!) Several appendixes and many sidebars reproduce manuscript gems from the archives. These flourishes are not always well connected to the text, however, or too often the text simply repeats the same material.