Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland by Catherine Dunlop (review)

Catherine Dunlop’s Cartophilia provides a thorough political and historical examination into the borderland and the shifting jurisdictional authority of Alsace-Lorraine in the decades around the Franco-Prussian War. Dunlop focuses her work on the creation of the man-made border between France and Germany along with its cartographic constructions and portrayals.

Dunlop divides her book into two sections. The first half, “Mapping Borders,” examines the State’s role in the creation of international borders, most particularly the one established after French defeat in 1871. Her first three chapters provide a useful summary of state-based cartography in France and Germany throughout the nineteenth century, as the two nations began to map their domestic territories. For example, German states benefited considerably from French surveyors who followed Napoleonic military campaigns into their conquered lands. Dunlop also devotes energy to the general understanding of international boundaries prior to the Franco-Prussian War, where any demarcation of a French/German divide would extend well beyond the official state-sanctioned border. As for the period directly following the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt, Dunlop excellently describes the collaborative approach between French and German officials as they marked, measured, and described the French-German border in the Vosges Mountains. We also learn more about the actual construction of the border itself. For countries such as France that traditionally referred to “natural” borders, such as mountains or water, the establishment of this artificial one (especially upon defeat to a neighbor) pleased few. Other examples of cartography appear in this first half of Dunlop’s volume as well. Maps of language zones created symbolic ruptures between European peoples, suggesting to viewers a correlation between linguistic divides and national borders (52). This trend took place primarily in Germany, where the idea of uniting German speakers even had its own vocabulary for language-specific divisions: Sprachgebeit (language area). Furthermore, in the nineteenth-century desire for German unification, language maps became idealized spaces for nationalists to visualize how far the future borders of the German state should extend (75). So “seeing” Alsace and German-speaking Lorraine as part of a greater German Empire was more or less expected outre-Rhin.

The second half of Dunlop’s book, Borderland Maps for Everyday Life, turns away from scientific maps in favor of “everyday use” ones that constructed up-close, experimental, and emotional views of land. Located far from the “center” of both the France republic and German empire, residents in Alsace-Lorraine related much more to their own medieval villages than to Paris or Berlin. So to be successful, new cartographers needed to acknowledge this mentality. Dunlop demonstrates how mapmakers transformed villages into positive picturesque locations through the use of cadastral maps, which included illustrations and cartouche boxes (text boxes) containing decorative images of the Alsatian countryside, while both nations were creating government-sanctioned visual representations of Alsatian hometowns. Wall maps, too, took on new importance during this time. In contrast to France, which tended to promote the nation or its capital city on classroom walls or in texts such as Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, Germany championed the local in its wall maps, which placed the student’s hometown within the territorial units of the German Empire. In addition to being able to situate their villages visually in relation to other provinces, students were given the opportunity to draw maps themselves in order to familiarize themselves with the shape of the region and to recognize their village’s role within that region. Beyond classroom materials, hiking maps and visual panoramas also help shed new light on the physical changes that the French and Germans imposed on their border territories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (133). On the French side, private civil societies helped catalogue the historical and picturesque sites in the Vosges as part of their inclusion into national patrimony. Although the government provided funds, private societies did the work and documented what they found...