Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [43]
The perceived value of such maps decided the city fathers to pioneer a municipal map office. The Abbé Delagrive, renowned for his devoted work with “rod, chain, and theodolite” and for the handsome geometric map that had resulted, was named Géographe de la Ville and quickly undertook studies of urban water distribution. Delagrive marketed his own map “in the Rue Saint-Jacques … at a wigmaker’s”; today we can purchase a restrike of it at the Chalcographie.
The historic map of Paris best known to the world, the Plan Turgot, recalls to me the New York City of the seventies, when I frequented Le Cygne not only to feast on its raspberry soufflé but to thrill to eighteenth-century Paris, for the restaurant’s walls were papered with blowups of the map.
The Plan Turgot is shrouded in misconceptions. First of all, unlike most maps of its time, it is known by the name of the man who commissioned it, Michel-Étienne Turgot, not the man who surveyed it, Louis Bretez. Descended from Norman nobility, Turgot was the capital’s prévôt des marchands, a royal appointee responsible for administration, which office he held for an unusually long eleven years. Little surprise that he decided to blow his city’s horn and commission a splendid plan. (Turgot’s third son, Anne-Robert-Jacques, for whom Michel-Étienne is often mistaken, was to become Louis XVI’s reforming minister of finance.)
The Plan Turgot was a map out of sync with its time, drawn in the great seventeenth-century tradition of the bird’s-eye view. By 1734 Delagrive and his imitators had already accustomed the map-reading public to precise renderings on which one could number the very pillars of the churches. And the Cassinis, the family who put French cartography on the map, were just about to begin triangulating for their famed topographical map of the kingdom.
The purpose of Turgot’s map—which it serves to this day—was as retrograde, and eternal, as its style: to broadcast the wealth and beauty of Paris. If Delagrive could draft sanitation plans worthy of the council chamber, Bretez would execute a vast plan worthy of the drawing room. Promised a fee of ten thousand livres and armed with a permit that granted him ready access to all the city’s buildings to make sketches, Bretez, a member of the Académie de Sculpture et de Peinture and onetime professor of architecture and perspective, blazoned the capital across twenty sheets, which, end to end, measure 10½ by 8 feet. Bretez knew full well that he was bucking the trend and perhaps betraying his training in perspective, for he apologized in print for his license, explaining that without forcing the perspective he would have lost some of the most interesting monuments of the city. At a time when maps had come to be oriented perpendicular to the meridian, the Plan Turgot has the east at the top, to allow Bretez the bravura chance to detail the façades of the churches, almost all of which face east. Sadly, Bretez didn’t live to see the final engraved product of his labors.
The Plan Turgot is the least rare of eighteenth-century maps because twenty-six hundred copies were run off. Some of them were mounted on linen; the remainder were bound. These were sent as presents to destinations as distant as Constantinople and China. Further copies have been (and remain) available, as the copper plates ended up at the Chalcographie. However inaccurate topographically, Bretez’s map, which attempted to portray each and every building, makes this a fascinating architectural study—and enormously decorative.
Purists criticized the Plan Turgot from the moment of its appearance, but the public loved it, drawn in by the lack of topographical progression and left happily lost in the city. The map’s popularity continues today, with reduced-scale facsimiles eagerly purchased from the Bibliothèque Nationale’s shop in the rue des Petits-Champs, as well as from myriad souvenir shops.
But in the Age of Enlightenment scientific