In 1589 Henry III of France died and the throne passed to Henry of Navarre. However he was a protestant and was forced to flee Paris in the same year. Setting up court in Tours and with the financial support of Queen Elizabeth I of England he began to fight for his country. Part of this process included the promotional tools of the press. This atlas by Maurice Bouguereau was an attempt to unify the provinces of the country under him. Bouguereau had wished to include more maps especially from first hand sources but presumably as events in 1594 advanced the work was hurriedly finished. Returning to Paris on 27 February Henry was crowned King of France at Chartres Cathedral. The dedication to the King is dated 15 October 1594.

The atlas was an association between Bouguereau and the engraver Gabriel Tavernier, 8 plates are derived from Abraham Ortelius, 4 from Gerard Mercator, and those of Blaisois, Touraine and Limousin are entirely new. There are no less than four general maps of France; the first is a small one set within the text on the verso of the engraved frontispiece. This place is sometimes taken up with a portrait of Henry IV and may be an indication of the sensitivity of Bouguereau to public opinion. A similar example is found in the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne.

The first great map of the country dated 1593 by Bouguereau is derived from one by Petrus Plancius in 1592. The second folio map of France is by Father Jean Jolivet (fl.1544-60) and is derived from that first published by Abraham Ortelius in 1570, itself derived from the original four sheet map of 1560. Jolivet was a priest, cartographer and geographer to Francois I and Henri II of France. The third and final folio map of the country is after Guillaume Postel after the woodcut of 1570. Postel (1510-81) was a French astronomer and cartographer.

This example bears a manuscript alteration to the date in the title page, the first two ‘I’s of the date bear a line effectively altering the date to 1597. This has been recorded in an example at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris and the British Library. Some of the “plates were later purchased by Jean Leclerc, and issued as the “Theatre François” “and constitute, without any doubt, a very outstanding stage of the history of the French cartography and its diffusion.” (Pastoureau).

I can find no record of a copy of the first edition being on the market in the last 35 years. An extremely rare atlas in a complete state, of the three examples in the British Library, all are lacking one or more plates. Tooley in 1949 wrote that even the maps were “practically unobtainable”!

Provenance: manuscript ownership inscription of “A moy Antoine de Guynant on both titles dated 1697, with a further inscription of Etienne Laget? “la Chambre des Comptes de Dijon en la ditte ville”. Bouzrara, Nancy & Conley, Tom. (2007). ‘Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France’ in ‘The History of Cartography’ volume 3 part 1 pp. 434; Dainville, F. (1960). ‘Le Premier atlas de Freance. Le Theatre Francoys de M. Bouguereau’ in: ‘Actes du Quatre-Vingt-Cinquieme Congress national des Societes Savantes’. Paris; Dainville, F. (1966). Introduction to facsimile edition. Amsterdam; Fordham (1914) ‘The Cartography of the Provinces of France, 1570-1757’ pp. 128-49; Karrow (1993) pp. 321-3; Pastoureau (1984) pp. 81-83; Tooley (1949) ‘Maps and map-makers’, p. 40; Tooley (1999-2004) Dictionary; Horffman (2007) ‘Publishing and the Map Trade in France, 1470-1670’, in ‘The History of Cartography’ volume 3 part 2 pp. 1576; The World Encompassed (1952) 155.