The World As Seen From Paris
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I found this wonderfully self-deprecating map on Strange Maps. The map dates from 1989, and was apparently produced by a French magazine called Actuel. Some characteristics of le monde, vu de Paris:
Centre of the world, obviously, is Paris (which once had its own meridian, eventually losing out to the one in Greenwich). New Caledonia, a rather small French dependency in the Pacific, is punching way above its weight on this map, much bigger than Australia (only good for ‘Kangaroos’) and New Zealand (‘Our enemy’, a reference to its stance against French nuclear testing on Mururoa, another French territory in the Pacific). Lybia gets a separate mention in North Africa as a ‘Terrorist centre’, while the rest of Africa’s northern half is labelled as ‘Our Arabs (poor)’ and ‘Our Africa’. Large parts of the area were indeed part of the French colonial empire. Beirut, another area with French colonial influence, is labelled as a ‘Gun market’, while their neighbours are ‘Oil Arabs’. Not so poor as ‘our’ Arabs, is the seemingly accusatory implication. Réunion, in reality a fairly small French island in the Indian Ocean, is shown hugely inflated – about the size Madagascar usually occupies on more realistic maps. Parisians’ view of America is fairly simple: there’s ‘Guyana’ (French Guyana is a small French territory between Suriname and Brazil, best known as the launch site for the European Space Agency’s rockets), Québec (Canada’s French-speaking province), Louisiana (formerly a French colony, now a US state) and, grudgingly, some room for Canada and the United States.
