The (Sun) King’s View of the World

— This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi, a writer-editor in the office of the chief information officer. It also appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

Louis XIV of France, the absolutist Sun King who ruled his nation from the monumental, lavish palace of Versailles, was not a man known for his modesty.

His personal world atlas, a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division, may not have been the monarch’s most ornate possession, but it created an appropriately memorable splash when it was unveiled in 1704.

Distinguished by special binding and the king’s royal cypher, or monogram, the atlas opens with a title page engraving showing a stately Louis XIV beside a map of the British Isles, his foot crushing the symbolically snake-haired man writhing beneath it.

The huge world map that follows is one of the most exceptional and scandalous features of the royal atlas. Although its creator, Jean-Baptiste Nolin, would later be sued for plagiarizing its greatest cartographic innovations, the map was groundbreaking.

It was the first world map to show the mythical Sea of the West, an eventually debunked inland sea in the Pacific Northwest. By depicting California as a peninsula, it also was the first world map to break a century-long trend of portraying the region as an island.

Other innovations include the first rendering of Australia’s east coast and a depiction of the start of French colonization in Louisiana.

In 1705, cartographer Guillaume De L’Isle (often also spelled Delisle) accused Nolin of stealing all of these concepts from a manuscript globe he’d created for the chancellor of France. Following a five-year legal battle that ended with his defeat, Nolin was discredited and forced to destroy the copperplates he used to create his world map.

During the controversy, Louis XIV issued new regulations to prevent future map forgeries and counterfeits. In true kingly fashion, however, he kept the contentious map in his own royal atlas.

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