A New Map of the Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute (1900)

FEDERICO FERRETTI

ABSTRACT: In the Reclus-Perron cartographical collection held in the Public Library of Geneva, a recently
discovered map by the explorer Henri Coudreau seems to have been essential, together with other published
and unpublished cartographic materials, in deciding the 1900 Swiss arbitration of the Franco-Brazilian border
dispute. These materials provide an opportunity not only to analyse the political power of maps, but also to
explore a different European way of conceiving maps and geography, that of anarchist geographers, which
diverged from the uncritical hagiographies of colonialism and geographical discoveries that were typical in
European science during the Age of Empire (1875‒1914).

KEYWORDS: Franco-Brazilian dispute, French Guiana, power of maps, cartographic reason, colonialism,
anti-colonial imagination, Henri Coudreau, Élisée Reclus, Charles Perron, Cartographic Museum of Geneva
(1907–1922), Nouvelle Géographie universelle, hydrological change.

A rich literature draws on maps, including histor-
ical ones, as powerful tools in decision making and
problem solving. This paper deals with a specific
case of the utilization of a map to resolve a
diplomatic issue, namely the 1897‒1900 Franco-
Brazilian border dispute on the southern frontier
of French Guiana, finally settled in 1900 through
arbitration by the Swiss government (Figs. 1, 2 and 3).
For this task, the Swiss referees made use of a
number of maps to try to identify the course of
the Japoc River. This was the first river to have
been given a name by the Spanish sailor Vicente
Pinzón (Pinçon in Portuguese) in 1500. The Japoc
was recognized by the 1713 Utrecht agreement as
the legal border between French and Portuguese
territories, but by 1890 it was no longer known
which river course actually corresponded to this
definition.
The focus in this article is on a manuscript map,
drawn by the explorer Henri Coudreau (1859‒1899)
and given by him to the geographer Élisée Reclus
(1830‒1905) in 1893, that has been recently dis-
covered in the Public Library in Geneva among
Reclus’s maps.1 This particular map was early
recognized to have played a role in directing the
decisions reached by the Swiss scholars who had
been asked by their government to study the prob-
lem. It is not surprising that Coudreau’s map has
lain among Reclus’s paper all this time unnoticed.
The archive contains, among various source ma-
terials, preparatory drawings, proof copies and
notes, some 10,000 maps amassed by Reclus and
Charles Perron (1837‒1909), geographer and car-
tographer respectively, during their work for the
encyclopaedic Nouvelle Géographie universelle.2
In the course of consulting the minutes of the
Geneva City Council, my attention was caught by
an entry for 8 January 1904 recording the city
councillors’ decision to finance a cartographical
exhibition based on the material that Reclus had

4Dr Federico Ferretti is a research and teaching fellow in the University of Geneva. Correspondence to: F. Ferretti,
Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva, Unimail, 40, Bd. Pont d’Arve, CH-1211 Genève 4,
Bureau 6399, Switzerland. Tel.: 41 (0)22 379 89 78. Fax: 41 (0)22 379 83 53. E-mail: federico.ferretti@unige.ch.

Imago Mundi Vol. 67, Part 2: 229–241

© 2015 Imago Mundi Ltd ISSN 0308-5694 print/1479-7801 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085694.2015.1027554
230 F. Ferretti
Fig. 1. Location of area shown in Henri Coudreau’s map of the contested Franco–Brazil frontier.
(Drawn by D. Bove.)
left in Switzerland in 1891. The councillors
remarked on the political importance of some of
the maps and referred to one map in particular,
noting that ‘It is one of these unpublished pieces
(a manuscript map by the explorer Coudreau) that
allowed Professor [William] Rosier to resolve many
uncertain points in the course of the Federal
Council’s arbitration of the line of the Franco-
Brazilian frontier’.3
That statement led me to examine the docu-
ments from the deliberations of the Swiss Federal
Council that were published in Bern in 1900.
There I noticed that nowhere, in a volume of
850 pages and eight attached folded maps con-
taining the Council’s discussions and documents
relating to the Brazil–French Guiana border, were
the names of any of the scientific advisors con-
sulted by the Swiss referees given.4 Reclus was
quoted twelve times and Coudreau eighteen as
the most recent and authoritative geographical
sources for the region. It is clear that the diplo-
mats’ arbitration had depended on the contribu-
tions of specialist historians and geographers, an
aspect confirmed by contemporary newspapers,
one of which stated that ‘the preliminaries of
this deliberation gave rise to long and difficult
studies in the fields of history and geography,
which the Federal Council entrusted to a number
of Swiss scholars’.5
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
One of these Swiss scholars was William Rosier
(1856‒1924), a geographer from Geneva, a liberal
politician, an admirer of Reclus and a friend of
Perron. Manuscript notes in volume 6 (the Atlas
containing the historical maps made available to
the Swiss referees) of the Geneva Public Library’s
copy of the Brazilian multi-volume memoir (writ-
ten in French and printed in Paris) were supplied
by Rosier.6 Between 1895 and 1901 Rosier had
been a member of the Geneva State Parliament, a
government minister, a member of a federal com-
mission for public education in Bern, and by the
start of the twentieth century, he was considered
one of the most authoritative geographers in
Switzerland.7 In short, there is nothing surprising
either in the Federal Council’s asking Rosier’s
advice in the affair or in the Council’s advisors
relying on the cartographic collection of Geneva,
the richest in Switzerland, for information.
Henri Coudreau’s Map of Brazil
Coudreau had compiled his manuscript map in
1893 and sent it to Reclus for the South American
volume of the Nouvelle Géographie universelle, in
which Perron had used it for two of the black-
and-white maps published in volume nineteen.8
Coudreau’s map, entitled simply Le Mapa, shows
in some detail the geography of the Atlantic coast
 Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute

Fig. 2. Carte générale de la Guyane représentant les prétentions des deux parties et dressée principalement d’après les cartes annexées aux documents français et brésiliens
(1900). 41 × 32 cm. Scale 1:4,000,000. The map shows the rival claims. Brazil wanted the border to run along the river Oyapoc [Oyapock] and thence
across French Guinea [Guyane française] to the Tumuc Humac mountains, which border Dutch Guiana (see detail in Figure 3). France claimed all the
land between that line, extended west to the Rio Branco, and a second line running from the Branco to the Rio Araguay and the Atlantic Ocean. The map
231

was published as Plate 1 in the official proceedings of the Swiss arbitration, Sentence du Conseil fédéral suisse dans la question des frontières de la Guyane française
et du Brésil du 1er décembre 1900 (Bern, Imprimerie Staempfli, 1900), Annexes. Bibliothèque de Genève, Département de Cartes et Plans, tiroir Amérique
latine—cartes partielles. (Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque de Genève, Switzerland.)
232 F. Ferretti Imago Mundi 67:2 2015

Fig. 3. Detail from the Carte générale de la Guyane (see Fig. 2). The single-headed arrow points to Brazil’s claim, eventually
favoured, for a boundary along the Oyapock River and thence along the watershed of the Amazon basin to the border with
Dutch Guiana. The double-headed arrow indicates part of the area wanted by France. From Sentence du Conseil fédéral suisse
dans la question des frontières de la Guyane française et du Brésil du 1er décembre 1900 (Bern, Imprimerie Staempfli, 1900),
Annexes, Plate 1. Bibliothèque de Genève, Département de Cartes et Plans, tiroir Amérique latine—cartes partielles.
(Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque de Genève, Switzerland.)

of South America from the northern channel of the
Amazon River north to the Carsevenne River, an
area corresponding to the southern part of the
territory claimed by France (Plate 9 and Fig. 4).
The map measures 85 by 60 centimetres. It is in
ink on a rather thin paper and tinted in bright
watercolours. The scale is given as 1:312,500.
There is also a scale bar in kilometres. Rivers, the
numerous coastal lakes and lagoons, and the sea
are blue, darker where the water is deeper and
navigable for European ships; a fine pecked line
labelled Ligne de fond de 4 mètres aux plus basses
mers [Depth line of 4 metres at low tide] demar-
cates the shallowest water. Coastal lowland is
uncoloured. The unvisited, or unsurveyed, interior,
across which several rivers (all named) are
indicated schematically with pecked lines, is uncol-
oured. The occasional upland is marked with
hachures and coloured dark brown. Lighter
brown land, labelled in many places Savane
(Savannah), is widespread between the coastal
region and the interior.
A key in the upper-right corner contains the date
and author’s signature and identifies five features:
Habitation; Village (house; village), represented
respectively by a point and a circle; Sentier (path),
represented by a pecked line; Prairies, Savane
(meadows, savannah), tinted in brown watercol-
our; Régions marécageuses ou inondées (marshes or
inundated regions), shaded with roughly-drawn
horizontal lines overwashed in blue; and Ancien
lac (former lake), represented by an uncoloured
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015 The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute 233

Fig. 4. Henri Coudreau’s manuscript map of Guiana, of 1893 (see Plate 9). Manuscript. 85 × 60 cm. Scale 1:312,500. The
key lists the signs for settlements, paths and vegetation, but most of the written notes on the map concern aspects of the
region’s hydrography. At issue in the dispute over the Franco-Brazilian frontier was the Carapaporis channel between
Maraca Island and the mainland, which the French alleged had been created only recently and thus marked the frontier as
this had been established in the Utrecht agreement of 1713, before the island was cut off. Bibliothèque de Genève,
Département de Cartes et Plans, tiroir Amérique latine—cartes partielles. (Reproduced with permission from the
Bibliothèque de Genève, Switzerland.)
234 F. Ferretti
area outlined by short hachures. Considerable
attention has been paid to potential anchorages
and navigable water; ports are indicated by an
anchor sign, and detailed information is provided
for the passage of different kinds of ships by
numbers giving bathymetrical measurements.
The depth of the Carapaporis channel, between
Maraca Island and the continental coast, is
obvious—a feature that in due course attracted
the attention of the scholars researching the bor-
der dispute. It pointed to the unlikeliness of the
hypothesis that this island was, until recent times,
part of the continent.
Coudreau’s emphasis on accessibility is also
reflected in the name of the creek that crosses
Maraca Island, Crique Calebasse or, in Portuguese
Igarapé do Inferno [Hell Creek], specified as accessible
seulement aux petits bateaux [accessible to small boats
only]. Unstable or seasonal rivers and lagoons are
represented by pecked lines, and information is
provided on the geomorphological evolution of
these features, with references to silted channels,
ancient lagoons and their former French,
Portuguese or indigenous toponyms. A former trib-
utary of the Araguary, near that river’s estuary, is
labelled R. Amacary—Barrancas, ou bouche du R. Moro
(ancien Rio Tapado), obstrué [River Amacary—
Barrancas River, or estuary of the Moro River
(ancient Tapado River), obstructed]. Every stream,
inlet, lake and lagoon is named this way, with
detailed notes giving modern and past toponymy.
On a number of rivers, lines across the channel
indicate a channel blocked in some way. On the
Tartarugal River a waterfall is labelled Chute [fall].
Sporadically, an arrow gives the direction of
water flow.
Settlements are marked with abstract signs in
black ink. Circles with a dot indicate the two
major villages—Mapa and Colonia Militar dom
Pedro II—which were the centres of Brazilian set-
tlement in the contested area. Habitations or smaller
settlements such as farms or isolated houses are
represented by small points and are labelled with
the Brazilian toponym or with the owner’s name.
Sometimes we find information like ‘house belong-
ing to a Paraguayan’.9 Crosses and stippling repre-
sent cemeteries and missions. All the settlements
are Brazilian, sometimes with toponyms of indi-
genous origin. A few paths between them are
represented, but the chief form of communication,
according to the map, seems to have been the
waterways. In the interior, labels such as
Caoutchouc (rubber) indicate the potential economic
value of this region.
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
What the map communicates at a glance is indeed
the complexity of the morphology and hydrogra-
phy of a highly unstable physical environment.
The only rivers that appear to be well-known
and well-defined are in the southern part of the
territory, where the Amazon’s northernmost
channel (Canal du Nord) is highlighted as deep
water where it enters the sea, as is the Araguary
River north of it.
Approaching the Problem
The main task that the 1897 Franco-Brazilian con-
ference entrusted to the Swiss government was to
locate the Japoc River. A decisive role was played
by maps and literature relating to the early explora-
tion of the region. As D. Graham Burnett found in
the case of Venezuela’s dispute with British Guiana
in the 1840s over its northern border, and here too
in Brazil’s dispute with France, ‘Colonial territory
came into being as a result of the passage of certain
individuals—explorers and surveyors—who made
distant land possessable by means of a set of power-
ful linked texts. Diplomats explored those texts, not
jungles, to see who had a right to what’.10
The Swiss geographers appointed to inform the
Swiss referees approached their task from three
directions, systematically analysing all the sources
they could find for the region’s history, physical
geography, and human and political geography.
They reconstructed its history through historical
maps and travel narratives. They investigated
the morphological and hydrographical coastal
dynamics. And they analysed all available data
about the local inhabitants and, in particular, the
results of French and Brazilian attempts to estab-
lish coastal and inland villages.
Their armchair geography was encyclopaedic, as
befitted the political situation of Switzerland at the
time: a European state with neither sea nor col-
onies that nonetheless saw a role for itself in inter-
national relations.11 As I have argued elsewhere,
the very concepts of Reclus’s Nouvelle Géographie
universelle and the authority of local geography
can also be seen as the products of ‘International
Switzerland’, a place of exiles and refugees in
which Reclus and his collaborators created their
great encyclopaedia during their exile in the
Helvetic Confederation.12
Inevitably, the armchair geographers could not
avoid the epistemological discourse surrounding
them. Their eventual judgment, which contradicted
official French accounts that claimed the Japoc
River corresponded to the Araguary, reflected
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
their decision that Reclus and his mapmaker
Coudreau were the most authoritative and their
evidence the most weighty.13 The adjudicators
appear, by starting with Reclus’s criticism of carto-
graphic documents as if ‘objective’ sources, to have
agreed with the theoretical foundation of his geo-
graphy, further developing the point by quoting
Alexander von Humboldt’s argument that
geographical maps reflect the opinions and knowl-
edge, more or less limited, of those who construct
them; but they do not recount the status of their
findings. That which we find drawn on maps (and
this is especially the case with those of the XIVth,
XVth and XVIth centuries) is a mixture of confirmed
facts and conjectures presented as facts.14
Reclus himself had steered clear of the debate
because he was not interested in questions of a
‘diplomatic character’, commenting that with ques-
tions such as ‘Which is this river Yapok or Vicente
Pinzon that the Utrecht diplomats, unfamiliar with
American things, wanted to mark on their rudi-
mentary maps? … One could fill libraries with the
reports and diplomatic documents published on
this insoluble question’.15
Locating the Border
In his own work, Reclus’s aim was to build a geo-
graphy independent of political power. In working
for the arbitration over the Franco-Brazilian bor-
der, however, the political question had to be
addressed. The Swiss geographers, relying on
Coudreau’s first-hand observations, found they
could interpret the complex dynamics of the coast-
line to give the Swiss referees reasons for question-
ing the older cartographic documents, which were
more ideological and less grounded in direct obser-
vation. According to the referees, the physical
geography portrayed on maps like Coudreau’s
demonstrated that it was not possible for the
Japoc, as described by Vicente Pinzón, to have
been one of the Amazon’s channels. In particular,
they refuted a central point in the official
French record, the claim that the contemporary
Carapaporis channel represented an ancient
north-flowing course of the Araguary, whereby
the island of Maraca would have still been con-
nected to the continent as recently as the sixteenth
century (Fig. 5). This could be the only reason
Pinzón omitted to mention this island.
After analysing the morphological history of the
coast and citing Reclus, Coudreau and the other
geographers, the Swiss referees concluded by
arguing that the Maraca Island and the
The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute 235
Carapaporis channel were geologically much
older. According to them, this proved that the car-
tographers quoted by the Utrecht diplomats had
not been as familiar with the region as they pre-
tended, saying dismissively that, ‘Consequently, it
is unnecessary, in any case, to look for the Vincent
Pinçon of the old cartographers either in the
Channel or in the Carapaporis River’.16 According
to the referees, the northern arm of the Araguary
‘does not exist, and has never existed’.17
A look at Coudreau’s manuscript map, which
Rosier would have consulted, allows us to suppose
that it was above all the map’s bathymetric record
that directed Rosier and his colleagues to their con-
clusion. As already noted, Coudreau had paid par-
ticular attention to the depth of water in the coastal
districts and immediately offshore, noting his
observations meticulously. His map shows no geo-
morphological evidence, such as abandoned chan-
nels and fluvial ridges, to support the French
argument that the Carapaporis channel marks a
former course of the Araguary River and that the
separation of Maraca Island from the mainland was
recent. Rosier, studying Coudreau’s map, accord-
ingly argued that it was unlikely that such a radical
transformation could have been accomplished in
no more than two or three centuries. Whatever
river Pinzón had seen, it could not have been the
Araguary.
In addition to examining the physical features in
the disputed area, the Swiss referees also consid-
ered the history of the territory and its inhabitants.
Apart from some French enclaves along the coast,
this part of South America was almost completely
occupied by Brazilians and indigenous peoples.
Again, Reclus and Coudreau were cited as the
principal sources and in contradiction of the
French claims. One argument was that the peoples
of the hinterland—for example, in the Rio Branco
Valley—recognized Brazil as their nation. Lest the
geographers’ impartiality was open to question,
the fact that both were French nationals was
cleverly inserted into the Swiss referees’ report:
Brazil’s sovereignty, especially in the Rio Branco val-
ley, was recognized by its population. In his work La
France équinoxiale, Coudreau said: ‘We can no longer
today sustain our claims as far as the Rio Branco; the
Rio Branco cannot not be disputed, since Brazilians
exploited and populated it’. Élisée Reclus has con-
firmed this statement in the following passage:
‘However the debate does not have real importance
except for the contest over the coast, between the
Oyapock and the Araguary. To the west, all the Rio
Branco valley has become uncontestably Brazilian
by language, custom, and political and commercial
relations’.18
236 F. Ferretti Imago Mundi 67:2 2015

Fig. 5. Detail from Coudreau’s map as redrawn by Charles Perron for the Nouvelle Géographie
universelle, volume 19, 1894, 87, showing the deep-water Carapaporis channel and Maraca Island.
The stippling represents marshy zones. (Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque de
Genève, Switzerland.)

Reclus’s statement had already worried the French
Minister Stephen Pichon in correspondence going
back to 1896.19 At the same time, the Brazilians had
relied on the work of other Frenchmen, such as Jules
Crevaux as well as Coudreau, to develop their own
arguments.20
Colonialism, Nationalism and Anarchism
In the end, the border between French Guiana and
Brazil was established along the river that is now
known as the Oyapock [Portuguese Oiapoque], a
decision that satisfied Brazil’s territorial claims (see
Fig. 2). But we have to ask, why did the Swiss
referees accord such importance to Coudreau’s
and Reclus’s maps and to the latter’s writings?
The key may lie in the personal philosophy of the
two French geographers, who were independent of
the interests of their nation. Neither supported the
idea of colonialism. Rather, they claimed that they
stood for scientific independence. In the case of
Reclus, this attitude owed much to his political
identity as an anarchist and to his experience as a
veteran of the 1871 Paris Commune, for which
he was exiled from France for the greater part of
his life. He explicitly criticized the idea of patri-
otism, preferring the idea of cosmopolitanism,
and contested the notion of borders, protesting
he was ‘against all these boundaries, symbols of
monopolization and hatred! We are eager finally
to be able to embrace all men and call ourselves
their brothers!’21
Coudreau apparently shared Reclus’s endorse-
ment of the independence of science. During the
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
making of the map, he remained true to his empiri-
cal observations. Although his draft map was sent
to Reclus in 1893, it was not published, which
might suggest that Reclus was the only French
geographer prepared to disseminate information
that risked damaging his homeland. Coudreau
had started his career as a ‘colonialist’ sent out to
Guiana by the French government, but he aban-
doned his formal appointment to live as an ‘irregu-
lar’, staying with indigenous people. Coudreau was
considered in France to be a ‘maverick’ explorer,
and ‘a little anarchist.’22 In the last years of his life,
he was branded a traitor for taking an appointment
in the Brazilian government.23 Early in 1896,
Coudreau wrote from Brazil to his friend Reclus
complaining that he was being marginalized and
comparing himself to the defeated fighters of the
Paris Commune.24 Letters written by Reclus after
Coudreau’s death in Brazil in 1899 reveal that he
tried to help Coudreau’s widow financially.25
In fact, Reclus owed much to Coudreau. Coudreau
had been one of Reclus’s most important sources
for the chapters on Brazil and Guiana, as Reclus
acknowledged at the end of his work, noting that:
‘My friend Henri Coudreau has kindly read the
proofs of the chapter on Guiana’.26 Reclus had
also quoted several times from the ‘manuscript
notes’ that Coudreau had sent him.27 The importance
of Coudreau’s role is still upheld; the Brazilian histor-
ian Nelson Sanjad has concluded that the pages
Reclus wrote on the Contested Territory are ‘a great
summary of Coudreau’s ideas ’.28
The Franco-Brazilian dispute reinforces my ear-
lier suggestion that Reclus and the other anarchist
geographers were precocious and radical adver-
saries of colonialism, systematically denouncing
European colonial crimes committed the world
over.29 The case of France and Guiana was no
exception. Reclus fumed at the brutality of the
République in these latitudes, and at the antisocial
function of the Cayenne penal colony, writing that
Of all the overseas possessions that France has arro-
gated to itself, none prospers less than its part of the
Guianas: one cannot relate this history without shame.
The example of French Guiana is the one usually
chosen to show the incompetence of the French in
matters of colonization.30
He denounced the thousands of deaths brought
about by clumsy attempts to acclimatize Indian
workers to French plantations, protesting that this
was ‘without method and without humanity’ and
that out of ‘8,372 workers hired in the prime of life,
4,522 had died in the 22 years between 1856 and
The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute 237
1878’.31 As regards the indigenous inhabitants, he
remarked that ‘more than the half of the peoples
cited by the early authors have disappeared’.32 This
was not the first time Reclus had expressed his
anti-colonial ideas. Some years previously he had
been the only well-known French scientist of his
day explicitly to claim independence for Algeria,
writing that Algerians must be given all their rights,
‘including that of getting rid of us’.33
The gap between Reclus and contemporary
French geographers is highlighted when his state-
ments are compared with those expressed by Paul
Vidal de la Blache after the Swiss judgment on the
Franco–Brazilian frontier. Vidal de la Blache
asserted that ‘although the end of any long dispute
is always a positive fact’, he nonetheless regretted
that ‘the case is turning out to our detriment’.34
With other French geographers, Vidal de la Blache
had been directly engaged in preparing documents
to be supplied to the adjudicators of the border
dispute, and whereas his evaluation of the final
judgment was relatively moderate, geographers
like Augustin Bernard severely criticized the Swiss
referees and the scientific basis of their decision.35
The Swiss judgment also upset the more conser-
vative elements of the French press, namely Le
Figaro and Le Temps, whose writers fumed over
the decision. They questioned the impartiality of
Switzerland, which they accused of having reached
its decision in the light of its own commercial inter-
ests in Brazil. The Swiss press promptly responded
with statistical data showing that ‘if Switzerland has
vital and essential interests with one of the parties
in question, it is not with Brazil, but truly with
France’.36
Reclus and Coudreau’s Legacy in Brazil
The Franco–Brazil frontier dispute left its mark in
Brazil, notably as regards the reception there of
Reclus’s works. Reclus was already well-known in
the country from his visit in 1893 to the
Geographical Society in Rio de Janeiro and to the
Historical and Geographical Brazilian Institute.37
Reclus had been corresponding with the Brazilian,
Baron Rio Branco, helping him to obtain maps for
the 1893‒1895 border dispute between Brazil and
Argentina, resolved in favour of Brazil.38 Rio
Branco was also a protagonist for Brazil over the
disputed frontier between France and Brazil,
resolved in 1900.
Accordingly, when, in 1903, Brazil found itself
with a new frontier dispute, this time with British
Guiana, the idea arose within the scientific
238 F. Ferretti
network, which included politicians and diplomats,
to ask Élisée Reclus for help. The eminent Brazilian
writer José Pereira de Graça Aranha, diplomat and
Reclus admirer, contacted the by-then elderly
Reclus, now living in Brussels, to ask him for
maps that would assist Brazil in the new dispute.39
According to M. H. Castro Azevedo,
Reclus accepted the task in order to oppose the inter-
ests of the British in the passage to the Amazon River,
where they intended to build a railway; he was also
personally very interested in this region, as he wanted
America for Americans.40
The point of the story in the context of the pres-
ent article is not to suggest that European anar-
chists in general preferred Brazilian imperialism to
that of the British or French. Rather, the message is
that, in the second half of the nineteenth century,
many of the anarchists expressed their solidarity
with the struggle for national independence
among the colonized nations as well as in Eastern
Europe. They hoped that those struggles would
herald the development of social revolutions, a
process that Benedict Anderson has described as
‘anti-colonial imagination’.41
It was easy for Reclus’s Nouvelle Géographie uni-
verselle to be warmly embraced in South America,
where relevant chapters, with the original maps
by Perron, were translated into Spanish and
Portuguese to become the main national geographi-
cal monographs of the respective countries.42 This
was the case not only in Brazil, where Reclus’s text
was published in B. F. Ramiz Galvão’s translation in
1900 with a preface by Rio Branco, but also in
Colombia with Francisco Javier Vergara y Velasco
translations of 1893.43 In Brazil, Reclus’s work went
further, inspiring Euclides de Cunha to write his
masterpiece, Os Sertões, the classic ‘national novel’.44
The settling of the Franco-Brazilian frontier and the
work of Reclus, Coudreau and Perron show how
the ‘power’ of maps can lead to some rather unin-
tended results. Whereas Harley noted that ‘Maps
were key documents in both a practical and an
ideological sense in shaping European nationalism
and imperialism’, the originality of the specific case
examined here is not so much to support the
notion that maps have a power of their own as to
demonstrate the heterogeneity of that idea and to
point to the sometimes unanticipated ideological
directions that cartographic representation can
take.45 According to Harley, maps are the language
of power, never that of contestation: their ‘ideo-
logical arrows have tended to fly largely in one
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
direction, from the powerful to the weaker in
society’.46 Research, though, shows that maps
acted not only for the European empires, but also
against them. Such was the case, in 1900, of a map
built by the ‘maverick’ explorer and cartographer
Henri Coudreau, sponsored in the scientific world
by a heterodox geographer Élisée Reclus.
A final observation is worth making. Coudreau’s
map had two roles; the first editorial, as a contribu-
tion to the Nouvelle Géographie universelle, the sec-
ond as a diplomatic tool in the hands of William
Rosier. The interlinking of these two uses under-
lines the importance of taking account of the place
and material condition of each map. It might be
expected that an accurate topographical map made
by a military-cartographical service deserves its role
in imperial strategy, whereas, as Henri Coudreau’s
map testifies, an individual map made by an ir-
regular explorer may sometimes have a more com-
plex pattern of use.
Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the Swiss
National Fund for Scientific Research (SNF) within the
project Écrire le monde autrement: géographes, ethnographes
et orientalistes en Suisse Romande (1864–1920), des discours
heterodoxes [grant number: 140274]. My thanks are due
to all the colleagues from several countries with whom I
have discussed the Franco-Brazilian dispute, especially for
their help in pointing me to the documentary sources:
Nelson Sanjad, Jean-Yves Puyo, Carlo Romani, Patricia
Aranha, Breno Viotto Pedrosa, Guilherme Ribeiro,
Sergio Nunes Pereira, Manoel Fernandes and Michael
Heffernan. Especial thanks go to David Ramirez Palacios
and Luciene Carris Cardoso for supplying the correspon-
dence between Reclus and Rio Branco. I also wish to
thank the staff of the Geneva Public Library for opening
up their archives to me, and especially to Marianne Tsioli
and Alexandre Vanautgaerden.
Manuscript submitted July 2013. Revised text accepted January
2015.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Le Mapa, manuscript map by Henri Coudreau,
Bibliothèque de Genève, Département de Cartes et
Plans, tiroir Amérique latine—cartes partielles. In 1893
the collection was given to the City of Geneva. For a
description of the Perron-Reclus collection see Federico
Ferretti, ‘Cartographie et éducation populaire: Le Musée
Cartographique d’Élisée Reclus et Charles Perron à
Genève (1907‒1922), Terra Brasilis, Revista da Rede
Brasileira de História da Geografia e Geografia Histórica 1
(2012): http://terrabrasilis.revues.org/178; Federico
Ferretti, ‘Pioneers in the history of cartography: the
Geneva map collection of Élisée Reclus and Charles
Perron’, Journal of Historical Geography, 43 (2014): 85‒95.
For a first description of the Coudreau map see Federico
Ferretti, ‘O fundo Reclus-Perron e o contestado franco-
brasileiro de 1900: um mapa inedito que decidiu as
fronteiras do Brasil’, Terra Brasilis 2 (2013): http://terrab
rasilis.revues.org/744. See also Federico Ferretti, ‘The
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015
correspondence between Élisée Reclus and Pëtr Kropotkin
as a source for the history of geography’, Journal of
Historical Geography 37 (2011): 216‒22.
2. Élisée Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle, vol. 19:
L’Amazonie et la Plata (Paris, Hachette, 1894).
3. Archives de la ville de Genève, Mémorial des séances du
Conseil Municipal de la Ville De Genève, Séance du 8 janvier
1904, 622‒23. ‘C’est une de ces pièces inédites (manuscrit
de l’explorateur Coudreau) qui permit à M. le professeur
Rosier de résoudre de nombreux points douteux lors de
l’arbitrage soumis au Conseil fédéral pour la délimitation
de la frontière franco-brésilienne’. All quotations from
texts in French or Portuguese have been translated by
the author.
4. Sentence du Conseil fédéral suisse dans la question des
frontières de la Guyane française et du Brésil du 1er décembre
1900 (Bern, Imprimerie Staempfli, 1900).
5. ‘Le contesté franco-brésilien’, Gazette de Lausanne, 4
December 1900: 2. ‘Les préliminaires de cette sentence
ont donné lieu, dans les domaines de l’histoire et de la
géographie, à des études longues et difficiles dont le
Conseil fédéral a confié le soin à un certain nombre de
savants suisses’.
6. Geneva Public Library, Frontières entre le Brésil et la
Guyane française. Second mémoire présenté par les États unis
du Brésil au gouvernement de la Confédération suisse, arbitre
choisi selon les stipulations du traité conclu à Rio-de-Janeiro, le
10 avril 1897 entre le Brésil et la France. Tome VI: Atlas
(Paris, Lahure, 1899). The Geneva Library also contains
the other volumes of the Brazilian evidence, as well as a
complete set of the French material. When Perron opened
the Musée cartographique in Geneva in 1907, which ran
until 1922, he included several of the maps. Charles
Perron, Catalogue descriptif du Musée cartographique—Dépôt
des cartes de la Ville de Genève (Geneva, Imprimerie Romet,
1907); Charles Perron, Une étude cartographique: les mappe-
mondes (Paris, Éditions de la Revue des Idées, 1907).
7. Bibliothèque de Genève, Département des
Manuscrits, Biographies genevoises, ad nomen; Bern,
Archives Fédérales, Séances du Conseil Fédéral,
Département de l’Intérieur, 1899; Claire Fischer, Claude
Mercier and Claude Raffestin, ‘Entre la politique et la
science, un géographe genevois: William Rosier’, Le
Globe 143 (2003): 13‒25.
8. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle (see note 2), 19:
25, 87.
9. ‘M[aison] d’un Paraguayen’.
10. D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed:
Exploration, Geography and a British El Dorado (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2.
11. Switzerland stood out, according to some historians,
for its ‘oblique colonialism’. See Yves Froidevaux, ‘Nature
et artifice: village Suisse et village nègre à l’exposition
nationale de Genève—1896’, Revue Historique
neuchâteloise (2002): 17‒33; Patrick Minder, La Suisse colo-
niale? Les représentations de l’Afrique et des Africains en Suisse
au temps des colonies (1880‒1939) (Neuchâtel, Université de
Neuchâtel, 2009); Roland Ruffieux, ‘La Suisse des
Libéraux’, in Nouvelle Histoire de la Suisse et des Suisses
(Lausanne, Payot, 1984), 599‒666.
12. Federico Ferretti, Élisée Reclus, pour une géographie
nouvelle (Paris, CTHS, 2014), 211‒68.
13. The outcome was published in Mémoire contenant
l’exposé des droits de la France dans la question des frontières
de la Guyane française et du Brésil, soumise à l’arbitrage du
gouvernement de la Confédération suisse (Paris, Imprimerie
Nationale, 1891); Réponse du gouvernement de la
The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute 239
République française au Mémoire des États-Unis du Brésil sur
la question de frontière, soumise à l’arbitrage du gouvernement de
la Confédération suisse (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1899).
14. Sentence du Conseil fédéral suisse (see note 4), 463. ‘Les
cartes géographiques expriment les opinions et les con-
naissances, plus ou moins limitées, de celui qui les a
construites; mais elles ne retracent pas l’état des
découvertes. Ce que l’on trouve figuré sur les cartes (et
c’est surtout le cas de celles des XIVe, XVe et XVIe siècles),
est un mélange de faits avérés et de conjectures
présentées comme des faits’.
15. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle (see note 2) 86.
‘Quel est ce fleuve Yapok ou Vincent Pinzon que les
diplomates d’Utrecht, ignorants des choses d’Amérique,
voulurent indiquer sur leurs cartes rudimentaires? . . .
On emplirait les bibliothèques de mémoires et documents
diplomatiques publiés sur cette insoluble question’.
16. Sentence du Conseil fédéral suisse (see note 4), 713. ‘Par
conséquent, il ne faut en tout cas chercher le Vincent
Pinçon des anciens cartographes ni dans le Canal, ni
dans la rivière de Carapaporis’.
17. Ibid., 720. ‘N’existe pas, et il n’a jamais existé’.
18. Ibid., 820. ‘La souveraineté du Brésil, notamment
dans la vallée du Rio Branco, est reconnue par la popula-
tion. Dans son ouvrage La France équinoxiale, Coudreau dit
à ce sujet: “Nous ne pouvons plus aujourd’hui faire valoir
nos prétentions jusqu’au rio Branco; le rio Branco ne
saurait être contesté, car les Brésiliens l’exploitent et le
peuplent”. Élisée Reclus confirme cette déclaration dans le
passage suivant: “Toutefois le débat n’a d’importance
réelle que pour le contesté de la côte, entre l’Oyapock et
l’Araguary. À l’ouest, toute la vallée du rio Branco est
devenue incontestablement brésilienne par la langue, les
mœurs, les relations politiques et commerciales”’.
19. Archives diplomatiques de Nantes, Deputations
Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Dossier 105, Franco-Brazilian
Border Dispute, Correspondence of the Minister, Mr.
Pichon, fol. 26, 23 August 1896.
20. Carlo Romani, ‘Algumas geografias sobre a fronteira
franco-brasileira’, Ateliê Geográfico, 2:1 (2008): 43‒64
(http://www.revistas.ufg.br/index.php/atelie/article/view/
3896/3580).
21. Élisée Reclus, Écrits Sociaux (Geneva, Héros-limite,
2012), 243. ‘Contre toutes ces bornes, symboles d’acca-
parement et de haine ! Nous avons hâte de pouvoir enfin
embrasser tous les hommes et nous dire leurs frères!’
22. Sébastien Benoit, Henri Coudreau (1859‒1899) (Paris,
L’Harmattan, 2000), 123.
23. Carlo Romani, Aqui começa o Brasil, história das gentes
e dos poderes na fronteira do Oiapoque (Rio de Janeiro,
Multifoco, 2013), 99‒100.
24. Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 22914, H.
Coudreau to E. Reclus, [Pará] 18 February 1896, fol. 65.
25. Bibliothèque publique et Universitaire de Neuchâtel,
Département des Manuscrits, MS 1991/10, E. Reclus, to
Ch. Schiffer, Brussels, 30 April 1903.
26. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle (see note 2),
19: 797.
27. Ibid., 19: 1, 2, 15, 25, 47. Coudreau is quoted 59
times in this volume.
28. Nelson Sanjad, A coruja de Minerva: o Museu Paraense
entre o Império e a República (1866‒1907) (Rio de Janeiro,
Fiocruz, 2010), 307. ‘Um grande resumo das ideias de
Coudreau’.
29. Federico Ferretti, ‘“They have the right to throw us
out”: Élisée Reclus’ New Universal Geography’, Antipode, A
Radical Journal of Geography, 45:5 (2013): 1337‒55.
240 F. Ferretti Imago Mundi 67:2 2015

30. Reclus, Nouvelle Géographie universelle (see note 2),
19: 72. ‘De toutes les possessions d’outre-mer que la
France s’attribue, nulle ne prospère moins que sa part
des Guyanes: on ne peut en raconter l’histoire sans humi-
liation. L’exemple de la Guyane est celui qu’on choisit
d’ordinaire pour démontrer l’incapacité des Français en
fait de colonisation’.
31. Ibid., 19: 73. ‘Sans méthode et sans humanité . . .]De
8 372 [travailleurs] engagés dans la force de l’âge, 4 522
sont morts en 22 années de 1856 à 1878‘.
32. Ibid., 19: 47. ‘Plus de la moitié des peuplades citées par
les anciens auteurs a disparu’. David Lowenthal has also
observed that, of the three Guianas, it was French Guiana
that remained the most sparsely populated not only because
of the environmental obstacles but also because of the pol-
itical choices, namely the establishment of the penal colony
(David Lowenthal, ‘Population contrasts in the Guianas’,
Geographical Review 50:1 (1960): 41‒58).
33. Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF, 16798, fol.
80, E. Reclus to P. Pelet, Clarens, 7 December 1884. ‘Y
compris celui de nous mettre à la porte’.
34. Paul Vidal de La Blache, ‘Le contesté franco-
brésilien’, Annales de Géographie 10:49 (1901): 68. ‘Le
procès se dénoue à notre détriment’.
35. Guy Mercier, ‘La géographie de Paul Vidal de la
Blache face au litige Guyanais: la science à l’épreuve de
la justice, Annales de Géographie 667:3 (2009): 294‒317;
Augustin Bernard, ‘Le contesté Franco-Brésilien’, Questions
diplomatiques et coloniales, revue de politique extérieure 1
(1901): 31‒37.
36. ‘Arbitrage Franco-brésilien’, Journal de Genève, 7
December 1900: 1. ‘Si la Suisse a des intérêts vitaux et
essentiels avec l’une des parties en cause, ce n’est pas avec
le Brésil, mais bien avec la France’.
37. Luciene Carris Cardoso, ‘A visita de Élisée Reclus à
sociedade de Geografia do Rio de Janeiro’, Revista da
Sociedade Brasileira de Geografia 1 (2006), http://www.
socbrasileiradegeografia.com.br/revista_sbg/luciene%20p
%20c%20cardoso.html; Milton Lopes, ‘Élisée Reclus e o
Brasil’, GEOgraphia 11:21 (2009): 160‒75 (http://www.
uff.br/geographia/ojs/index.php/geographia/issue/view/
23); Marcelo Augusto Miyahiro, ‘O Brasil de Élisée Reclus:
territorio e sociedade em fins do século XIX’ (unpublished
Master of Arts dissertation, São Paulo University, 2011).
38. José Maria da Silva Paranhos Júnior (1845‒1912),
Baron Rio Branco, was one of the most famous Brazilian
politicians and diplomats in the first years of the Brazilian
Republic. His skill in resolving diplomatic matters in
favour of Brazil, such as the frontier disputes with
France, Great Britain and Argentina, earned him a repu-
tation as ‘the Brazilian Bismarck’. The correspondence
with Reclus is in Rio De Janeiro at the Arquivo Histórico
de Itamaraty, Correspondence Rio Branco, Baron Rio
Branco to E. Reclus, Paris, 19 June 1893.
39. José Pereira de Graça Aranha (1868‒1931) was a
member of the progressive Brazilian bourgeoisie during
the first years of the Brazilian Republic (proclaimed in
1889). He never forgot his youthful sympathy with an-
archism, and continued to read and admire the anarchist
geographers Pyotr Kropotkin and Reclus.
40. Maria Helena Castro Azevedo, Um senhor modernista:
biografia de Graça Aranha (Rio de Janeiro, Academia
Brasileira de Letras, 2002), 75‒77. ‘Reclus aceita o
encargo, no intuito de opor-se aos interesses dos ingleses
para aquela passagem para o Amazonas, onde pretendiam
fazer um camino de ferro; também a ele a ele a região
interessava muito pessoalmente, na medida em que
deseja a América para os americanos’.
41. Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and
the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London, Verso, 2007). The
place of geographical and cartographical issues in such
struggles seems to me to merit further exploration.
42. For a similar treatment of Vidal the la Blache’s
Tableau de la Géographie de la France (1903), see Marie-
Claire Robic, ed., Le Tableau de la géographie de la France de
Paul Vidal de la Blache: dans le labyrinthe des formes (Paris,
CTHS, 2000).
43. See David Alejandro Ramirez Palacios, ‘Élisée Reclus
e a geografia da Colômbia: cartografia de uma interseção’
(unpublished Master of Arts dissertation, São Paulo
University, 2010), http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponi
veis/8/8136/tde-06102010-093308/pt-br.php; Élisée
Reclus and Francisco Javier Vergara y Velasco, Colombia,
traducida y anotada per F. J. Vergara y Velasco (Bogota,
Matiz, 1893); Élisée Reclus,Estados Unidos do Brazil, geogra-
phia, ethnographia, estatistica, por Élisée Reclus. Traducção e
breves notas de B. F. Ramiz Galvão, e annotações sobre o
territorio contestado pelo barão do Rio Branco (Rio de
Janeiro, Garnier, 1900).
44. Euclides de Cunha, Os Sertões (Rio de Janeiro, 1902).
See Luciana Murari, Brasil, ficção geográfica: ciência e nacio-
nalidade no país dos Sertões (São Paulo, Annablume, 2007);
Denis Rolland, ‘Comprendre les enjeux d’un conflit et de
ses représentations’, in Le Brésil face à son passé: la guerre de
Canudos, ed. Isabelle Muzart-Fonseca dos Santos and
Denis Rolland (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005): 8.
45. Brian Harley, ‘The map and the development of
the history of cartography’, in The History of Cartography,
vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval
Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and
David Woodward (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1987), 14.
46. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 79.

Une nouvelle carte du conflit frontalier franco-brésilien (1900)

Dans la collection cartographique Reclus-Perron conservée à la Bibliothèque publique de Genève, une carte
de l’explorateur Henri Coudreau récemment découverte semble avoir joué un rôle essentiel, en même
temps que d’autres matériaux cartographiques (publiés ou non), dans l’arbitrage rendu en 1900 par la
Suisse dans le conflit frontalier franco-brésilien. Ces matériaux offrent l’opportunité non seulement d’ana-
lyser le pouvoir politique des cartes, mais aussi d’explorer une façon différente de concevoir les cartes et la
géographie en Europe, celle des géographes anarchistes qui se démarquèrent de l’hagiographie peu critique
du colonialisme et des découvertes géographiques, qui était typique de la science européenne à l’âge des
Empires (1875‒1914).
Imago Mundi 67:2 2015 The Franco-Brazilian Border Dispute 241

Eine neue Karte des Grenzstreits zwischen Frankreich und Brasilien (1900)
In der Reclus-Perron Kartensammlung in der Bibliothek von Genf befindet sich eine Karte des
Forschungsreisenden Henri Coudreau, die zusammen mit anderen publizierten und unveröffentlichten
Karten, eine wesentliche Rolle bei der Entscheidung der schweizerischen Schlichtungsinitiative im
französisch-brasilianischen Grenzstreit gespielt haben dürfte. Diese Materialien bieten nicht nur die
Möglichkeit, die politische Relevanz von Karten zu untersuchen, sondern zeigen auch einen unkonventio-
nellen europäischen Weg der Kartographie und Geographie: den anarchistischer Geographen, die sich von
den unkritischen Hagiographien des Kolonialismus und der geographischen Entdeckungen absetzten, wie sie
für das Europa des imperialistischen Zeitalters (1875‒1914) typisch waren.

Un Nuevo mapa de la disputa fronteriza franco-brasileña de 1900

Un mapa recientemente descubierto del explorador Henri Coudreau en la colección cartográfica Reclus-
Perron, alojada en la Biblioteca Pública de Ginebra, parece haber sido esencial, junto con otros materiales
cartográficos publicados e inéditos, para decidir el arbitraje suizo de la disputa fronteriza franco-brasileña.
Estos materiales proporcionan una oportunidad, no solo de analizar el poder político de los mapas, sino
también de explorar un diferente modo europeo de concebir los mapas y la geografía: el de los geógrafos
anarquistas, que divergió de la acrítica hagiografía del colonialismo y de los descubrimientos geográficos que
eran típicos de la ciencia europea durante la Edad del Imperio (1875‒1914).
 Plate 9. Le Mapa, Henri Coudreau’s unpublished map of Guiana given to Élisée Reclus in 1893 for the Nouvelle Géographie universelle (vol. 19, Hachette,
1894). 85 × 60 cm. Scale 1: 312,500. North is at the top. The map contains a wealth of detail about the physical geography of the part of the coast of Brazil
from the Amazon’s northern channel to the Carsevenne River that was being claimed by France. Bibliothèque de Genève, Département de Cartes et Plans,
tiroir Amérique latine—cartes partielles. (Reproduced with permission from the Bibliothèque de Genève.) See p. 232.
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