A quirky reissue of what may be the first printed representation of New Orleans, presenting the infant settlement as a flourishing and heavily fortified center of French power.

The print is a re-engraving of a composition first published around 1720, only a few years after the foundation of New Orleans. As with the original, the re-engraving gives a sweeping view of the northern Gulf Coast, extending from the Mississippi River to Florida’s panhandle.

The engraver has however reversed the image, placing west to the right and east to the left: thus, the Mississippi lies at the far right, while at far let are Florida’s Chochtawhatchee Bay (“Baye de Ste. Rose”), Fort San Carlos (“Charles Fort”), and Apalachicola River (“Riviere du St. Esprit”). Likewise New Orleans is incorrectly on the west bank of the Mississippi (Further confusing matters, the image sandwiches Lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain between the city and the river.)

New Orleans is represented as an imposing European stronghold, enclosed by massive stone walls and laid out around a monumental church and other substantial buildings. In reality, at the time of the original composition it consisted of little more than a handful of rough structures in an precarious setting along a flood-prone river Extending the illusion, “the multiple ships cruising in the Gulf of Mexico and the Native American forts and villages scattered in the background recalled that “the Mississippi” had been integrated within the French Empire.” (Vidal, p. 94)

The misrepresentation may have been deliberate, perpretrated not with an eye toward providing an accurate record of Louisiana, but rather to promoting it as a secure, populous and commercially promising extension of France. On this reading, the view’s importance lies less in the accuracy of its topography than in the vision it offers of French ambition in the Mississippi Valley.

Publication history
The first edition of the print print was engraved in Paris by Jacques Chéreau (1688-1776) and is typically dated by cataloguers to around 1720, though Tooley’s Dictionary of Mapmakers dates it without explanation to 1740. The second edition offered here was engraved on a new plate by “Basset”, likely André Basset (fl. 1750-1787) or his son Paul-André (fl. 1755-1839). As mentioned above, it follows closely the Chéreau print but reverses the composition, placing the Mississippi and New Orleans at right rather than left. There are at least two known variants of this Basset edition: one, as here, with the Basset imprint partially obscured by the engraved lines representing the Gulf of Mexico; the other with both the engraved lines and the lettering of the imprint largely burnished away.

Like the first edition, this second edition is undated. Historic New Orleans dates its example to “between 1750 and 1785”, while the Library of Congress Geographicus tentatively dates its impression to the 1770s. Either seems plausible: renewed publication of the image during either the Seven Years or Revolutionary War era would have been a timely reflection of revived public interest in North America and in the history of French territorial ambitions there.

In all, a rare survival of French popular printmaking and colonial propaganda, combining one of the earliest printed representations of New Orleans with a powerful message about French imperial ambition in Louisiana.

Rarity and references
Impressions of this Basset edition are held by the Library of Congress and the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Marseilles). Historic New Orleans holds a variant of the Basset, with the imprint partially burnished out.

Alfred E. Lemmon, John T. Magill and Jason R. Wiese, eds., Charting Louisiana (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003), p. 71 (fig. 28). Cécile Vidal, Caribbean New Orleans[:] Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), pp. 94-95, p. 96 (illus.).