Reconstructing a Surveyor's Work:

Cartographer R. Schouany's Survey of the Piedmont Region, 1805-9

     
A Compiled Map Upon Which Schouany
Was To Improve: Bacler d'Albe's
Carte général du théâtre
    de la guerre, 1792 

                                      
   Field Sketchbook                                                                  Small Sketch Maps


                                                      
 Regional Compilations                                                           Drawing Out And      
                                                                                                   Filling In The Map


 
              Explaining An Absence          

The Purpose of the Assignment

Between 1805 and 1809 Rodolphe Schouany worked on producing a military reconnaissance of the Piedmont region. This map was designed to correct and replace a map in 52 sheets of all of Italy produced by Bacler d’Albe in 1802 from sources available in Turin and Paris. The purpose of Schouany’s map was to help understand the movements of Generals Massena, Menard, and Napoleon in the region of Montenotte, Monte Legino and Altare and to provide a smaller scale cartographic setting of the scene for the much more detailed 1:10,000 maps of the battlefields and for the landscape views of the battles.

The Man for the Job

Schouany was the ideal choice for this job. He had both extensive military and mapping experience. He had taken part in eight campaigns as a military man and in six as a cartographer including mapping in the Pyrenees, Italy, Egypt, and Bavaria.[i] He had, in fact, served in the Italian campaign that Napoleon was memorializing with the 1:10,000 series and with Schouany’s own military reconnaissance map. Consequently, he had first-hand knowledge of the movement of the armies. In both Egypt (1798-1802) and Bavaria (1803-1805) he was assigned the task of rapid military surveying using the minimum of equipment. Of his work in Egypt he wrote:

All of that work can only be regarded as military reconnaissances and as such they are, I think, all that they could be. As is clear from what is written here below, I had very little means with which to operate and to observe. With the exception of the reconnaissance from Menouf to Tenta, etc. (17^th reconnaissance) where I had a detachment under my orders, all the others were carried out on the run, that is to say while following the forces who marche 10, 12 and 14 hours a day. From that, there were many sections that I travelled through at night or that only saw from a distance…[ii]

In carrying out this mapping in Egypt and Bavaria, Schouany walked or rode hundreds if not thousands of kilometers. It is clear from his time in Italy that he preferred to walk and generally refused to ride.[iii] In Egypt alone, according to his reports to his superiors, Schouany covered 3,240 kilometers.[iv] In 1808, a year before his work on the Italian reconnaissance ended, Schouany declared that he had mapped 224 ¾ leagues (roughly 1079 kilometers) and still had 521 kilometers to map. This figure would not include wasted trips, such as repeatedly climbing mountains to get a view unobstructed by fog. The number of men who had the skill, the will and the physical strength to carry out such work must have been limited.

A Sense of the Man

Schouany was 46 when he started working on the Italian reconnaissance. We know that he had a wife (Marie-Catherine Nourry, the daughter of a painter, Jean-Jacques) and a daughter in Paris and that he was devoted to his daughter. There is some hint in his personal dossier that when he was in Egypt he may have been financially neglectful of his family. But we have no idea why this might have been the case as it is only hinted at in one document. We know that he had a speech impediment of some sort that made it hard for him to command or indeed to communicate with locals in the course of information gathering. And it is very clear from his correspondence that his knowledge of French orthography and grammar was poor.

Perhaps in deference to his father who was Swiss, he volunteered as a rifleman in the Régiment of the Swiss Guards from July 1774 to March 1779. For a time after leaving the Swiss Guards, he worked in an architectural office and then entered the école d’architecture. He then seems to have returned to the military serving as a dragoon (a heavily armed trooper) in the regiment of Penthièvre from 1785 to 1786. He was working as a copperplate engraver from 1786 to 1789 when he married his wife. He then served in the National Guard. He was briefly imprisoned in Luxemberg and subsequently worked as a schoolteacher. By 1794 he was employed as a geographic engineer at the Dépôt de la guerre, the central bureau for the army’s topographic activities and was sent as a geographical engineer to the army of the Pyrénées Orientales with the rank of cavalry captain for a short time in 1795. There he worked under the direction of two mathematical geographers, Puissant and Lomet. He was sent to the army of Italy again as a geographical engineer with the rank of cavalry lieutenant from 1796 to 1798 and was sent again as a geographical engineer to the army of the Orient from 1798 to 1802. In Egypt he was promoted by General Kleber to the rank of chef d’escadron (company commander). Sometime after the return of the forces from Egypt, he was again attached to the Dépôt de la guerre in Paris briefly before being sent out to the topographic bureau of the Carte de Bavière from 1803 to 1805. His efforts on the Italian reconnaissance map, under consideration here, were carried out from 1805 to 1809 in Piedmont. He was transferred to the topographic office in Bavaria again in 1809 but does not appear to have taken up that post, dying in Paris in October of 1809.

The Life of a Surveyor

The nature and flavour of a surveyor’s life can only be gleaned from tangential remarks in official correspondence. We know that surveyors often had a servant and that they might be allowed to travel with a dog (which in Schouany’s case was shipped to him from Paris).[v] We know that they had small allowances for housing as they travelled through the countryside but that they had to seek permission on a regular basis to be housed outside of military barracks. They were expected to check in with local authorities and one has a sense that this was both to keep the peace with local authorities and to assist the military in keeping track of the surveyors. Their primary means of staying in touch with family and friends would have been through correspondence, which might be highly variable depending on the local political conditions, how much they moved around and on their distance from a post office. They might also receive newspapers through the post, if they were willing to pay the subscription fees.[vi] Leave to go home for a visit seems to have been granted rarely as any time not spent in the field collecting data was supposed to be devoted to the compilation and production of the final map. Thus for many of the military surveyors who served during the Napoleonic wars participation in home and family life seems not to have been a possibility.[vii] Most of the surveyors worked under considerable time pressure, which did not always recognize the demanding nature of their work. Delays might result from personal illness (often brought on by poor quality food, water and housing), inadequate equipment and supplies, lost or delayed orders and poor weather including snow, fog and rain. For the most part, surveyors and their commanders were expected to work through illness and pain, retiring to bed in their rented lodgings only as a last resort. Work must have been highly cooperative as the instructions to the surveyors presupposed considerable knowledge of their art and were at a level of generalization that allowed the surveyors some latitude in establishing their own procedures, schedules and work plans, though this depended on rank and experience[viii]. Their livelihood was a demanding and at times dangerous one. Military surveyors were often understood as particularly threatening by local communities, both because they represented the intrusion of a foreign power in the daily lives of locals and because they represented distant state power (the source of conscription and taxation). Nevertheless, their commitment to the job and willingness to place themselves in danger was not rewarded with a pension (until January 1809) and the amount paid to a widow very much depended on the circumstances of the death and was in any case sadly inadequate to support a family or even a widow. Sometimes, to rectify this, surveyors were asked to contribute to a fund to support the widow of a colleague.[ix] The difficulty of the life of the surveyor is perhaps best captured by Brossier, the officer in charge of the Topographic Office for the Map of Italy and thus the man on the ground responsible for all the topographical engineers in Italy:

During 7 or 8 months of the year they have to put up with the infinite demands necessary to complete the [field] work confided to them. During the four or five other months they have to work almost always more than 8 hours a day in the office. That is how they pass their existence. It is certain that in neither the army, nor in civilian life is there a more difficult service.

Physically the result is that their strength is quickly exhausted, such that after 12 or 15 campaigns a geographical engineer of 34 to 35 years has already aged and too soon develops the elements of infirmities that come with age. This happens at precisely the moment when, formed by his earlier studies and by the experience that he has acquired, he would be able to render the most useful services both in terrain measurement and following the army.

Morally, if disgust does not positively result from this perpetual tension, it would be difficult to avoid some diminution in zeal. This is often slight, but is nevertheless more or less real. From there, there is regret over the chosen career and then attempts to change it so as to diminish  fatigue and prolong life.[x]

The Puzzles

In the archives at the Service historique de l'Armee de terre, Vincennes, there are numerous maps, sketches and documents associated with Schouany's mapping activities. The relationship between these various documents and the fate of the map that Schouany was working on have been hitherto unclear. The following pages of this atlas will elucidate these questions.