Lattré’s Dedications to Franklin

Mary Pedley

Assistant Curator of Maps

What greater declaration can there be than naming a new nation? The “United States of America” made its first public appearance in Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence and remained there until the final version: “In Congress, July 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Maps similarly declare names and so enter the competition for the name that endures.

Another declaration on a map is its dedication, usually to a person either linked to the author or the work itself, often as an act of honor and homage. An early French map of the United States, published in Paris in 1784, was dedicated to Benjamin Franklin with a unique iconography in the title to match Franklin’s stature. The Carte des États- Unis de l’Amérique Suivant le Traité de Paix de 1783 Dediée et Presentée A S. Excellence Mr. Benjamin Franklin Ministre Plénipotentiaire des Etats-Unis de l’Amérique près la Court de France, anc[ien]. Présid[ent]. de la conventio[n] de Pensilvanie et de la Société Philosophique de Philadelphie &c &c Par son très humble et très obeissant Serviteur Lattré. 1784. (Map of the United States of America according to the Treaty of Peace of 1783. Dedicated and presented to his Excellency Mr. Benjamin Franklin, Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Court of France, former President of the convention of Pennsylvania and of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia By his very humble and very obedient Servant, Lattré.)

Detail from map of title cartouche.

Paris in 1784 buzzed with the news of the peace treaty negotiated between the victorious Americans and the defeated British, as the world watched a powerful nation lose her colonies. Benjamin Franklin was one of the chief negotiators of the treaty. Printer, essayist, scientist, and diplomat, Franklin had arrived in Paris in late 1776 to act as minister plenipotentiary for the fledgling United States, soon after the Declaration of Independence. Franklin was a popular figure in Paris, lionized by salon society, as contemporary prints show. He also pursued his scientific interests while there, attending meetings of the Académie des Sciences and continuing to conduct scientific experiments.

To find a Paris mapmaker paying his respects to Franklin and the young United States of America was no surprise. Jean Lattré (c. 1722?–1788) was a well-known and prolific engraver, printer, and mapseller, whose Carte des États-Unis de l’Amérique was designed to celebrate the connections between France and the United States and to pay homage to Franklin for his services both to his native country and to his hosts in France.

The map’s dedication, integral to the title, is displayed in a decorative cartouche in the form of a view of the foresail of a ship in full sail. Three seals incongruously hang amid the sails: one from the ship’s beam, that of the Society of the Cincinnati; another from the central mast, that of the United States of America; and the third of Benjamin Franklin himself, being hung from the beam by a sailor balancing precariously.

These three seals connect the subject matter of the map to its dedicatee, Benjamin Franklin, and to the French government. In the center, the seal of the United States commemorates the legitimization of the young country by the terms of the recently signed Treaty of Paris. The seal’s design is rooted in the deliberations over the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson had worked on a design of an earlier seal, which was not accepted by the Continental Congress. A later design was proposed by the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thomson, assisted by William Barton of Philadelphia. An eagle grasps the arrows of war and the olive branch of peace in its talons and holds the Latin motto of the United States in its beak: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Above the eagle, clouds surround thirteen stars, the thirteen original British colonies, now independent states. The design was adopted in 1782, and a die was cut from brass later that same year. Franklin had ordered another block to be cut in Paris for use on the published version of the Treaty of Paris. Franklin’s printer, Philippe-Denis Pierres, used the seal on the title pages of both the Constitutions des Treize Etats-unis de l’Amérique, and the Definitive treaty between Great Britain and the United States, both published in 1783 at Passy, on the west side of Paris, where Franklin lived. Franklin also used the seal for other official documents he issued as Minister Plenipotentiary. On the cartouche ship sail, the seal is repeated in faint outline imprinted on the flag billowing in the wind.

Until he had his own printing block of the official seal of the United States, Franklin had used his personal seal for identifying his own papers and books and as his official seal of office. This is the seal which the young sailor is hanging onto the yard. Franklin had devised this seal when he was a printer’s apprentice in Boston, designing his blazon in imitation of a coat of arms he had found associated with an English Franklin family. The arms comprise a pike’s head facing upward, two lion’s heads facing to their right, and a diagonal cross bar with two martins on either side of a dolphin. Such crests were usually associated with landed gentry and nobility, not men of the lower social orders like Franklin, but he justified the creation of his seal: “The first thing requisite in an almanac-writer is, that he should be descended of a great family and bear a coat of arms, this gives luster and authority to what a man writes, and makes the common people believe, that certainly this is a great man.”

The third seal on Carte des Etats-Unis is that of the Society of the Cincinnati, a group that honors the participation of the French army and navy in the War of American Independence. The society was founded in May 1783, with George Washington as its first president. Named in honor of the ancient Roman farmer turned patriot, who twice abandoned his plow to take up arms in defense of his country and returned to the fields after each war was over, the society was open to the officers of the Continental (American) Army and their French counterparts, in order “to perpetuate the memory of the revolution and their mutual devotion to it” by aiding the officers according to the three principles of financial, fraternal, and patriotic support. The society’s seal was designed by Pierre Charles l’Enfant, a member of the original society and the architect who laid out the city of Washington, D.C. It consists of an eagle with wings slightly spread and a roundel on its chest, in which Cincinnatus is depicted with his plow, and the name of the society written in Latin and its foundation date around the edge of the circle. The seal, also known as an “eagle,” was first manufactured sometime between December 1783 and April 1784 by the Paris goldsmiths Duval and Francastel. Lattré’s depiction of the seal on this map must be a very early representation of it in print.

Franklin himself felt a certain ambivalence about the Society of the Cincinnati, as he was concerned, rightly, that it would become a hereditary society rather than merely honoring the courage and patriotism of the participants in the war. Critics of the society accused it of creating an aristocracy in a country that valued liberty and equality. Franklin expressed this view privately, and supported the pamphlet describing these concerns by the Comte de Mirabeau.

Benjamin Franklin (1709-1790) was an immensely popular ambassador for the fledgling United States. His presence in Paris elicited the delirium today afforded to modern celebrities. He had visited Paris on earlier occasions, but arrived as a minister plenipotentiary in 1777 to encourage French participation in the war as an ally of the young republic and to act as the diplomatic face of the new United States. His success may be measured in the French provision of military support by land and sea to the Continental Army and financial support to a county whose trade was cut off from its colonial mother.

While Franklin worked tirelessly for the cause of the United States, he also found time and energy to pursue his scientific interests, making presentations to the Académie des Sciences, and doing his own bit of mapmaking. His ideas about the Gulf Stream were visualized by the Paris geographer Georges Le Rouge in a map of the ocean river (Maps 8-M-1770 Re).

Nothing in the voluminous Benjamin Franklin papers connects him with Jean Lattré, the publisher of the map. Although the title of the map says “dedicated and presented” to Franklin, no record of Lattré’s presentation has been recovered. Nonetheless, Franklin’s acquaintance with the circle of printers in Paris, his interest in mapmaking and acquaintance with Le Rouge could easily have included an introduction to Jean Lattré who, like Le Rouge, had an interest in the current events of the War of American Independence and in placing these events on maps. Lattré was an eminent engraver: graveur ordinaire du roi; graveur ordinaire de monseigneur le Dauphin (1767) and graveur ordinaire de monseigneur le duc d’Orléans et de la Ville [de Paris] (1771). He was eager to meet the demand for maps of the war and advertised English maps, imported from London, “relative to the present war in North America.” He was in regular touch with London mapmakers; his letters to William Faden during the War of American Independence, now in the Clements Library (Jefferys and Faden Collection) testify to his interest in the ongoing war. In 1777, he ordered the John Mitchell map of the British Empire, maps of the theater of war, of Canada, of the province of New York, of the area around Philadelphia, and of specific military operations. His map of the newly minted United States with its side panels of events was published as an aide-mémoire for up-to-date journalism.

The map’s publication in 1784, the year before Franklin’s departure in July 1785 from France to return to the United States and in the year of the formal ratification of the peace treaty between the United States and England, serves as an homage to the one man who successfully represented the alliance between France and the young nation. With his dedication to Franklin and the innovative display of the three seals, Lattré summarized and glorified the extraordinary victories of the War of American Independence.