Cartographies of Region and Empire: Scaling Le tour de la France par deux enfants (and its Afterlives)

Augustine Fouillee's (alias G. Bruno's) Le tour de la France par deux enfants, a children's geography textbook initially published in 1877, has long been considered a nation-building tool in the Third Republic. This essay draws on critical approaches to cartography in order to show how the contradictory modes of mapping throughout the Tour can clarify its generic complexity. Such forms of spatial knowledge would take on new resonances through the book's travels, adaptations, and remediations in a colonial context, from Indochina to French West Africa. Tracing these migrations offers a dialectical, transnational approach to the spatial analysis of literary narrative.