A shrunken Africa, a Greenland and a northern Russia that seem to stretch into infinity: that is about to disappear from the maps used by French diplomacy.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced on Friday that his department is abandoning the so-called Mercator projection, which artificially enlarges polar regions and visually downplays the size of equatorial areas. France will now use instead the Eckert IV projection, which reflects the true proportions of the continents more accurately.
As a result, France will appear smaller on the map compared with countries close to the equator, just like the United States or Russia.
'A map is never entirely neutral'
In a speech at the Sorbonne university during the public event "La Fabrique de la diplomatie" or "The making of diplomacy", the French minister said that "the time has come" to "correct" how the world is perceived through maps inherited from 16th-century Western navigators.
