Built up areas and urban footprints in France, 1820s–1860s

Abstract

This dataset provides a nationwide geospatial inventory of buildings in nineteenth-century France, extracted from the historical État-Major maps produced by the French military cartographic services. The underlying maps were surveyed between 1825 and 1866 and subsequently updated through partial revisions until 1889. All mapped buildings have been vectorised and harmonised into a single, consistent dataset, allowing a large-scale analysis of settlement patterns, urbanisation, and spatial economic change during the nineteenth century.