France drops Mercator as the UN votes 164-1 for equal-area world maps

France's foreign ministry will stop using the Mercator projection on its diplomatic maps. Jean-Noël Barrot announced the change on 4 September at a Sorbonne event the Quai d'Orsay billed as La Fabrique de la diplomatie. The ministry will switch to projections that keep land area in scale, with Eckert IV named as the working replacement for many uses. The process started quietly in 2021. Barrot made it official in the same week the UN General Assembly voted on the same argument.

The Assembly resolution, written by Togo and the African Union and co-sponsored by France, passed on 4 September with 164 votes in favour. The United States voted against. Six states abstained. The text does not ban Mercator. It asks governments, schools, international organisations and technology firms to adopt Equal Earth and other equal-area maps wherever the relative size of continents is the point of the picture. Equal Earth, which cartographer Bojan Šavrič has described as keeping area true while holding shapes as close to a globe as a flat map can, is the projection the resolution names.

Mercator, drawn by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for sailors, keeps compass bearings as straight lines. That property is why it still belongs on a chart table. It also inflates land as latitude rises. Greenland looks like a peer of Africa. Africa is about fourteen times larger. North America, Russia and, in some framings, China occupy more of the eye than the equatorial belt. Barrot put that distortion in institutional language. "A map is never entirely neutral," he said. "The United States, Russia and China take on a disproportionate visual importance compared with Africa, Latin America or South-East Asia. Greenland seems almost as vast as Africa. The distortions settle into perceptions. The moment has come to correct them."

France itself shrinks on an Eckert IV sheet, as do other high-latitude states. That is the cost of the argument Barrot is making. A foreign ministry that wants Africa to look its size has to accept that metropolitan France will look smaller on the same wall. Diplomats at the Quai say the swap will not happen on every product overnight. Navigation tools and some technical plates can keep Mercator where rhumb lines are the requirement. Political maps, textbooks the ministry funds, and the slides that go to the Assembly are the first targets.

The African Union has pushed this case for years. Schoolroom Mercator is, in that telling, a quiet tutor of hierarchy: a continent of 1.4 billion people drawn as a residual south of Europe. The Assembly vote does not force Apple, Google or a provincial education board to change a default basemap. It gives ministers a text to wave when they ask those firms and boards to do so. Whether Silicon Valley alters the projection that sits under a billion phones is a separate negotiation. The 164-1 tally is what that negotiation now starts from.

Cartographers have said the same thing in quieter rooms for decades. Every flat map lies about something. Mercator lies about area to tell the truth about direction. Equal Earth and Eckert IV lie about direction and shape to tell the truth about area. Choosing one is a statement about which lie a state is willing to print. France has now said, in public, that area is the lie it will no longer put on a diplomatic brief.

The United States' no vote will be read in two ways. One is technical: Washington still treats Mercator as the default for a large share of official mapping and does not want the Assembly to set software policy. The other is political: a resolution born in Lomé and Addis Ababa, co-owned by Paris, is easy to frame in Washington as a gesture. Neither reading changes the count in the hall.

What a reader can take from the week is concrete. French diplomatic maps are moving off Mercator. The Assembly has a non-binding text that names Equal Earth. Africa's area is 30.4 million square kilometres. Greenland's is 2.2 million. Any map that makes them look similar is doing a job other than measuring land. Paris has decided that job no longer belongs on the ministry wall.