France drops Mercator for Eckert IV after a UN vote the United States opposed

France will stop using the Mercator projection on official diplomatic maps and switch to Eckert IV, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on 4 September at "La Fabrique de la diplomatie" in Paris. The announcement came the same day the UN General Assembly adopted, by 164 votes to 1 with 6 abstentions, a resolution urging governments, schools, international organisations and technology firms to use maps that keep the relative size of continents. Togo and the African Union led the text. France co-sponsored it. The United States voted no.

Mercator, drawn by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for sea navigation, keeps compass bearings as straight lines. It does that by stretching land as latitude rises. Greenland looks almost as large as Africa. Africa is about fourteen times larger. North America, Russia and China gain visual weight. Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia lose it. Barrot said a map is never quite neutral and that those distortions settle into how people see power. "Changing maps obviously doesn't change the world," he said. "But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth."

The UN text points members toward Equal Earth, an equal-area projection published in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. Equal Earth keeps area and, as far as a flat map can, the shapes seen on a globe. France chose Eckert IV, an older equal-area oval, for its own ministry maps. The resolution is not binding. It does not ban Mercator. Navigators and some web tiles will keep it because rhumb lines still matter at sea and because changing a global tile set is expensive.

Google Maps has said nothing that suggests an immediate switch. A classroom can change a wall map in an afternoon. A phone map used by billions cannot. That gap is the practical limit of Friday's vote. The political limit is the American no. Washington's objection was not explained in detail in the open coverage. The visual effect of Equal Earth is to shrink the United States relative to Africa. That is a fact of geodesy. It is also a fact that some capitals did not want written into a UN resolution.

India, on a related cartographic fight the same weekend, said any UN equal-area world map must still show Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh according to India's official map. New Delhi voted for the 4 September text and then drew a boundary reservation. Maps that claim neutrality still carry borders. France's switch does not settle those lines. It changes how large the blocks look before the lines are drawn.

Barrot said French diplomacy should carry its own account of the world and represent it accurately. On a ministry briefing slide, France itself will look smaller than it did last week. So will Russia, Canada and the United States. Africa will look closer to the size it has on a globe. That is the whole of the policy. Whether teachers, newsrooms and map apps follow is outside the Quai d'Orsay's writ. The UN asked them to. One member state voted against being asked.