France drops Mercator on diplomatic maps after a UN vote of 164 to 1

France's foreign ministry will stop using the Mercator projection on its diplomatic maps, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said in Paris on 4 September, the same day the UN General Assembly asked governments and international organisations to favour maps that keep the true area of continents.

The Assembly vote was 164 in favour, one against, six abstentions. Togo and the African Union wrote the text. France co-sponsored it. The United States voted no. The resolution is not binding and does not ban Mercator. It tells schools, UN agencies, governments and technology companies to use Equal Earth and other equal-area projections when the point of the map is to compare size.

Barrot spoke at the Sorbonne during an event titled La Fabrique de la diplomatie. A map, he said, is never quite neutral. On Mercator, land near the poles swells. North America looks larger than it is. The United States, Russia and China take more of the sheet than Africa, Latin America or South-East Asia. Greenland appears almost as large as Africa. Africa is about fourteen times larger.

The ministry will switch to projections chosen for the job, closer to real surface area and in line with what cartographers already recommend. French briefing notes have named Eckert IV as the working diplomatic projection. Equal Earth, drawn in 2018, is the projection named in the UN text.

A 1569 tool used as a classroom wall

Gerardus Mercator published his projection in 1569 so that a constant compass bearing would be a straight line. That property still makes it the right chart for some marine and aviation work. It is the wrong chart for a political atlas, because area is not preserved. A country at 60 degrees north is drawn far larger than the same land at the equator.

The Quai d'Orsay started cutting Mercator use in 2021. Barrot's announcement closes that process for official diplomatic graphics. Classroom walls, news graphics and web map tiles are a different market. Google, Apple and most school publishers still default to Web Mercator because it tiles cleanly. The UN text asks those firms to change the default where scale is the point. It cannot force them.

France itself will look smaller on the new sheets, as will the United States and Russia. Africa, Latin America and South Asia will look larger. That is the political content of a technical choice. African governments have argued for years that a sixteenth-century navigation tool has trained two generations to see the continent as a residual shape.

What a resolution cannot do

A General Assembly text does not rewrite atlas contracts. It does give cover to any education ministry or UN office that wants to change a template. It also gives Washington a recorded dissent. The US no vote was not explained at length in the first reports. The practical American objection is familiar: Mercator remains useful, and a UN preference list can slide into a political test.

Barrot's line was narrower. French diplomacy, he said, should carry its own account of the world and represent that world accurately. The first test is internal. If the next official map of a Sahel deployment or an Indo-Pacific tour still uses a Mercator base, the announcement was a speech. If the base has changed, the 164-1 vote has one government that already acted on it.