France has abandoned the Mercator projection in its diplomatic maps, a decision that makes the country appear visually smaller on these cartographic representations. The change comes at a time when various voices have been criticizing the geographic distortions present in this type of projection.
The Mercator projection, used for centuries in navigation and widely adopted in schools and official documents, tends to exaggerate the size of territories located at higher latitudes, such as Europe and North America, while minimizing the size of tropical and equatorial regions, such as Africa.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has chosen to adopt maps that more realistically show the true size of the African continent, which in the Mercator projection appears with significantly reduced proportions compared to its actual area. This decision is part of a broader movement of reflection on the historical biases present in Western cartographic representations.
The change represents a symbolically significant shift in the way French diplomacy presents itself to the world, abandoning a projection that critics consider not only technically misleading, but also culturally biased in the way it represents power relations between different regions of the globe.
