Cybergeo (Mar 2025)
Postal horse relays and roads in France, from the 17th to the 19th centuries
Abstract
The database presented here results from a collective work that involved researchers in geography, historical geography and geomatics over the last twenty years, focusing on one of the first rapid transportation and communication network created in France, the postal horse relay. The research's goals evolved through this period of time, as we will show in this paper, but were constantly based on the exploration of this database resulting from the digitalization of the relays in a geographical information system (GIS). It provides information allowing the modeling of the postal horse roads and their relays (where horses were changed) in a Historical GIS from 1632 to 1833, at seven different dates. Different datasets can be downloaded*: the location and the name of the postal relays and of the current commune** in which they are located in 1632, 1708, 1733, 1758, 1783, 1810 and 1833 (digitized from a 1632 historical map and from historical Post Books); the roads digitized in the GIS as the crow flies between two adjacent relays according to the historical sources, with different attributes (length in number of "posts", which was the historical count unit of the time, length in kilometers, estimation of the speed travel according to a model integrating the average slope and the evolution of horse speed during the two centuries); the population of the relays for 1600, 1700, 1750, 1780, 1809 and 1831 (when the information is available in historical sources); the historical boundaries of France in 1632, 1708, 1733, 1758, 1783, 1810 and 1833 (digitized from historical maps).*. [Online]. URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11196161**. The commune is the French name for the administrative level of municipalities.
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