Le Contesté franco-brésilien : enjeux et conséquences d'un conflit oublié entre la France et le Brésil.

The Map, the Name and the Territory

“…Throughout the 19th century, the French and the Brazilians claimed sovereignty over a vast expanse of 200,000 km 2 of savannas and forests located between the rivers Oyapock, considered to be the border limit by Brazil, and Araguari, considered to be the border limit by France. Taking advantage of the official absence of political authority, many adventurers then settled there, as well as runaway Brazilian slaves; subsequently, from 1894, wildcat gold miners who came from the Guianas and the West Indies following the discovery of a significant gold deposit in the region (Granger 2011). In 1895, a clash in the disputed zone between a French military detachment and a Brazilian militia caused about forty deaths, mostly civilians, in the small town of Mapá (Rouard de Card 1897).…”

“…Faced with this international scandal, France accepted the Brazilian proposal for Swiss arbitration to settle this border dispute definitively. In Bern, a French delegation that was little aware of the problem but passed on the maps and arguments drawn up by the geographer Vidal de La Blache, faced off against Brazilians led by the diplomat Rio Branco, armed with an impressive corpus of historical maps (Granger 2011). Rio Branco used place names as proof not only of the location of the disputed river, but also of the antiquity and prior history of the Brazilian settlement, whereas Vidal de La Blache, with a more traditional use of maps, stuck to geomorphological arguments alone (Mercier 2009).…”