PARIS, September 6 — Against this backdrop of renewed global scrutiny over colonial cartographies, France has become among the first countries to formally discard the Mercator projection from its national classrooms, a decision announced by the education ministry earlier this year that continues to reverberate in the corridors of European geographic institutions. The French education ministry declared on January 7, 2025, that the Mercator world map, a fixture of classrooms for generations, would be removed from school textbooks and teaching materials.
The ministry called the projection “distorted” and inaccurate, a verdict that follows sustained pressure from cartographers and educators who have long challenged its representational claims. The projection carries the name of Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish geographer who developed it in 1569.
Its original purpose was nautical navigation. The design preserves angles and shapes, allowing sailors to plot straight-line courses across the oceans. What is at stake in its continued use, critics argue, is not merely technical accuracy but the wider picture of how the world is perceived.
On a Mercator map, landmasses near the poles appear dramatically larger than they are, while those near the equator shrink. Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa, though Africa is actually about fourteen times larger.
Europe and North America loom larger than their true dimensions. Critics contend this perpetuates a Eurocentric worldview, diminishing the visual presence of equatorial regions where much of the world’s population resides.
Alternative Cartographies
The French ministry will promote equal-area projections instead, specifically naming the Gall–Peters projection as a replacement. This alternative accurately represents the relative sizes of continents, though like all projections, it involves trade-offs in other properties. The change will affect geography curricula in primary and secondary schools across France.
New guidelines are expected to take effect in the school year beginning September 2025. Some individual schools and districts elsewhere had already adopted alternative projections.
France’s move marks a national-level step that few countries have taken.
Debate Among the Mapmakers
The announcement has divided educators and cartographers. Supporters praise the shift toward more accurate and equitable representation. Others caution that no single projection serves all purposes perfectly; each involves choices about which properties to preserve and which to distort.
The ministry frames the decision as part of a broader effort to update teaching materials to reflect modern cartographic standards and to encourage critical thinking about maps. Students will be asked to consider not merely what maps show, but what they conceal.
What follows in France may test whether other national education systems reconsider their own cartographic conventions. The wider picture suggests a slow reexamination of tools once treated as neutral, now understood as carrying the assumptions of their makers.
