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With this rich book, presented in an elegant Italian format, Bjørn Berge, who has long dreamed of walking all over the world, invites us to a double journey in the room, in the quirks of history and of Geography.
With more than eighty titles, the Atlas collection from Autrement publishes for more than fifteen years a scholarly, synthetic and attractive approach to geography. There are both historical and geopolitical atlases, thematic or dedicated to a country or a region of the world. Those dedicated to slavery or colonization, for example, are unparalleled in the French-speaking editorial world.
Atlases ... otherwise
With books like Funny Planet, 99 Maps to See the World , and The Atlas of Countries That No longer Exist , published in November, the collection diversifies its approaches and proves to the general public as to the students and teachers to whom they are also intended, that the representation of a territory can be a matter of creativity both in form and in the issues addressed.
The second is the work of a history enthusiast, pedestrian explorer of the shores and collector of objects that the sea deposits there. Bjørn Berge is also an atypical philatelist since he has set himself the task of collecting a stamp from every state in the world. And it is from this project that it has come to him to tell the story of the disappeared countries.
His approach is that of a passionate more than a scientist. Some of the fifty countries he described, whose existence, sometimes very brief, was between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-1970s, enjoyed limited sovereignty, as Manchukuo in the pay of the Japanese Empire, or were set in cup set by totalitarian states, such as the Channel Islands under Nazi command in 1940, or were of pure and simple colonial dependencies, as the Spanish protectorate of Cape Juby, to the extreme south of Morocco today.
Beyond the cabinet of curiosities
Between philately, geographical evocation, historical anecdote or literary quote, the texts sometimes gain in poetry what they lose, for the uninitiated, in descriptive clarity. The book thus invites more to the rambling than to the study, although the bibliography at the end of the volume, and the suggestions of reading in each of the chapters, are as many invitations to continue the journey.
The first treaty country is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, created in 1816 following the Congress of Vienna, after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire. Gathering the great Italian island and the south of the Italian peninsula, it has Naples as capital and Bourbons for ruling dynasty. Irri- dered politically and socially, it is nonetheless a leading economic power in the Mediterranean. He collapsed with the Garibaldi expedition in 1860 before being attached to Italy the following year.
At the other end of the book is the state of Biafra. This short-lived secessionist republic of Nigeria, between the Niger Delta and the Cameroon border, has left behind only a name synonymous with famine amidst international rivalries for the exploitation of oil. On this point, read Bjørn Berge's novel Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Other Half of the Sun, which tells of the shocked fate of twin sisters in a war that, directly or indirectly, resulted in the death of two million people. people.
European wars and rivalries in the world
Many of these states recount, beyond the unusual names, propitious to dreams, the imperial and dictatorial nightmares of the century. Thus the Orange Free State, where white domination has tried to detach itself from all European tutelage, brings us back to the origins of the Boer War. On land that now belongs to South Africa, its logic of racial segregation has prepared that of apartheid.
The Republic of Tripolitania, which the author describes as the first Islamist republic in history, reminds us that the colonial campaign in Libya, still summarized today in the Italian-Turkish war of 1911-1912, is stretched over two decades, between massacres of the inhabitants and their cattle, concentration camps and genocidal desires.
As for Tierra del Fuego, where a gold digger, Julius Popper, thinks himself at the turn of the 1890s at the head of a real empire, it is the scene of a "great replacement", very real this one , which sees the indigenous populations disappear with gunshots and European epidemics. If "the self-proclaimed fuégien dictator" dies poisoned in 1893 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Chile debate for a century again the borders of the extreme South American, emptied of its inhabitants.
Behind the philatelist and the passionate traveler, Bjørn Berge hides perhaps a moralist who leaves little room for an exotic junk or a nostalgia of good quality. The stories that follow each other are all the more fascinating and, in this era of tourist consumption, they certainly offer us a new, sincere and delicate way of exploring our world.
► Bjørn Berge, Atlas of countries that no longer exist, 50 states that history has removed from the map (translated from Norwegian by Jean-Baptiste Coursaud and Sophie Jouffreau). Éditions Autrement, published November 2019. 24.90 euros.