The cadastre is a technology for property survey and valuation, and in most European countries (in part due to the Napoleonic experience) it has become the standard practice for allocating property taxes among owners. Yet by 1800 no dominant view had emerged on how to conduct the cadastre in France. The paper studies seven projects sent to Napoleon between 1800 and 1802, which show conflicting interpretations on the role of animate and inanimate nature and its economic valuation. The view of modern experts ultimately prevailed (projects #5 & #7), who favored a cadastre based upon geometrical maps that (1) rendered the most accurate and impartial representation of inanimate nature and (2) permitted the uniformization of nature’s diversity by transforming its animate and especially inanimate components into commeasurable and taxable units/items.
The implications of this paper are twofold. First it reasserts the centrality of the French cadastre as the European blueprint for the valuation of nature (in particular inanimate nature) and second it provides a historical case to specify competing views on the role of nature in the transition to modernity. The paper thus contributes to the early history of the transformation of nature into a scientific and administrative object of economic value in modernity.
