After considerable retrospection, politicians and military officials came to believe that France had lost the disastrous Franco-Prussian war in part due to the inability of French soldiers and commanders to perform such simple tasks such as read a map. Through providing insufficient support for education, industry, and science, they believed that Napoleon III had not prepared the nation for the confrontation, and that the rapid, humiliating defeat caused by ‘l'ignorance des officiers français qui auraient été incapables à lire une carte d’étatmajor’ (Fierro, Dictionnaire 222). Regaining the nation's lost prestige required a critical self-examination and a change in how it viewed and understood itself. One way to address these weaknesses was to improve and reform education. The current system's creation of ‘dilettantes’ and ‘penseurs de salon’ did little to help the military defeat of its neighbour rival, so France needed to incorporate more science into its national curriculum. As part of this drive, geography, once marginalized as a subset of history, became a vital component to improving national security and throughout the Third Republic the nation introduced the discipline to school children on an unprecedented scale. Once very rare, by the start of the First World War maps appeared more frequently in textbooks, travel guides, newspapers, and official government documents.

It is under these circumstances that France witnessed the birth of the French map reader, whose rise can be attributed to many factors. First, the average Frenchman became better educated. As education minister from 1879 to 1881 and again from 1882 to 1883, Jules Ferry instituted major educational reforms.