The Société de Géographie (French:[sɔsjetedəʒeɔgʁafi]; lit.'"Geography Society"'), is the world's oldest geographical society. It was founded in 1821 as the first Geographic Society.[1] Since 1878, its headquarters have been at 184 Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris. The entrance is marked by two gigantic caryatids representing Land and Sea. It was here, in 1879, that the construction of the Panama Canal was decided.
Although the Society rarely funded scientific travel, by issuing instructions to voyagers, encouraging research through competitions, and publishing the results of their work, it served in its early years as "an important institutional support" for the study of Mesoamerica. Two members in the "active core" of the society played central roles in this regard: Jomard and the Irish exile and former United States consul David Ballie Warden.[2] Their terms for a competition for the best new work on "American antiquities", including maps "constructed according to exact methods" and "observations on the mores and customs of the indigenous peoples, and vocabularies of the ancient languages."[3] extended decades-old scientific practices to a new field of anthropological inquiry.[2]
The society was to be associated in time with the greatest French and foreign explorers from René Caillié, the first European to return alive from the town of Timbuktu, to the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, and leading geographers, among them Vidal de la Blache, founder of the French School of Geopolitics.[4]
The Society was the location of the Arab Congress of 1913, which took place from June 18 to June 23 of that year and marked the confluence of events surrounding the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the beginnings of Arab nationalism, and early Arab reaction to Zionist immigration to Palestine.
Publications
The Society's revue has appeared monthly since 1822, as Bulletin de la Société de Géographie (1822–1899) – offering in octavo format early news of all the discoveries of the nineteenth century – or quarterly, as La Géographie, with a break from 1940 until 1946. Since 1947 the Society's magazine has appeared three times a year, as Acta Geographica.
The Society's library, map collection and photograph collection are among the world's deepest and most comprehensive.
^Other geographic societies were soon founded: Berlin (1828), London (1830), Frankfort (1836), St. Petersburg (1845), New York (1852), Vienna (1856), Geneva (1858), Mexico City (1859).
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