Joseph de Ferraris

He was born on 20 April 1726 in Lunéville. Between 1771 and 1778, Ferraris was commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Joseph II to create a detailed Carte-de-Cabinet of the Austrian Netherlands. The maps were made on a scale 1:11,520, and formed a collection of 275 hand-coloured and hand-drawn maps 0,90 × 1,40 m each. These were accompanied by twelve volumes of handwritten commentaries relating to topics of economic and military interest (rivers, bridges, forests, possibilities for military camps, etc.). He died on 1 April 1814 in Vienna.

Three originals of the map remain. One is in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, one is in the Rijksarchief in The Hague, and the third one remains in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. The maps held in Brussels were the maps destined for Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine, the Governor of the Austrian Netherlands, and were transferred to Belgium by Austria in 1922 as part of the World War I reparations. The handover of the maps was a provision of Annexe II to Part VIII, Section II of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In 1777 and 1778, Ferraris issued a reduced version of the cabinet maps with a scale of 1:86,400 in 25 maps, issued for commercial sale ("carte marchande"). The Ferraris maps were used to a great extent during the military operations of the French Revolutionary Wars and during the Napoleonic Wars. When the French invaded in 1792–1793, they took 400 copies of the map from a Brussels printer and seller. In 1794, they took the engraving plates to France so they could produce more maps for their own use and to prevent any enemy from acquiring copies. Louis Capitaine, a French engineer, copied it and produced two versions: one with 69 sheets and a smaller-scale version on six sheets, which was sold commercially. During the Waterloo Campaign, the Duke of Wellington had a copy of the six-sheet version, as it is probable that Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher also had a copy of the six-sheet version. Napoleon carried a copy of the full-scale Capitaine map while Gourgaud, an aide-de-camp to Napoleon, carried a copy of the Ferraris map. Both versions were very similar and about 40 years out of date (for instance, coal mines with their supporting infrastructure, which had developed around Charleroi in the interval between the map's drafting and 1815, were missing).

Joseph de Ferraris was recorded at birth as Joseph Johann de Ferraris. His recorded language was French. He was the child of Graf Louis von Ferraris and Anne Thérèse de Saint-Rémy de Fontette. He married Henriette d'Ursel. One child is recorded: Marie Wilhelmine Ferraris.