Léopold Manen

Eugène Hyppolyte Léopold Marie Manen (30 July 1829, Toulouse – 21 May 1897, Paris) was a French naval hydrographer and cartographer who rose to ingénieur en chef de la Marine and headed the French Navy’s Hydrography Service. Trained at the École polytechnique (entered 1849; hydrographic engineer, 1851), he first served in the Mediterranean and then in the Black Sea during the Crimean War, surveying the approaches to Sevastopol, Kertch, and Kinburn and preparing a Bosporus chart.

From 1859 he was posted to the Far East mission; promoted sous-ingénieur de 1re classe in 1860, he worked along the coasts of China and Indochina through 1864, producing the first systematic French atlas-level surveys of ​“Basse-Cochinchine.” In 1865 he joined the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine as director for the China Seas and Indochina section. His fieldwork and office leadership framed the earliest official mapping of the Mekong Delta; among the outputs were the Saigon-printed Description des côtes et des rivières de la Cochinchine (with F. Vidalin and G. Héraud, 1865) and the Carte générale de la Basse Cochinchine et du Cambodge [Overview Map of Low Cochinchina and Cambodia] (1867).

After returning to France he conducted multi-season surveys of the Gironde estuary (from 1868, continuing through the 1870s), served on the Paris siege staff in 1870 – 71, and later led the Tunisian hydrographic mission (1882 – 86) aboard Linois and La Provençale, work for which the Académie des sciences awarded a prize in 1885. He was elected a corresponding member of the Académie in 1892 and belonged to the Bureau des longitudes; he retired in 1894. [from Ruderman Rare Maps biographical notice].

The prospections and plans by Manen and his collaborators at Service hydrographique de la marine were later exploited by the French Army Service géographique de l’armée, initiated in 1886 in Hanoi as ​”Bureau topographique des troupes” [Infantry Tographic Bureau]. For a history of the genesis of the French colonial cartography, see the notice in Brebion & Cabaton, Dictionnaire de bio-biobliographie ancienne et moderne, Paris, SEGMC, 1935: 349 – 350.