Marguerite Silvestre entered the still rather small family of historians of maps and mapping already somewhat advanced in age, in the early 1990s. Before then, she was a history and geography teacher in the Comoros (Comoro Islands), where the first of her three children was born. After her return to Belgium, she worked as a social historian in the Centre de sociologie urbaine et rurale in the Section d’analyse culturelle at the French-speaking University of Louvain-la-Neuve (Centre of urban and rural sociology, Section of cultural analysis).
Marguerite Silvestre at the BIMCC conference at the Royal Library of Belgium, 10 December 2016. (Photo by Paul De Candt.)
In 1991, Marguerite was hired by the National Centre for the History of Sciences, located in the Map Room of the Royal Library of Belgium, to work on the inventory of the maps produced by the well-known Belgian geographer and cartographer Philippe Vandermaelen (1795–1869). The Royal Library had received part of the collection from its creator during his lifetime and had acquired the rest at the public auction of his belongings after his demise and the closing of his Établissement géographique de Bruxelles.
Philippe Vandermaelen would remain Marguerite’s main research topic for more than twenty-five years. At first she was one of four, later two, collaborators working towards the publication of the first volumes of the inventory. From 2014 onwards, however, she was the sole editor of the remaining volumes in the series: Inventaire raisonné des collections cartographiques Vandermaelen conservées à la Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, 7 vols. (Brussels, 1994–2016).
A particular mention deserves to be made here of the prosopography of the Établissement’s personnel and collaborators published in 2014 as well as the biography of Vandermaelen that completed the series in 2016: Autour de Philippe Vandermaelen: Répertoire biographique des collaborateurs de l’Établissement géographique de Bruxelles et de l’École Normale (Brussels, 2014) (reviewed in Imago Mundi 68:1, 2016, by Gilles Palsky); and Philippe Vandermaelen, Mercator de la jeune Belgique: histoire de l’Établissement géographique de Bruxelles et de son fondateur (Brussels, 2016) (reviewed in Imago Mundi 70:1, 2018, also by Gilles Palsky). Both were written by Marguerite in a most readable way.
Beside the Établissement géographique of Philippe Vandermaelen, although very much related to it, Marguerite studied the topography of Brussels in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2000, together with her colleague and life-long friend Michel Fincœur, she mounted the successful exhibition on the vaulting of the Senne River in Brussels in the second half of the nineteenth century. The exhibition catalogue, Bruxelles et le voûtement de la Senne (Brussels, 2000), has become a reference for the subject. Then from 2004 to 2007 she coordinated a historical study on urbanism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brussels, which ten years later resulted in the publication of a richly illustrated book: Michel De Beule, Benoît Périlleux, Marguerite Silvestre et al., Bruxelles. Histoire de planifier: urbanisme au 19e et 20e siècles (Brussels, 2017).
In 2016, Marguerite retired as map curator from the Royal Library of Belgium, but she continued her research and worked as a volunteer for the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Her last contribution must be her article on Philippe Vandermaelen and his Établissement géographique, which she prepared for volume 5 of The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming).
Marguerite passed away much too early, only a few months before her 71st birthday, after a long and tenacious fight against cancer.