Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'armee francaise dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
Six variables ride on one figure - number of men, longitude, latitude, direction of march, date and temperature - because each is encoded in a property the band already has: width, position, colour and the ruled axis beneath it. Colour splits advance from retreat, so the reader is never told the direction; the black thread simply is the surviving army. The temperature panel shares the map's horizontal scale, which converts two separate datasets into one causal reading with no annotation. Pairing it with the Hannibal carte above turns a single case into a stated pattern about the cost of long marches.
Steal this when
Use this when the story is attrition through a sequence - a funnel, a hiring pipeline, a multi-stage migration, a cohort decaying over time - and the audience keeps discussing the stages in isolation. Drawing the survivors as one continuous narrowing band, with the suspected cause plotted on the same axis below, makes the leak and its driver impossible to discuss separately.
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