- Guedj, Denis.
Le mètre du monde.
Paris: Seuil, 2000.
ISBN 2-02-049989-4.
-
When thinking about management lessons one can learn
from the French Revolution, I sometimes wonder if Louis
XVI, sometime in the interval between when the Revolution
lost its mind and he lost his head, ever thought, “Memo
to file: when running a country seething with discontent,
it's a really poor idea to invite people to
compile lists of things they detest about the current
regime.” Yet, that's exactly what he did in
1788, soliciting
cahiers de doléances
(literally, “notebooks of complaints”) to
be presented to the Estates-General when it met in
May of 1789. There were many, many things about
which to complain in the latter years of the
Ancien Régime, but one which appeared on
almost every one of the lists was the lack of
uniformity in weights and measures. Not only was
there a bewildering multitude of different measures
in use (around 2000 in France alone), but the
value of measures with the same name differed from
one region to another, a legacy of feudal days when
one of the rights of the lord was to define the weights
and measures in his fiefdom. How far is “three leagues
down the road?” Well, that depends on what
you mean by “league”, which was almost 40%
longer in Provence than in Paris. The most common unit
of weight, the
“livre”,
had more than two hundred different definitions
across the country. And if that weren't bad enough,
unscrupulous merchants and tax collectors would exploit
the differences and lack of standards to cheat those
bewildered by the complexity.
Revolutions, and the French Revolution in particular,
have a way of going far beyond the intentions of those
who launch them. The multitudes who pleaded for
uniformity in weights and measures almost unanimously
intended, and would have been entirely satisfied with,
a standardisation of the values of the commonly used
measures of length, weight, volume, and area. But
perpetuating these relics of tyranny was an affront to
the revolutionary spirit of remaking the world, and
faced with a series of successive decisions, the
revolutionary assembly chose the most ambitious and
least grounded in the past on each occasion: to entirely
replace all measures in use with entirely new ones,
to use identical measures for every
purpose (traditional measures used different units
depending upon what was being measured), to abandon
historical subdivisions of units in favour of a purely
decimal system, and to ground all of the units in quantities
based in nature and capable of being determined by anybody
at any time, given only the definition.
Thus was the metric system born, and seldom have so many
eminent figures been involved in what many might consider
an arcane sideshow to revolution: Concordet, Coulomb,
Lavoisier, Laplace, Talleyrand, Bailly, Delambre, Cassini,
Legendre, Lagrange, and more. The fundamental unit, the
metre, was defined in terms of the Earth's meridian,
and since earlier measures failed to meet the standard
of revolutionary perfection, a project was launched to
measure the meridian through the Paris Observatory from
Dunkirk to Barcelona. Imagine trying to make a precision
measurement over such a distance as revolution, terror,
hyper-inflation, counter-revolution, and war between
France and Spain raged all around the
savants and their
surveying instruments. So long and fraught with misadventures
was the process of creating the metric system that while the
original decree ordering its development was signed
by Louis XVI, it was officially adopted only a
few months before Napoleon took power in 1799. Yet
despite all of these difficulties and misadventures, the
final measure of the meridian accepted in 1799 differed
from the best modern measurements by only about ten metres
over a baseline of more than 1000 kilometres.
This book tells the story of the metric system and the
measurement of the meridian upon which it was based,
against the background of revolutionary France. The author
pulls no punches in discussing technical detail—again
and again, just when you expect he's going to gloss over
something, you turn the page or read a footnote and there
it is. Writing for a largely French audience, the
author may assume the reader better acquainted
with the chronology, people, and events of the Revolution
than readers hailing from other lands are likely to be; the
chronology at the end of the book is an excellent resource
when you forget what happened when. There is no index.
This seems to be one of those odd cultural things; I've
found French books whose counterparts published in
English would almost certainly be indexed to frequently lack this
valuable attribute—I have no idea why this is the case.
One of the many fascinating factoids I gleaned from this book is that
the country with the longest continuous use of the metric system is
not France! Napoleon replaced the metric system with the mesures usuelles in 1812, redefining the
traditional measures in terms of metric base units. The metric system
was not reestablished in France until 1840, by which time Belgium,
Holland, and Luxembourg had already adopted it.
April 2007 