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On the basis of its Declaration of the Rights of Man (26 August, 1789) the
Assembly founded the new régime and its constitution of equality before the law
and universal suffrage (the right to vote given to men, at least, without attention
paid to social class). Now that France was free, the Revolutionary Government set
out to make equality a reality by wholesale reform of French institutions, regulating
brotherhood and the relationships between French people ( liberté, egalité, frater-
nité ). Local dialects were banned in favor of French, a principle which remains
enshrined in the modern French constitution through the statement “the language
of the Republic is French.” Old regions were amalgamated and carved up into a
system of Departments ( départments ), roughly equivalent to counties in the UK or
the USA. (The Departments still survive as local administrative units; they have
been numbered alphabetically since 1860. The numbers act as their abbreviations
as the post- or zip-code in every French address and as the place of registration of
every French car as proclaimed until recently on its licence plates).
As an essential part of its program of administrative reforms, the Revolutionary
Government set out to make trade fair and uniform throughout the whole country
by constructing a unified system of money and measures. How could trade be fair
if the farmers who sold wheat to bakers in bushels bought bread back to eat in
bushels of a different (smaller) size? In 1790, under Charles Tallyrand (1758-1838)
and as part of the reforms, the National Assembly charged the Academy to design
a new system of units to define weights, measures and other units. The new meas-
urements were intended as a means for spreading enlightenment and fraternity
among all the French people. The Academy decided that the system should consist
of measuring units based on invariable quantities in nature. In the words of
Condorcet while introducing the meter to the Legislative Assembly, they would be
universal measures for all times and for all men.
People The Marquis of Condorcet (1743-1794)
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat (the Marquis de Condorcet) was a mathematician
who worked on the integral calculus and probability. Through his work on election statistics
and voting methods, he was the founder of the modern science of Sociology. He became
Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1774 and Secretary of the Legislative Assembly in
1791. He was a moderate who was arrested under orders by Robespierre in 1794, dying in
prison in mysterious circumstances a few days later, most likely by suicide.
The intention of using natural units like the meter was to replace the arbitrary
definitions. Some of the commonly-used units of length, for example, were defined
in terms of something that was not fixed or permanent, or was mostly unavailable
for comparison. Lengths based on the human body are obviously not well enough
defined to avoid argument - a merchant selling cloth could hire people with small
feet to measure length, so as to be able to claim that the cloth was as large a number
of feet long as he could get away with. If the units of length were defined in terms
of one particular man's thumb or feet, like the king's, he was unlikely to be available
to settle a dispute, so it did not really help when the inch or the foot (originally the width
of any thumb or the length of any foot) were replaced by the width of the king's
thumb or the king's foot. The French pouce (thumb) and pied-de-roi (foot-of-the-king)
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