Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
this was merely discomfort; as they traveled through the border country they risked
their lives to marauding bands of renegades and patriots. Nevertheless Méchain
worked through the arc from Perpignan towards Barcelona, and by the end of
1792 he was established in a fortress location on the hill of Montjuïc (in French
Mont-Jouy), overlooking Barcelona, where he decided to stay to make measure-
ments of the latitude his most southern station of the Meridian survey. By accident
on 10 January, 1793 he discovered a new comet; he explained he wasn't looking
for it lest anyone think that he had been diverted from the main purpose of the
observations.
Comets are thought by the superstitious to be harbingers of wars, famine and the
death of kings. On 21 January, 1793 Louis XVI was executed, war between France
and Spain followed, and France was plunged deeper into economic chaos.
Places
Montjuïc
The hill of Montjuïc (428 m high) was fortified in the eleventh century to protect the port
of Barcelona. The present Castillo de Montjuïc is an eighteenth century castle in the tradi-
tional star shape of continental fortifications, designed in 1751 by the French military
architect Vaubon. It is reached by cable car from the funfair and is now a museum of mili-
taria, with displays of model soldiers, uniforms and armaments overlooked by a large
statue of General Franco on a horse. He may be reflecting on the use of the castle as a
prison during the Spanish Civil War where his opponents were taken to be imprisoned,
tortured and in many cases killed. In this he was continuing the long history of the fortress
as a place of repression (four-hundred suspected anarchists and left wingers were incarcer-
ated there in a round up after the attack on the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona in
1896). If you can put these grim thoughts behind you, you can take pleasure in looking out
to the splendid vistas over the city and visiting the Miró Museum, the Palau Nacional
(Museum of Catalan Art) and others nearby. Méchain's geodetic observations are memori-
alized by the Montjuïc Castle geodesic marker.
Because Méchain was an alien, he was expelled from Montjuïc and restricted to
the town of Barcelona. He had completed his observing work and perhaps at first
enjoyed the respite, but his inactivity was further enforced by an accident in which
he broke some ribs and his right arm. By the autumn of 1793, he was recovered
enough and trusted enough to resume work on the Spanish side of the border but
was still not permitted to return to France. He reduced his observations at Montjuïc
and became troubled because the observations had an inconsistent result for the
latitude of his mountain observing station (a discrepancy of 3 arc seconds, corre-
sponding to about 100 meters). Over the winter of 1793-74, Méchain took up
observations again from his hotel in Barcelona as a check, linking the two observing
stations through a grudgingly issued one-day-pass to Montjuïc. To his horror the
result clearly showed inconsistency but the data did not resolve what it was.
Méchain began to spiral into what we would now classify as depression. His
scientific rigor had forced him to recognize that there was an error in his observations
but he began to doubt that whether he was able to resolve it. In addition, his situation
gave him cause for concern; as an alien in Spain his position was restricted and every
day as the French armies penetrated deeper into Catalonia the people became less
friendly. On the other hand, they would not let him leave to return to France given
what he had seen of the defences of Barcelona, and if he stayed in Spain, would
