Early modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 75

formed by early modern time-space compression. Prior to 1789, Baroque
culture, with its celebration of ornate form, constituted something of a
counter-Reformation response to the Protestant emphasis on literacy. For
example, the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, held at Versailles, the center
of imperial France after 1682, constituted a spectacle and theater designed to
impress and rea rm the power of the ancien régime (Jay 1993).

Post-revolutionary France, perhaps the world's first true nation-state,

unleashed not only a radically new social order predicated on egalitarianism
but also a radically new geography designed along the lines of Cartesian space.
For example, the older provinces of the feudal regime that were drawn along
ancient ethnic lines of demarcation were abolished, replaced by 82 départments
(more were added later) of roughly equal size. This political restructuring
was complemented by a widespread rationalization of transportation space.
Indeed, even prior to the Revolution of 1789, France emerged as a model
of centralized transportation planning. In 1713, for example, it created the
Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, trained engineers charged with caring for roads
and bridges. Following the defeat of Napoleon, in 1824 the French govern-
ment initiated the new road system of routes nationales (the

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first national
system since Roman times), generating unprecedented equality and rapidity
of movement. The new infrastructure made Paris, already the core of French
national space, even more accessible to the rest of the country, enhancing
its centrality and primacy. By 1847, the system had 47,000 kilometers, and
transport speeds rose from 10 kilometers per hour in 1815 to 15 in 1840
(Vance 1990:157). The construction of this system entailed detailed surveying
and mapping of French territory as part of a sustained rationalization of
French national space, an e

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ort initiated by the Cassini family even prior to
the Revolution. Cadastral surveys, triangulation, and geodesy were all
moments within the Enlightenment rationalization of space and its esprit
géométrique . The mapping of the country by the Académie royale des
sciences, for example, between 1668 and 1740 provided one of history's

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rst
systematic and rational surveys of national space. The new transportation
system was complemented by a nationwide system of optical telescopes and
towers, or semaphores, arranged by line-of-sight operation (Standage 1998;
Hugill 1999).
In the same spirit of Enlightenment rationality, in 1795 the National
Assembly, seeking a standardized and scienti

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cally exact method for the
measurement of weights, measures and space, initiated the metric system, in
which the basic unit of space was to be one ten-millionth of the arc between
the equator and the North Pole. Although Napoleon suspended its use, it was
reinstated in 1837. Pride of the French Revolution, the system spread rapidly
throughout Europe, particularly following the 1875 Convention of the Meter
(signed by 17 countries, including the U.S.), supplanting local traditions for
measuring space. Throughout the twentieth century it e

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ectively became a
universal system for measuring weights and distances, just as its inventors
had hoped. It was received with enthusiasm by communities of scientists and

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