A Military Connection

Delambre believed, probably correctly, that the Committee on Public Safety and many members of the Convention wished to kill the meridian measurement and declare the provisional meter definitive.^[63] At this point a powerful advocate of geodesy came to the rescue: General E.N. de Calon, formerly of the Royal Geographical Engineers (Ingénieurs géographes), which had been suppressed in 1791. Meanwhile Calon had become a deputy and a Jacobin; his rampant republicanism perhaps may be traced to unfulfilled ambition and a sense of injury suffered in the late 1770s, when, though an officer of twenty years' standing, he had been ordered to do survey work usually assigned to his juniors.^[64] He was a numerary as well as a passionate man. His few recorded statements in the Convention and the Jacobin Club of Paris were precise and numerical, as in the following complete discourse: "A vehicle drawn by six horses has just been stopped at Neuf-Brisach; it contains a ton of gold and of white and black uniforms."^[65]

The suppression of his former corps presented Calon with a vacuum in which to fulfill his ambition. With the corps went the map department of the Dépôt de la Guerre, the headquarters and storehouse of military cartography. The temporary organization put in its place could not handle the flood of maps, and Calon, who became head of the Dépôt in April 1793, managed to recapture most of its archives. He then purged the place of suspect employees installed by his aristocratic predecessor. To repopulate the Dépôt, Calon set up a school there in astronomy, geography, engineering, history, languages, and engraving; and to staff the school and get on with his major mission, providing maps of the front and of captured territories to the Army, he tried to attach to his service all the unoccupied savants he could find. At its height in the autumn of 1796, Calon's

cartographical program, printing establishment, and school ran at an annual cost of 300,000 livres. His expansiveness caused inefficiencies and inspired jealousies, and by the spring of 1797 he and his empire had fallen.^[66]

Among the academicians Calon recalled to government service were Méchain, who had managed to get himself to Genoa in September 1794, after a narrow escape from corsairs, and Delambre. It was agreed, probably early in 1795, that they would triangulate the new departments and that, to prepare as firm a base as possible for the work, they would resume the measurement of the meridian. Then at the zenith of his influence, Calon persuaded the Committee on Public Safety to grant 220,000 livres for map-making, half for extending the Cassinis' Carte de France into the Rhineland and half for finishing the meridian between the Loire and the Pyrenees.^[67] This largesse, given on 13 May, fit well with proposals Prieur had made in March for the prompt completion of the metric project.^[68] Prieur recommended setting up a temporary agency (Agence temporaire des poids et mesures) to push through the manufacture of provisional standards and to oversee their deployment. He estimated that much could be done for 500,000 livres. He had to request another 500,000 livres the following September. Meanwhile the Army lent a hand by collecting old metal, chiefly church bells and discarded measures, to serve materially and symbolically as raw ingredients for metric measures.^[69]

Prieur's program became law on 7 April 1795. It provide for using the "provisional" meter in everyday transactions even after the definitive platinum prototype came into existence; confirmed the basic names, meter, liter, and gram; and ordered resumption of the measurement of the arc. It established a triumvirate under the Commission of Public Instruction to oversee the manufacture, distribution, and explanation of the provisional standards, using machines

wherever possible, "so as to combine facility and swiftness with precision, and consequently to allow citizens to buy the new measures at a reasonable price"; and it specifically ordered the new agency to provide graphic representations of conversions requiring no calculations by users.^[70] Later that month the scientific side of operations was entrusted to academic survivors of earlier commissions: Borda and Brisson were to bring int he exemplar of the copper provisional meter within a "décade" (ten days); Méchain and Delambre, to do their thing; Delambre, Laplace, and Prony, to fix a baseline near Paris; Borda, Haüy, and Prony, to determine the standard of weight; and Berthollet, Monge, and Vandermonde, to oversee the preparation of the platinum to be used in the definitive primary standards.^[71]

Matters being thus composed, Delambre left Paris on 28 June 1795 in the capacity of "astronomer of the Dépôt de la Guerre" to resume his observations at Orléans. He had the usual trouble finding intact steeples, and the cost of erecting signals quickly depleted his cash. No one wished to accept the assignats (government IOUs) he carried; and once again Calon tided him over. Three years of republican rule had not made peasants less suspicious and superstitious. They now tore down Delambre's signals on the theory that they attracted storms.

Méchain had his hardships, too, as he crawled north across the mountains toward their rendezvous in Rodez. In one place, on a high outcrop only twelve feet wide, surrounded by precipices, he sat for days waiting for the clouds to lift long enough to work the Borda circle. He arrived within signaling distance of Rodez around 1 September 1797, shortly after Delambre had completed his part of the work. There they stopped. Méchain would not accept Delambre's help and could not go on. "In this cruel situation," he wrote his collaborator, "I prefer to stay in this terrible exile, far from what I most cherish in the world; I will sacrifice everything, give up everything,

rather than return without finishing my part of the job." Delambre felt that he could not insist and Méchain finished the arc the following September.^[72]

After concluding his triangles at Rodez, Delambre joined Laplace at Melun to fix the ends of the baseline near Paris. Borda had devised special rulers for the purpose, which were not ready until the spring of 1798. Their employment was extremely tedious. Delambre could make only about ninety lengths (about 360 m) a day; it took thirty-three days to cover the entire distance of 6075.90 toise. In the summer he redid the Perpignan baseline. That took six or seven weeks. Earlier surveyors had done it in twelve hours. The length of the Perpignan base as calculated from the length of the Melun base and the triangles differed from the measurement on the ground by less than a foot. On 1 brumaire 1798 an VI (22 October 1798), everything required to calculate the length of the arc from Dunkirk to Barcelona was in hand. Méchain and Delambre returned to Paris, where an international committee had assembled to examine, approve, advertise, and propagate their results.^[73]