Cain's Legacy

God may have made the world according to weight and measure, but it was Cain who invented weights and measures, and thus—we have this from Flavius Josephus—"converted the innocent simplicity in which man had lived into a miserable existence dominated by fraud and deceit."^[1] The existence of French men and women around 1790 was made miserable by, among other things, 700 or 800 differently named measures and untold units of the same name but different sizes. A "pinte" in Paris came to 0.93 liter; in Saint-Denis, to 1.46; in Seine-en-Montagne, to 1.99; in Précy-sous-Thil, to 3.33. The aune, a unit of length, was still more prolific: Paris had three,

[1] Josephus, Jewish antiquities , cited by Witold Kula, Measures and men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3.

each for a different sort of cloth; Rouen had two; and France as a whole no fewer than seventeen, all in common use and all different, the smallest amounting to just under 300 lignes, royal measure, the largest to almost 600.^[2]

France possessed nonuniform measures in law as well as by custom. Their multiplicity went with other relics of the feudal system, which maintained arbitrary rents and duties usually to the disadvantage of the peasant. A landlord wanted his bushels of grain or hogsheads of beer in the biggest measures in use in the neighborhood, and he preferred to sell according to the smallest. Nor were all seigneurs above enlarging the vessel in which they collected their rents; and since in many cases they possessed the only exemplars of their patrimonial bushel, no one could be certain that it did not grow in time. But one suspected. A frequent complaint in the cahiers , or notebooks of desiderata brought by representatives of the people to the meeting of the Estates General in 1789, was that "the nobles' measure waxes larger year by year." These same representatives castigated the oppressive confusion of customary measures as barbaric, ridiculous, obscurantist, gothic, and revolting, and demanded an end to them, and the establishment of a system of unchanging and verifiable weights and measures throughout the country, or at least throughout their region. Many urged that the King's measure, the royal foot, be made the law of the land.^[3]

Sharpers and crooks whose practices were not sanctioned by ancient rights and wrongs and middlemen acting in analogy to money changers opposed the rationalization that menaced their livelihood. In 1747, shortly after returning to Paris with the vision acquired while measuring a piece of a meridian in Peru, Charles-

[2] Georges Bouchard, Un Organisateur de la victoire. Prieur de la Côte-d'Or membre du Comité de salut publique (Paris: R. Clavreuil, 1946), 286; Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Proposition faite à l'Assemblée nationale, sur les poids et les mesures (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1790), in John Riggs Miller, Speeches in the House of Commons upon the equalization of the weights and measures of Great Britain. . .together with two letters from the Bishop of Autun (London: J. Debrett, 1790) 60–3.

[3] Kula, Measures and men , 164–226, esp. 191–6, 230, 236; Beatrice Fry Hyslop, French nationalism in 1789, according to the general cahiers (New York: Octagon, 1968), vii, 56.

Marie de La Condamine identified and condemned this special interest, which he proposed to abolish with the confusions that engendered it. His accusation echoed in France for decades and eventually bounced across the Channel. We read in the cahiers from Orléans that multitudinous measures "expose[d] people daily to swindlers" and in the records of Parliament that John Riggs Miller, an obscure and verbose M.P., declared that they had but one purpose, "the perplexing of all dealings, and the benefitting knaves and cheats."^[4]

Reformers laid down several requirements for a new system of weights and measures. It should not rest on an arbitrary unit, especially not on a king's foot; it must not offer enticements to cheaters; and it had to be easily reproduceable were its exemplars lost. Further, it had to be rational, so as to recommend itself to all nations, and become universal. The measuring stick used by La Condamine and his colleagues, the "toise de Pérou," had attained some currency in France and in a few other countries, and the units used in Paris also had more than local authority. It would not do to impose them, however, as Talleyrand wrote Miller, since they had not been derived from nature or constructed "with the ceremony necessary to settle once and for all the opinion of all enlightened nations." Last and also first, the reformed system had to be simple, or, as Miller preferred to say, "on a level with the lowest and humblest capacity." It must not require "skill in calculation beyond what. . .the inferior orders of men commonly possess"; everyone should be able to confirm for himself the correctness of all transactions of interest to him, "the meanest intellect. . .on a par with the most dexterous."^[5]

This last paragraph contains many buzz-words of the Englightenment.^[6] The replacement of the arbitrary and the capricious, of the

[4] Charles-Marie de La Condamine, "Nouveau projet d'une mesure invariable, propre à servir de mesure commune à toutes les nations," MAS , 1747, 489-514, on 492–5; Kula, Measures and men , 209; Miller, in Thomas C. Hansard, Parliamentary history , 28, col. 322, and Miller, Speeches , 18.

[5] Talleyrand, Proposition , in Miller, Speeches , 68–9; Miller, ibid., 16, 35, and in Hansard, 28, col. 321.

[6] Cf. Maurice Crosland, "'Nature' and measurement in eighteenth century France," Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, 87 (1972), 277–309, on 297.

feudal and historical, by the natural is the message of all the philosophes from Montesquieu to Condorcet. The natural coincides with the rational and the universal: when people cast aside customary belief and established abuse, they can reach agreements that all others, guided by their own reason, will accept. This reason is not the property of a few great intellects; the truth is accessible to all, or at least to every man. Everyone has the right to know, and to recognize, the truth. Any system that claims universal assent must be universally intelligible.