The Measure of All Things

by Ken Alder

  Under the Ancien Régime, by contrast, measurement was inseparable from the object being measured and the customs of the community which performed the measurement. These measurements were not enforced by a remote bureaucracy, but by local people answerable to their neighbors for their fairness. Far from being irrational or unnatural, this hodgepodge of measures made real sense to the peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, and consumers who used them every day.

  To begin with, each act of measurement in the Ancien Régime referred to a particular physical standard, held in local hands and safeguarded by local officials. A town’s measure for the length of building materials, for instance, might derive from an iron fathom mortised into the wall of the town’s market hall. The local measure for the weight of bread might derive from a master pound preserved in the guildhall of the area’s bakers. The district’s volume for grain might derive from a master bushel secured in the lord’s château. And the local volume of wine might derive from a master barrel stored in the cellar of the monastery that owned the vineyard. It was the obligation of local officials—these aldermen, guild-masters, lords, and abbots—to enforce these standards, ensuring that exchanges made in the marketplace were fair. In return, they were entitled to extract a small fee for their services.

  Not only did the physical standards differ from community to community, but the technique of measurement depended on local custom. One district measured grain heaped high in its bushel; another measured grain after it had been leveled off; still another, after the bushel had been struck to settle its contents. Even the height from which grain was poured into the receptacle was dictated by custom, since contents may settle upon handling. A slight nudge might alter the amount of grain in the bushel, a difference of great concern to those who paid taxes in kind or who bought or sold foodstuffs in bulk—that is to say, the vast majority of French men and women. Similarly, the aune (the ell), a measure of cloth, generally equaled the width of local looms, so that a square aune of fabric could be appraised by folding a quick triangle. Alternatively, the shopkeeper might measure an aune by extending the cloth from his nose to his outstretched arm, with a complimentary thumb’s worth thrown in “for good measure.” Quantity in the Ancien Régime was bound up in ritual and custom.

  ANCIEN RÉGIME MEASURES OF LAON

  These pre-Revolutionary measurement standards from the town of Laon, Méchain’s birthplace, are still mortised into the wall under the archway of the town hall. They are among the last Ancien Régime measures still in situ. From left to right: the “T” measured the size of barrels; the rectangles are matrices to gauge bricks (above) and roof tiles (below); and the “I” is an aune (an ell, about three feet in length) to measure cloth. (From the Musée de Laôn)

  This meant that measurement standards were potentially open to dispute, negotiation, and change—albeit with the consent of the local community. Indeed, in many places the quantity that local people called “a bushel” had actually altered over the years, as lords and tenants disputed its “true” amount (and hence the proper level of taxation and a fair price for basic foodstuffs). As such, local measures served as a living record of the shifting balance of power within the community. Outsiders, of course, did not understand these measures, but local buyers and sellers did—which suggests one of the main advantages of local diversity. They kept outsiders out. Distinctive measures protected small-town traders from big-city merchants, or at least forced the latter to pay the equivalent of a fee before they could enter the local market. Artisanal guilds took charge of their own measures so that they might define their goods in a unique way, identify interlopers, and drive them out of business with ruinous lawsuits. This was as true of gunsmiths and milliners then as it is true of the computer industry today. Control over standards is control over the rules of economic life, and Ancien Régime standards were everywhere local. Yet beneath this local diversity lay the deeper meaning of measurement in the Ancien Régime.

  Many Ancien Régime measures—especially those that related to the world of production—had at their origin an anthropometric meaning derived from human needs and human interests. This does not mean that they directly reflected the size of the human body, the pied (foot) as the size of the king’s foot, or as the length of the average human foot. Rather, many Ancien Régime measures reflected the quantity of labor a person could do in a given period of time. Thus, coal in one region of France was measured in a charge (“load”) equal to one-twelfth of a miner’s daily output. Arable land was often measured by the homme (“man”) or journée (“day”) so as to designate the amount of land a peasant might plow or harvest in one day. Other units expressed the local people’s evaluation of worth or quality. Thus, the size of a plot of arable land might also be measured in bushels; that is to say, a plot of land was equal to the number of bushels of grain it took to sow that field. Even in districts where land area was ostensibly measured in a unit like the arpent, which referred to a number of square pieds (feet), the dimensions of the surface area would actually vary depending on the type of field and the quality of its soil. For instance, pastureland measured in arpents was often divided into five distinct degrés, based on the best use for the field. In some cases, properties described in arpents in the official records were in practice divided into journées—which could not be compared with one another on the basis of their abstract surface area.

  As the economic historian Witold Kula has pointed out, these anthropometric measures expressed features of primary concern to those who worked the soil or produced the goods. After all, a peasant whose plot of land was physically smaller than his neighbor’s “five-bushel” plot, but which took six bushels to sow because it was on a gentle slope and had fertile soil, might well have found that “six bushels” expressed his stake in the land far more vividly than an abstract surface area. Moreover, these measures did not simply express the value of the land, they guided work rules and set customary limits on the labor a landlord might extract. Thus, when a foreman hired four peasants to pick a vineyard of eight journées, the laborers knew not to settle for less than two days’ wages each; nor would they do the work with only three peasants on their gang. In this sense, the anthropometric measures of the Ancien Régime acted as a control on productivity, and indeed, masked the very idea that productivity was a value that could be measured.

  For just this reason, some eighteenth-century landlords had begun to map their property in geometric units rather than in units of labor. They hired surveyors who could “put all these defective [measures] in good order, so that in each district their content is regulated in either perches, pas, or pieds (rods, yards, or feet).” Armed with the new square units, these landlords hoped to monitor productivity and pocket any gains. This new breed of efficiency-minded landlord-farmer was the great hope of the “physiocrats,” a group of reformers who had acquired much influence with the French royal administration and were also known as “the economists,” being the first to practice that dismal science. The physiocrats touted agricultural reform and free trade as the key to improving standards of living, and they—like economic historians ever since—have expended great effort to determine whether productivity was rising in France. Unfortunately, the question is virtually unanswerable for much of France because the process of translating anthropometric measures into modern measures erases the very information that defined productivity in the Ancien Régime. When England’s leading agronomist set out to assess French agriculture in the 1780s, he discovered that he could not rely on the official measures listed in the public records.

  The denomination of French measures, as the reader will see, are almost infinite and without any common standard to which they can be referred. . . . The only clue tolerably general that can be in the least relied upon is drawn from the quantity of seed sown. . . . [And] inquiries of this kind are not to be made in the bureaus of great cities; books and papers will not afford the information; a man must travel through the country or must always remain ignorant though surro
unded by ten thousand volumes.

  METER STICK, “CADIL,” AND KILOGRAM

  This meter stick is the official provisional meter of 1793, which measured 443.44 lignes in the old Paris units. It was made by Lenoir out of copper. The cadil was the name for the liter until it was changed in 1795. The kilogram weight pictured here was based on the original definition of a gram (then called a grave), which equaled the weight of one cubic centimeter of water at the freezing temperature. For the definitive kilogram of 1799, the gram was based on a cubic centimeter of water at its temperature of maximum density (about 4°C). (From the Musée des Arts et Métiers-CNAM, Paris; photograph by CNAM)

  Even the surveyors hired by “improving” landlords were daunted by the challenge of transforming land into a factor of production expressible in square units. They warned their employers that for the actual partitioning of fields “it is best to stick to the report of those who sow the land.” That is because these anthropometric measures of land and other commodities were the outcome of centuries of protracted negotiations among artisans, peasants, traders, and lords. Their value had been ritualized and fixed in ways that reflected the relative bargaining power of different members of the local community. As such, Ancien Régime measures had come to express that community’s sense of the proper social equilibrium. And any attempt to substitute a new kind of measurement was read as a threat to that social balance.

  No wonder peasants hated surveyors—and why Delambre and Méchain met with such mistrust on their route. They too were surveyors of a sort, come to supplant the anthropometric measures that were the lifeblood of the peasant economy. They too were measuring the earth for the purposes of a new partition.

  The savants said the new measures would be “natural” because they were based on the size of the earth. For these savants, a metric unit was natural when it could be defined without reference to human interests. The meter, they said, would be independent of all social negotiation or temporal change, transcending the interests of any particular community or nation. These men invoked nature as the guarantor that all people would benefit equally because no person benefited in particular. This spoke to the ideal of justice as blind. Indeed, this Enlightenment project has often been read as an attempt to displace personal relations as the foundation of the social order, and in their stead substitute a universal metric, imported from the natural sciences, by which the social world might be subject to dispassionate analysis—and schemes for improvement. But the people of the Ancien Régime also considered their measures “natural,” in that they had been built into the dimensions of the lived world and expressed their needs, their values, and the history of their shared life. Their anthropometric measures sanctified man as the measure of all things, and expressed a different notion of justice, one which governed not only the domain of productive labor, but also the realm of economic exchange.

  The Ancien Régime was governed by a “just price” economy, in which basic foodstuffs were sold at a customary price set by the local community at a level which most of the people in that community could afford. The just price was enforced by moral sanction and ultimately by the threat of violence. The theory of this “just price” economy had been legitimized, moreover, by medieval scholastic doctrine, although this does not mean that prices were thought to be divinely sanctioned. The people of the Ancien Régime understood that production and consumption would halt if buyers and sellers were unwilling to trade. To induce production and exchange, then, the just price needed to reflect the costs of doing business, with these important caveats: that the authorities intervene in times of dearth, that locals not extort exorbitant fees from wayfarers or people in desperate need, and that sellers not conspire to rig prices.

  In such an economy, the diversity of weights and measures greased the wheels of commerce. In an age where bakers dared not charge more than the “just price” for a loaf of bread for fear of precipitating a riot, bakers who wanted to preserve their livelihood when the cost of flour rose simply baked a smaller loaf. The same ruse allowed monasteries to circumvent Christian restrictions against profits by buying wine in large barrels and then selling it (for the same price) in smaller barrels. Sometimes this could lead to accusations of fraud, as when the petitioners of Notre-Damme-de-Lisque complained in 1788 that their abbot’s tax collector had increased the measure of grain. More probably, he was simply trying to maintain his own revenue during a time of rapidly increasing prices.

  The workings of this economy were familiar to Ancien Régime officials. One government agent noted that local grain merchants profited by buying grain at one measure and selling it (for the same price) at a lesser measure. But rather than condemn this practice, he noted that it encouraged commerce in the region, since attempts to raise prices risked the wrath of the local populace. A provincial assembly warned in 1788 that “the establishment of a uniform measure would ruin this genre of commerce, destroying at the same time an infinity of little markets which subsist only on these differences and, though of no great importance, supply the needs of nearby consumers.”

  In many towns, Ancien Régime officials themselves served as the “fair mediators” who interposed themselves between buyers and sellers, setting the just price for essential foodstuffs like bread, meat, wine, and beer. Indeed, superintending the economy in this way was one of the obligations of a benevolent monarch, and among the principal justifications for his rule. In setting the just price, local officials generally took market conditions into account. The price of bread, for instance, was governed by tarifs, numerical tables that translated the current market price of wheat into the just price for a four-pound loaf of bread of a specified quality (white bread, brown bread, second-class bread, and so on). In major towns, these tarifs were drawn up collaboratively by aldermen and bakers, who jointly estimated the cost of milling and baking bread, and outfitting a shop, while guaranteeing a modest return for the baker. These regulated prices, however, were “sticky” in the sense that bakers could not fine-tune their prices to meet daily fluctuations in the cost of wheat. Also, bakers tended to set their prices in round numbers because of a persistent shortage of small coins. Instead of adjusting prices, bakers then altered the weight of their loaves or diluted their ingredients. Such practices were illegal, but even consumers who were aware of them generally tolerated them so long as everyone could still afford a “pound” of bread. Equity mattered more than efficiency. Yet in times of dearth any attempt to raise prices or to “short” bread too egregiously could spark violence. Price was not the paramount variable in the Ancien Régime economy, but merely one variable among many, including quantity, quality, the cost of production, and local custom.

  In short, the old diversity of weights and measures, far from being irrational and unnatural, formed the backbone of the Ancien Régime economy. These measures did not simply define a distinct kind of economy, they defined a kind of human being. Today, we assume “the market” consists of the aggregate of innumerable one-on-one private exchanges, the sum total of which sets prices. We might call this the market principle. The Ancien Régime operated according to the idea of the market as a place, which one might imagine as a kind of bazaar or village fair in which buyers and sellers met in public to conduct exchanges under the watchful eye of a third party. That third party—typically an emissary of the king, a town alderman, the local lord, or the nearby abbot—justified the taxation of these transactions by ensuring that the needy did not go hungry and the producer got a fair return for his troubles. Thus, in addition to providing peasants and artisans with a ready guide to the value of their land and labor, the weights and measures of the Ancien Régime also provided shopkeepers and consumers with some guarantee that their marketplace transactions would be fair.

  In this context, the French savants’ scheme to reform weights and measures was a revolutionary rupture, far more radical than the sort of translation involved in the switch from, say, Anglo-American units to the metric system. Indeed, the revolutionaries i
ntended the metric system to eradicate the assumptions underlying the old just-price economy. Their goal was to make productivity the visible measure of economic progress, and to make price the paramount variable in commercial exchange. They saw the metric reform as a crucial stage in the education of modern Homo economicus.

  To this end, the Academy of Sciences proposed in 1793 a decimal division for its currency, so that its value too would be based upon the new metric units of weight. The Academy proposed that one franc should equal 0.01 grams of gold. “Thus will all measures, weights, and money refer to a unique and foundational base: a quarter of the earth’s meridian.” By defining the scale of worth as well as that of quantity, science would provide a secure foundation for a rational economy. On December 7, 1794, the new franc was declared equal to the old livre, now divisible into 100 centimes. This rationalization was the brainchild of the same savants and politicians who had pushed for metric reform: Lavoisier, Condorcet, and Prieur de la Côte-d’Or.