The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [470]
A second, more specific break with the past at the end of the eighteenth century was exemplified in the tumultuous events of the French Revolution. More selfconsciously than any generation before them, the French revolutionaries saw themselves as launching a wholly new era in the life of mankind, putting behind them all the darkness and superstition of the past. They were determined to tear down not just the monarchy and the social hierarchy which had ruled France since far back into the Middle Ages, but also the entire legacy of the Christian religion. Their revolution was seen as marking a final victory for that spirit of rationalism which had found expression in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The idea of a transcendent God was to be replaced by a new `Supreme Being, the `Goddess of Reason': a glorified projection of the power of human consciousness. And nothing better symbolised this triumph for the ordering function of the human brain than the desire of the new revolutionary rulers to force the people of France to live in a new mental universe. They were to have a new calendar, replacing the dating of years from the birth of Christ with a new system which began with 1792 as `Year One' of the Revolution. There were to be new names for their months; a new decimal week, replacing the Babylonian week of seven 24-hour days with one of 10 days, each divided into 10 hours; a new decimal currency. Above all they were to have a new system of weights and measures. The confusion of old traditional measures was to be replaced by a perfectly rational system in which all weights and measures would be defined in terms of the new `metre, precisely equivalent to one ten-millionth of a quarter of the circumference of the earth, In 1799, after two leading French savants had spent seven years meticulously measuring every inch of the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona, to establish the exact length of this new standard, a huge crowd assembled in Paris to see the unveiling of the platinum bar which was to define the length of the metre for all time. It was the most holy object of the Revolution: the central symbol of how the world had been made new.
But again, to all this triumphant celebration of human consciousness there was a dark underside. For the privilege of living in this new era of liberty and equality, the people of France paid in a sea of blood, starting with the heady spectacle of thousands of aristocrats being sent to the guillotine, ending in the deaths of millions on the battlefields of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. When the churches of France were rededicated as `Temples of Reason, the role of the `Goddess' was more than once acted out by a local prostitute, paraded in triumph through the streets before being enthroned on the high altar of the cathedral. So mad was the new revolutionary calendar that within only a year or two it had been shamefacedly abandoned. As for the hubris which inspired that sacred symbol of the revolutionaries' brave new world, the platinum metre, it was somehow appropriate that one of the two savants employed to ensure that it precisely corresponded to that fraction of the earth's circumference had secretly discovered that his sums did not add up, provoking him to a nervous breakdown. Rather than admit the truth, he falsified his figures: with the result that the strip of metal defining what is still to this day the metre's length all over the world, is a fraction of a millimetre short of what it should be. The entire metric system, symbol of the power of human reason to make the world anew, is based on a tiny but symbolic lie.28
The third fundamental break with the past taking place towards the end of the eighteenth century was in important respects related to the other two. The extraordinary drama of the French Revolution had sent a psychic shock wave through Europe, the repercussions of which ran much wider and deeper than just the world of politics.