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chapter 14 ) It’s Not About France Ken Alder I never had the Latin for the judging. . . . I managed to get through the mining exams [though]. They’re not very rigorous; they only ask you one question. They say “Who are you?” and I got seventy-five percent on that. Peter Cook, “The Coal-Miner Skit,” Beyond the Fringe Stick a pin into the geographic center of France and it will poke through near Bruère-Allichamps, some forty-five kilometers south of the cathedral town of Bourges. Or at least that was the location of France’s center as calculated in 1799, soon after Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain completed their seven-year survey of the French meridian to establish the length of the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. There have, of course, been other contenders for the nation ’sbalancing-point in thepast two hundred years.AsFrance’sfortuneshave shifted, so has its center: with the incorporation of Nice, Savoy, and Corsica; with the gain and loss of empire; with the loss and gain of Alsace-Lorraine; not to mention with the calculator’s attitude toward France’s colonial holdings and départements d’outre-mer in Algeria, sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, and tropical islands around the globe. Even to answer so simpleminded a question as the location of France’s geographical center—the balancing-point of le patrimoine—depends on a political calculus, one that has altered with the years and with the allegiance of the balancer. All the more telling, then, that historical precedent has persistently awarded the crown to Bruère. I was biking through Bruère in August 1999, researching my book on the Revolutionary survey of 1792–1799, zigzagging my way down the meridian on the trail of Delambre and Méchain and, like them, navigating by way of the great Cassini map of France (which an archivist at the University of Chicago had kindly let me photocopy), when I began to see notices spraypainted on the surface of the road: “Course d’âne, 5km,” “Course d’âne, 4km,” “Course d’âne, 3km.” At first I was not sure what this meant. A donkey race, presumably. But literally? It was a sweltering August afternoon, and I was feeling groggy and not at all literal-minded. I had been cycling hard since leaving Bourges, having come the long way around after a night in a cheap hotel not far from the inn used by Delambre in 1796, itself not far from the inn used by the cartographer Cassini III in 1740 (their respective distances calculated geodetically by Delambre in his expedition logbook, which an archivist at the Observatory of Paris had grudgingly let me photocopy). Delambre had been trapped in Bourges for an entire summer while the hyperinflation of the year III doubled and redoubled the price of rented horses. Even his tip for the stable boys had gone up by a factor of ten. (I had an account book to prove it.) For my part, I had been obliged to spend an extra night in Bourges because my Kryptonite lock had rusted tight around my front wheel, and I had been forced to carry my bike from the damp hotel cellar to the motorcycle shop down the street, mentally planning, as I went, the laborious explanations I would have to make: that I wasn’t stealing the bike, and that I would prefer to avoid going to the police station to fill out a report, et cetera. But the stocky mechanic in the blue smock shrugged off my explanations and cut the lock off for free. That left me the afternoon to climb the tower of the Bourges cathedral and visit its pelican weathervane, which Delambre had used as one of his sighting targets. The view from the top was magnificent: a corrugated terrain of green and yellow fields dotted with distant spires, two of which were Delambre’s stations to the south—and my immediate destination. From this vantage point it was easy to feel yourself at France’s center. There are many lines one may draw across the terrain. Fortified lines mortared with the blood of millions of young men. Political lines drawn for administrative convenience. Lines that encircle. Lines that divide. You will not find the line of the meridian recommended in any Michelin guide; it’s not the sort of circuit that leads you...

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