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Did You Know?

France Measured the Planet, Then Refused to Say "Greenwich" for 67 Years

94% of Parisians live within a five-minute walk of one of the city's 1,180 boulangeries.

Across France there are about 35,000 bakeries, serving roughly 12 million customers a day. The Observatoire du Pain — France has a Bread Observatory, and this is the least surprising fact in the paragraph — estimates that 320 baguettes are consumed every second.

Do the arithmetic and the figures argue slightly with each other. Bakery federations put annual production at six billion baguettes; other counts say ten billion. Six billion works out closer to 190 a second across the full year; the famous 320 figure matches the higher count of ten billion. Either way, it is somewhere between sixteen and twenty-seven million baguettes leaving French ovens every day.

Consumption is falling and has been for a century. The average French person now eats around 105 grams of bread a day, down from 114 in 2015. Just after the Second World War it was 900 grams. Before the Revolution it was closer to a kilo, and it was not a side dish — it was the meal.

The trade is shrinking too. The culture ministry noted, when it nominated the baguette for UNESCO status, that France had 55,000 artisanal bakeries in 1970 — one for every 900 or so people — and 35,000 today, one for every 2,000. The baguette was inscribed as intangible cultural heritage in 2022.

The clock: and here is the very French part.

The baguette is defined by law. A 1920 statute set its minimum weight at 80 grams and its maximum length at 40 centimetres. The word boulangerie is protected by the Consumer Code: to use it, the bread must be prepared and baked on the premises and must never have been frozen.

France legislates units. The metre, the second, and the loaf.

In 1791 the French National Assembly decided the world needed a unit of length that belonged to nobody in particular. Not a king's foot. Something derived from the Earth itself.

So between 1792 and 1799, French surveyors triangulated an arc of the meridian running through Paris, from Dunkirk to Barcelona, through a revolution and a war, in order to define the metre as a fraction of the distance from the pole to the equator.

France measured the planet to invent a ruler. That is the level of commitment we are dealing with.

The Paris meridian had been France's zero longitude since 1667, fixed by the Académie des Sciences and running through the Paris Observatory. French maps, French navigation and French time all ran from it.

Then in 1884, twenty-six countries met in Washington and voted to make Greenwich the prime meridian of the world. Roughly 72% of the world's shipping tonnage was already using it. The vote was, practically speaking, a formality.

France did not adopt it. Not for twenty-seven years.

On 9 March 1911, France finally aligned its legal time with Greenwich. The law defined French time as "Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes and twenty-one seconds."

That is Greenwich Mean Time. Exactly, to the second — nine minutes twenty-one is precisely the longitude difference between the two observatories. The legislation had simply found a way to say GMT without saying Greenwich.

The phrasing stayed in French law until 1978.

Sixty-seven years of national civil time defined as the time in Paris, but slower. Meanwhile the Eiffel Tower had been broadcasting time signals twice a day since 1910, at 40 kilowatts, to ships and colonies across the world — from 1911 on, French legal time, which was Greenwich Mean Time, which nobody in the French statute book was willing to call by its name.