Category: Anti-Secular Panics

• The "Metric" Conspiracy

  This theory claimed that the metric system was not just a new way to measure the world but a French revolutionary plot to strip creation of its sacred proportions by replacing older, divinely sanctioned measures such as the inch and foot with abstract decimal units. It emerged from the openly revolutionary origins of the metric system in late eighteenth-century France and was sustained in later anti-French, anti-secular, and anti-centralizing arguments. In hostile readings, the metric system became an ideological weapon disguised as rationalization.