Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      By the time of the Second French Revolution in 1830, no one dared suggest new calendars or clock dials.⁵ Instead, another obsession seemed to engulf early nineteenth-century France, or at least its psychoanalytical casebooks: the act of looking back became a certifiable disease. Medical studies of the 1820s and 1830s were fascinated with what appeared to be an outbreak of nostalgia.

      One of the earliest cases concerned an elderly occupant of a lodging in rue de la Harpe, in the Latin Quarter. This man took great pride in his apartment and was devastated when he heard the news that it was to be demolished to make way for street improvements. So devastated that he took to his bed and, despite his landlord’s assurances that his new home would be better and brighter, refused to budge. ‘It will no longer be my lodging,’ he complained, ‘the one I loved so much, that I embellished with my own hands.’⁶ He was found dead in his bed just before the demolition, having apparently ‘suffocated of despair’.

      Another example, also from Paris, featured a two-year-old boy named Eugéne who couldn’t bear to be separated from his wet nurse. Returned to his parents, Eugéne became limp and pale, with eyes fixed on the door from where his nurse exited. When returned to his nurse, all joy broke loose. Such cases rendered French citizens useless to the state. The cultural historian Michael Roth has classified nostalgia as ‘an affliction that doctors regarded as potentially fatal, contagious, and somehow deeply connected to French life in the middle of the nineteenth century.’ The common cause was an over-fondness for one’s earliest memories, and in a century of intended modernity, nostalgia cast the patient as an outcast, destined for the madhouse or the jail. The affliction was first classified in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who aligned the Greek words nostos (or homecoming) with algos (pain). Earlier in the century the affliction mal de corazón had seen a group of soldiers sent home during the Thirty Years War, and it did seem to be a disease that particularly afflicted the army. Swiss soldiers could apparently be left in puddles of tears if they heard cowbells, reminding them of their native pastures, not least the milking song ‘Khue-Reyen’. This was such a weakener that anyone who played it – or consciously hummed it – was liable for the firing squad. Today we might just be homesick or unhappy. But nostalgia was the first disease associated with time, its victims longing for days gone by.⁷

      But nostalgia is not a disease of the past. Nowadays we are nostalgic for all sorts of things, even if the analyst’s couch has been vacated for more critical concerns. We like retro and vintage and distressed and heritage, and we adore history (history as a subject worthy of academia and literature barely existed before the French Revolution). The Internet thrives on the desire of the middle-aged (mostly men, it must be said) to buy back a lost youth, be it auctionable toys or salvageable cars (time has not withered these things, only increased their resale value). Nostalgia is increasingly viewed not as a punishable disease but as a consumerist one, and its connotations are no longer entirely negative. As we shall see in a later chapter, a desire to turn back the clock pervades an increasingly popular way of living: the slow life (incorporating slow food, mindfulness, a back-to-the-lathe ‘maker’ mentality) has long since transformed itself from a dilettante’s diversion into a monetisable movement.

      The French tradition of redirecting the traditional flow of time continues today, with similarly ineffective results. But the objections are now more extreme, and more self-parodic, and are based not just upon reformatting the calendar but cancelling it altogether. On New Year’s Eve 2005, a protest group calling itself Fonacon gathered in a small coastal town near Nantes to try to halt 2006. There were a few hundred people in all, and their reasoning was simple: 2005 had not been a great year, and 2006 had all the potential to be worse, and so they would symbolically try to stop time by singing some songs and smashing up a few grandfather clocks. Astonishingly, it didn’t work. They tried again the year after, and a few more innocent clocks lost their lives, but globally things just kept ticking.

      Next year they tried again, but still no joy. It was playful anarchy, and proof, if it was needed, that the French will protest about anything, but it brought to mind a more serious incident from more than a century before. On 15 February 1894, a French anarchist called Martial Bourdin met an unfortunate fate in the grounds of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, the traditional home of empirical timekeeping. Bourdin was carrying a bomb, and when it exploded accidentally it blew off one of his hands and ripped a hole in his stomach.

      When two Observatory staff ran from their office at the sound of the explosion, they found Bourdin still alive. But he survived only half an hour, and when his body was examined by the police they found he was carrying a large amount of cash; it was fleeing money, they suggested, quite enough to get him swiftly back to France once his mission had been accomplished. But what precisely was his mission? Speculation gripped London for weeks, and a decade later it inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. Bourdin’s motive remains unclear. He may have been carrying a bomb for an accomplice. He may have simply been trying to cause panic and chaos, the way terrorists aim to do today. But the most romantic theory, and the most French, is that he may have been trying to stop time.

      The people at Fonacon do not hold up Bourdin as a hero, not in these straitened times. But they do possibly share an ambition. On New Year’s Eve 2008, Fonacon tried to stop time once more, and they had a new slogan: ‘It was better right now!’ As a man named Marie-Gabriel explained, ‘We’re saying no to the tyranny of time, no to the merciless onslaught of the calendar, and yes to staying put in 2008!’ The protest in Paris saw the largest turnout yet, with about a thousand people gathering to boo the arrival of the new year on the Champs-Élyseés. The clocks struck midnight, and the protestors struck the clocks, and then, merde, it was 2009.

      The idea that time may be stopped in its tracks we happily recognise as a fanciful one, or the stuff of movies. If, in revolutionary France, such a thing once seemed plausible, it is a desire we should credit to optimism and enthusiasm, and to the fact that another revolution, a revolution in travel, was yet to occur. A train was coming down the track, and it was a solid and earnest thing: in terms of time, the train would change everything.

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       1 The French had another shot at time transformation in 1897, albeit on a modified scale. The Commission de décimalisation du temps suggested maintaining the 24-hour day, but changing to 100-minute hours with 100-second minutes. The proposal lay on the table for three years but was brought into effect for nought minutes.

       2 Rather than face the guillotine, the principal architect of the calendar, Gilbert Romme, fell on his own sword almost a year later on 17 June 1795 (or, as he would have preferred, 29 Prairial).

       3 See Sanja Perovic, ‘The French Republican Calendar’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 1.

       4 We are vaguely familiar too with the Julian months: Januarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Iunius, Julius, Augustus, September, October, November, December. In the first centuries of the modern era, newly appointed Roman emperors made their own egotistical modifications. The most extreme was Commodus, who delighted in changing all the months to variations of his own adopted names: Amazonius, Invictus, Felix, Pius, Lucius, Aelius, Aurelius, Commodus, Augustus, Herculeus, Romanus and Exsuperatorius. And then he was assassinated, and subsequent emperors changed the months back.

       5 Although, as with the revolution of 1789, time momentarily, and perhaps mythically, did stand still. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin claims (in On the Concept of History, 1940) that ‘during the evening of СКАЧАТЬ