Mistakes commemorated, whether a revolution's or my own

Ah, the seventh of November. A bit of a special day. For me and for Russia

It’s the anniversary of the October Revolution.

Lenin addressing the crowd during the October Revolution
A moment that didn't lead to quite what was hoped
But that isn't the only mistake its anniversary brings to my mind

“The October Revolution?” I hear you cry, “In November?”

Indeed. One of the reactionary aspects of the Russian Tsarist regime, overthrown by the Bolsheviks in that great revolution, was that it had stuck with the old Julian calendar long after practically everyone it dealt with had moved to the Gregorian.

The Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar who launched it, didn’t get the leap years quite right. The result was that as the centuries rolled by, the calendar year got further and further out of step with the actual movement of the earth around the sun (or, as modern science has it, the movement of the earth and the sun around each other). The time it takes for the earth to go around the sun (or, as modern science has it, etc.) isn’t exactly 365 days, but more like 365.256 and then a bit. That extra fraction eventually begins to add up.

So the Gregorian calendar adds an extra day every four years, in leap years, but then adds the additional refinement of not making century years leap years except, as a further refinement still, if the century year is a millennium year. 1900 wasn’t a leap year but 2000 was.

That keeps the years pretty closely aligned with the earth’s movement.

But the Gregorian calendar was launched in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. Well, the Protestants and the Orthodox were a bit wary of anything papal, so they didn’t immediately switch with the Catholic nations. That meant that Britain, for instance, was ten days behind most of Europe in the seventeenth century, leading to such charming little discoveries as the coincidence of the deaths of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, and William Shakespeare on the same date, 23 April 1616, but ten days apart.

It’s a lovely coincidence only slightly tainted by the fact that scholars today claim that Cervantes died on 22 April and the 23rd was the day he was buried. Still, why spoil a great little story just for the sake of the truth? After all, few of our political leaders these days do.

So you can see where this is heading. The revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power happened on 25 October 1917 in Russia. Pretty much everywhere else it was 7 November. That is the date that the event is now commemorated.

Why’s it so special to me? Well, not because of the revolution. Once I thought it was a pretty remarkable event, opening the doors to a better future for the victims of oppression everywhere. Not any more.

These days, it seems to me that the Russian revolution was tainted in its very roots. Not by the violence to which it led. The revolution itself involved little violence, and it was only because of the attempted counter-revolution against it that a bloody civil war broke out.

No, the problem was that it was led by people who knew they were right. They were expressing the force of history, which is at least as magnificent and all-powerful as the force of divinity, for those who believe in that idea. So anyone who stood in their way, wasn’t just a critic or an adversary, he was a traitor to a fundamental force that was unstoppably moulding human destiny. To sweep him away wasn’t merely justified, it was obligatory. If that involved a little torture, some forced confessions and an execution, well you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The result was a regime that lasted over 70 years and killed more people than Hitler’s, mostly because it had so much longer to do so. That means the anniversary of the seizure of power is hardly a matter to celebrate.

Instead the reason I smile each year the date comes round is in memory of a deeply frustrating afternoon I spent in the library of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific academy, in London. I was researching a French scientist who had spent some time in London and, specifically, at the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century.

What I couldn’t cope with was that a letter of his announcing his departure from Paris was dated after another announcing his arrival in London.

Yep. I was being pretty dumb. I knew all about the problem of the Julian calendar in Britain and the Gregorian on the Continent. And yet I spent several hours racking my brain to try to understand how Maupertuis could have written a letter from Paris after his arrival in London. How I kicked myself when the solution to the conundrum came to me at last in a flash, as I remembered the difference in calendars...

7 November reminds me each year how badly I too can fail. Making it a salutary lesson in the importance of humility. Among the faults people attribute to me, and they are legion, excessive humility is not one that is often mentioned.

So the lesson is invaluable.

Basel: enjoying the present and remembering the past

What a joy it was, to be back in the grand old Swiss city of Basel, built around the elbow of the Rhine when that majestic river turns from its early westward course, to run straight up the map to the North Sea at Rotterdam.

It’s an enchanting and exciting city. That may be a surprise, given the Swiss reputation for stolid respectability. The qualities the nation seem to prefer are hard work and honesty, you might think, not the pursuit of the unorthodox and original.

Well, you’d be mistaken.

The honesty bit is perhaps not quite as obvious as one might imagine, in a country that is home to Nestlé. And Basel itself is a major centre of the pharmaceutical industry, not a sector that has won itself many plaudits for its probity and commitment to equitable behaviour.

Still, on the other side of the coin, I love the fact that Basel can give you sudden and surprising glimpses of a different Switzerland with an attractive sense of humour.

Helvetia on the 2-franc coin, and on her holidays in Basel

In this instance, the other side is that of the 2-franc coin. It shows Helvetia (Switzerland) wearing a cloak and carrying a spear and a shield. One of my favourite spots in Basel has a statue of Helvetia when she decided to take a holiday from the coin. She’s sitting on a low wall with a glorious view of the river below. She has flung her cloak over the wall, and her spear and shield are propped up behind her, next to the suitcase she’s travelling with.

Also on this visit, I went out for dinner with three colleagues. It was warm enough to eat out of doors, in a lovely courtyard off one of the main squares. And what a delight it was to suddenly find an entire choir from the Music Academy assemble practically next to our table and entertain us for half an hour of a cappella singing. What greater pleasure is there than an unexpected one?

A Choral surprise

Still, it isn’t just for the beauty and charm that I like returning to Basel. It’s also the city closest to the French village where Danielle, later to be my wife, was living when I first met her. At that time, she was at the centre of a group of young people who were open, warm-hearted and fun. Where by ‘fun’ I really mean ‘party animals’.

One of my most vivid memories of that time was driving a Range Rover belonging to people I barely knew, down a woodland lane at night with branches whipping its sides, as I tried to keep up with the far smaller car which Danielle was driving at speed towards a clearing where we could light a fire, cook sausages, drink too much and while away the night listening to young people (well, we were all young, but they were younger) strumming guitars and singing songs about such respectable subjects as the consumption of cocaine (not that they actually took any).

Now, I was in Basel for the most sensible, you could almost say Swiss, of motives. A gentleman called Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis had spent time studying in the city and then kept up a long and voluminous correspondence with his former professor and one of his sons.

I can say without boasting that I was at one time the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis. That really is no boast, because I revelled in that rank simply by virtue of being the world’s only authority on him. Obscure? The term could have been invented for people who suffered his fate: he enjoys the somewhat paradoxical claim to fame that his reputation was destroyed by someone far more talented and celebrated. In Maupertuis’ case, that was Voltaire and let me tell you, when Voltaire destroyed your reputation, it stayed destroyed.

To give you an idea of how Voltaire dealt with his adversaries, let me pass on an anecdote which I’ve never been able to verify but I feel ought to be true: Voltaire is said to have replied to correspondence from a critic, “Sir: I am sitting in the smallest room in the house. Your letter is before me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Back then, I was in Basel to consult the large collection of manuscript letters in the University Library. Now libraries tend to be warm, quiet, tranquil places. Eighteenth-century paper has a peculiar, not unpleasant smell, which has nothing of the stimulant and it. And reading handwriting two and a half centuries old requires a lot of concentration.

If you’ve spent the whole of the previous evening with a bunch of party-goers, and the evening tended to be loosely interpreted so that it extended into the small hours – sometimes the big hours (to give you an idea, this was the only time in my life that I missed seeing the dawn because we were simply too late for it) – then sitting in a library poring over manuscripts is a difficult thing to do without your eyes beginning to close.

There were occasions that I just had to get out, breathe some air and even take a brief nap. The closest place I could go to fulfil both aims was the botanical garden behind the library. An enchanting place. And it had benches.

Sadly, even though I’m far from tall (my father used to tell me I suffered from ‘duck’s disease’ – arse too close to the ground), the benches were too short even for me to be comfortable. I suppose the advantage is that it kept my naps short so that I got back to my manuscripts quickly: it’s hard to sleep much with the edge of a bench digging either into the back of your neck or into your ankles.

In the evening, of course, the partying started all over again.

I made a point of getting back to the Botanical Gardens on this visit. A happy trip up Memory Lane. The memory of discomfort, you see, is far more pleasant than the experience of it…

Bench in the Botanical Garden
Not ideal for sleeping

The Empress, the Wit and the Disappointed

When I first went to university, it was to study Maths and Physics. It didn’t work out. I spent a rather purgatorial time immersed in the politics of the far left – all about ‘having faith in the working class’ which always left me a little uneasy, as I felt the left ought to be about evidence not faith – and even became president of my college students’ union, but at the end of the process I had no degree.

This struck me as annoying, so I immediately signed up to study something completely different. French. That gave my mother a wonderful told-you-so moment: she pointed out that I had always been temperamentally far more suited to the humanities than the sciences. And she was right.

Fortune favours the bold. Sometimes, I find it favours the downright impertinent. At the end of my first year of French studies, I let my professor know that I wanted to do a PhD.

‘Come and see me at the beginning of your fourth year,’ he sagely told me. 

After all, I had a failed degree behind me, and I certainly had something to prove before I could be considered for postgraduate studies. Like graduating, for instance.

Well, I stuck it out. At the beginning of my fourth year, a message trickled through to me that Professor William Barber would like to see me. I made an appointment and dropped in for a chat.

It seemed that he was now open to the idea of my doing a PhD. I was delighted. Why, I’d even chosen the extraordinary man I wanted to study. Denis Diderot, the son of a craftsman, had emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. He was the prime mover of the Encyclopédie: at a time when the belief was that driving knowledge forward was the most important endeavour of mankind, what could be more valuable than to bring all available knowledge together in one easily accessible place – the first Encyclopaedia ever?

Denis Diderot: an extraordinary brain and a delightful wit

But what appealed to me most about Diderot was his extraordinary wit. If you don’t know his Jacques the Fatalist, you should try to find it and read it: it’s rich in lessons about tolerance and decency, and is also one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.

William Barber, my Professor, invited me to sit down.

‘Subject to your getting a sufficiently good degree, I’d be happy to supervise you doing a PhD,’ he told me.

I was delighted.

‘I’d like you to work on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.’

I was disappointed.

Maupertuis was someone I’d heard of, but only because he appeared in two footnotes of a work of Diderot’s. It was a bit of a come down. And yet – William was right. Maupertuis was a scientist as well as a philosopher. My failed studies of science had at least equipped me with enough knowledge to understand his work.

‘Of course,’ William had assured me, ‘you don’t have to choose Maupertuis. But if you want me to supervise you, that’s who I’d like you to work on.’

Since I did want to work with William, I accepted his suggestion. For the next ten years, Maupertuis would dominate my life, as I wrote his Intellectual Biography. He may have been obscure and I may have done little to shine much light on his life, but I enjoyed what I did. There’s also a little pride in having been, however briefly, the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis, which I never would have been on Diderot. That’s big fish in a small pond thinking, I know, but hey, that’s not without its satisfaction.

So, I have no complaints about William’s decision.

On the other hand, I do still sometimes regret not having worked on Diderot. He was so much more attractive a character than Maupertuis. If nothing else, he didn’t take himself half so seriously - Maupertuis had what was no doubt to his mind an accurate estimate, to everyone else a wildly overblown one, of what was due to him.

So it was a pleasure to come across an anecdote about Diderot I was unaware of while reading a biography of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Well, I say reading, but in reality I was listening to it: these days I often find it easier to listen to books than read them. 

Catherine was a great fan of Diderot’s, and even had him come to Russia as a guest for several months.

Diderot did outstanding work but it wasn’t well paid. He was never wealthy. He was devoted to his daughter, the only child he and his wife had after a series of miscarriages. When the daughter reached adulthood, he was anxious to raise a dowry for her. With little material wealth, he decided that all he could do was sell his library. He went looking for 15,000 French pounds (yes, the pound was a French currency too at one time) for it.

Catherine decided to offer him 16,000. But then she attached a condition to the sale. On the grounds that it was wrong to separate a scholar from his books, she insisted that he should keep them for her during his lifetime.

In effect, she had made him a librarian of hers. So she decided to pay him 1000 pounds a year to play that role. That worked fine in the first year, but his pay failed to show up in the second. Catherine, much embarrassed, made up for the oversight, by sending him fifty thousand pounds.

As she told him, that was fifty years’ salary, paid in advance.

Ah, yes. He was a special man, our Diderot. And, to be fair, Catherine was a pretty remarkable woman too.

Catherine the Great
As keen a fan of Diderot as I am. But with the means to prove it