Rickard wrote:
The meter, quite obviously, is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
At the beginning, It was the 1/10000000 part of the distance between equator and pole. 
* 1791 March 30 ? The French National Assembly accepts the proposal by the French Academy of Sciences that the new definition for the metre be equal to one ten-millionth of the length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one-fourth the polar circumference of the earth).