That isn't correct. The pendulum definition was actually something called a "universal toise". Burattini suggested defining a unit called the metre based off of this, but it was found to be unworkable because it's not the same everywhere. A toise is ~1.949m.

The metre was _actually_ originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Obviously, that ended up having its own issues, hence the subsequent refinements until we settled on using the speed of light in a vacuum as the basis for it.