The Most Bizarre Calendar Ever
The French Republican Calendar
Hello everyone!
Buckle up, folks, because it’s going to be a wild ride. And by the end, you’ll probably be questioning the nature of time itself.
A Little Backstory
It’s 1793, in Paris, France. The French Revolution is in full swing, having started four years earlier. The king has just been executed, and the Convention (France’s first government after the monarchy, with a single chamber of assembly) is in the midst of purging the perceived enemies of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. This includes, of course, anything royal, but also the Catholic Church (which Enlightenment-inspired revolutionaries complained had too much power). The Catholic Church would be completely banned from the country a year later. But, it wasn’t just the obvious signs of religious power that the Convention was concerned about; it was also the more implicit manifestations of religion that, to this day, permeate our daily lives. Case in point?
The Gregorian Calendar.
The Gregorian Calendar is the most-used calendar in the world today. I’m going to make the safe assumption that you readers are familiar with it somewhat, even if I can’t ever seem remember which months have 30 days and which have 31. This calendar was in fact the Catholic Church’s official calendar - it got its name from Pope Gregory XIII, who created it in 1582. To the French revolutionaries, this was a clear sign of undue Church influence. They also considered it to be simply an inefficient way of keeping time and dates. Their solution?
To make perhaps the single most extensive change to timekeeping in hundreds of years:
They created The French Republican Calendar.
Chaos Begins
The French Republican Calendar is unlike any calendar you’ll have ever seen, and frankly even after my research it still doesn’t make sense. But, I’ll do my best to explain it.
This calendar has 12 months. It has days and weeks. It has hours, minutes, and seconds. Aaand… we have reached the end of the similarities with our calendar.
For starters, all 12 months were renamed. They also weren’t at the same time of season as they used to be - the first month started was Vendémiaire (meaning “vintage”), corresponding to roughly October-September (each month was 30 days, and they weren’t aligned with the Gregorian Calendar. This is followed by Brumaire (“mist”), Frimaire (“frost”), Nivôse (“snow”), Pluviôse (“rain”), Ventôse (“wind”), Germinal (“seedtime”), Floréal (“blossom”), Prairial (“meadow”), Messidor (“harvest”) Thermidor (“heat”), and Fructidor (“fruits”). If you haven’t already guessed, almost everything named here, and going forward, is related to nature or agriculture; the French revolutionaries were nature-loving Enlightenment students after all. Within these months, every single day has a different name, mostly after plants. I’m not going to list them all, but I’ll show you the amusing highlights: the 30th of Pluviôse (18th of Feb.) is “sleigh,” meaning exactly what it sounds like. The 3rd of Fuctidor is “puffball,” a kind of plant with the best name ever. I’d love to be able to say “happy puffball!” The 20th of Messidor is “livestock pen,” not exactly the first thing I’d consider if I got to name a day. And finally, to top it all off, the 5th of Nivôse is a dog, and I sincerely hope that they treated it as a holiday for canines (I don’t have any evidence for this). I cannot imagine how hard it must’ve been for people to suddenly start trying to remember 360 names for individual days.
Each of these days was organized into 10-day weeks, making it an even three weeks for each month. The thing is, they called weeks “decades.” Considering that the French word for an actual decade is une décade, there was bound to be confusion as to whether the birthday party was in 10 days or 10 years. Each day was 10 hours long, and each hour was 100 minutes long. Each minute was, in turn, 100 seconds long. Since this system was called the decimal system, a minute was now a “decimal minute,” as were seconds. This, um, interesting calendar was put before the Convention on 20 September 1793, but the director of the Convention recommended that the first day and year of the calendar be made to start on the 22nd of September 1792, a year earlier, to commemorate the declaration of the Republic. The proposed calendar was accepted save some name changes (the ones I mentioned above are all from the revised version; the original named some dates after French Revolution leaders and events). The French Republican Calendar was now the official calendar of France.
Aftermath
As you might expect, the French Republican Calendar was received… poorly. Few people wanted to make the drastic changes the calendar demanded, and watchmakers were in an understandable panic. The Convention had tried to make the calendar exciting by adding new holidays, but they later admitted, “the people detest our national festivals.” People ignored the removal of the no-work Sunday, and plenty of people still observed it. The public, many of whom were Catholic, did not see the removal of the Catholic Church with as much positivity as the new government did. Politicians began criticizing the change as being tyrannical and everything the French people didn’t want. Somehow, thanks to the efforts of a few hard-core revolutionaries, the French Republican Calendar managed to create chaos for 13 whole years, before Emperor Napoleon finally re-instated the Gregorian Calendar and the Catholic Church in 1806. There was another Paris Commune in 1871, where the old calendar was brought back for 18 days, but by and large the French Republican Calendar was finished.
Happy 1st of Brumaire, the day of the apple, everyone.
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/list/the-12-months-of-the-french-republican-calendar
https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/the-republican-calendar/
https://www.worldhistory.org/French_Republican_Calendar/
https://www.wired.com/2011/09/0922revolutionary-calendar/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/15247
https://daily.jstor.org/why-the-french-revolutions-rational-calendar-wasnt/