In the autumn of 1793, France abolished Sunday. Also Monday, the month of October, the year 1793 itself and, for good measure, the sixty-minute hour. A Parisian who went to bed in a Gregorian world woke to learn that the date was now something like octidi, 18 Vendémiaire, Year II of the Republic, and that the week — henceforth a ten-day 'décade' — would end not with the Sabbath but with a civic rest day called décadi. The same revolutionary decade produced two great rationalisations of measurement. One of them, the metre, went on to conquer the planet. The other, the Republican calendar, was dead within fourteen years. The difference between their fates is a lesson in what people will and will not let politicians standardise.
The calendar was the work of a committee led by the mathematician and politician Gilbert Romme, and it was ideology rendered as arithmetic. Twelve months of exactly thirty days each; every month divided into three décades; the days renamed primidi through décadi. Because twelve thirties make only 360, five extra days — six in leap years — were bolted onto the end of the year as national festivals, cheerfully named the sans-culottides after the Revolution's trouserless militants. Year I was backdated to begin on 22 September 1792, the day the Republic was proclaimed, which happened, with cosmic tidiness, to be the autumn equinox. Even the time of day was decimalised: a decree of 1793 ordered a ten-hour day, with 100-minute hours and 100-second minutes.
Fog, frost and Sneezy
The poetry came from Fabre d'Églantine, an actor and playwright who named the months in seasonal triplets after the weather and the farming year of northern France. Autumn brought Vendémiaire (vintage), Brumaire (fog) and Frimaire (frost); winter Nivôse (snow), Pluviôse (rain) and Ventôse (wind); spring Germinal (seed), Floréal (blossom) and Prairial (meadow); summer Messidor (harvest), Thermidor (heat) and Fructidor (fruit). British satirists, unimpressed, rendered them as Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy and Nippy; Showery, Flowery and Bowery; Hoppy, Croppy and Poppy. The mockery had a point: a calendar calibrated to the skies over Paris made little sense in Marseille, let alone in France's tropical colonies. And in place of the saints' days, each day of the year now honoured something usefully republican — a plant, an animal, a mineral or a farm implement — so that the pious found their name-days replaced by the day of the turnip, the goat or the pickaxe.
The system worked beautifully on paper and almost nowhere else. Decimal time collapsed first: hardly anyone owned a ten-hour clock, few clockmakers wanted to make one, and the requirement was suspended in 1795 after barely a year of official life. The calendar limped on far longer, but it had made an enemy of nearly everyone. Workers discovered that one rest day in ten was a distinctly worse bargain than one in seven. The devout resented a scheme designed precisely to detach daily life from the Church. Merchants had to keep two sets of dates to trade with the rest of Europe. Once Napoleon had made his peace with the papacy, the experiment's fate was sealed: France returned to the Gregorian calendar on 1 January 1806.
What survived the wreck
Yet the calendar's ghost is all over the history books, because the Revolution's convulsions are still named by its dates. Robespierre fell on 9 Thermidor Year II — 27 July 1794 — which is why historians speak of the 'Thermidorian reaction', and why, via a later hit play called Thermidor, a lobster dish carries the name. Napoleon seized power in the coup of 18 Brumaire. Émile Zola called his great mining novel Germinal, the month of the seed, promising spring after a long winter. The calendar even rose briefly from the dead: the Paris Commune of 1871 dated some of its pronouncements to Year 79. Its creators fared worse than their creation — Fabre d'Églantine went to the guillotine with Danton in 1794, and Romme stabbed himself in 1795 rather than face execution.
The metre, meanwhile, thrived — defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator on the meridian through Paris, and eventually adopted by nearly every nation on earth. The contrast is instructive. The metre asked people to change how they measured cloth and grain; the calendar asked them to change when they rested, prayed and celebrated — to surrender the rhythm of their lives to the state. Humanity, it turns out, will decimalise almost anything except its Sundays.
Quiz nuggets
- The French Republican calendar had twelve 30-day months divided into ten-day weeks called décades, plus five or six festival days known as the sans-culottides.
- Year I was backdated to 22 September 1792 — the proclamation of the Republic, and conveniently the autumn equinox.
- The month names, including Brumaire (fog), Nivôse (snow) and Thermidor (heat), were coined by the playwright Fabre d'Églantine, who was guillotined in 1794.
- Decimal time — a ten-hour day with 100-minute hours — was decreed in 1793 and suspended in 1795.
- Napoleon scrapped the calendar from 1 January 1806; the Paris Commune briefly revived it in 1871, dating documents to Year 79.