During the French Revolution, the Republican Calendar introduced a new dating system and new month names to express a break with the old regime. The names referred to seasons, weather, and agriculture. Each month comprised three ten-day periods, affecting rest days and religious routines. The calendar was later abolished, illustrating how systems of time can become subjects of political reform.
History
The National Constituent Assembly at first intended to create a new calendar marking the "era of Liberty", beginning on 14 July 1789, the date of the storming of the Bastille. However, on 2 January 1792 its successor the Legislative Assembly decided that Year IV of Liberty had begun the day before. Year II had therefore begun on 1 January 1790.
On 21 September 1792 the French First Republic was proclaimed, and the new National Convention decided that 1792 was to be known as Year I of the French Republic. It decreed on 2 January 1793 that Year II of the Republic had begun the day before. However, the new calendar as adopted by the Convention in October 1793 made 22 September 1792 the first day of Year I. The Common Era, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, was abolished and replaced with l'ère républicaine, the Republican Era, signifying the "age of reason" overcoming superstition, as part of the campaign of dechristianisation.
The calendar is frequently named the "French Revolutionary Calendar" because it was created during the revolution, but this is a slight misnomer. In France, it is known as the calendrier républicain as well as the calendrier révolutionnaire. There was initially a debate as to whether the calendar should celebrate the revolution, which began in July 1789, or the Republic, which was established in 1792. Immediately following 14 July 1789, papers and pamphlets started calling 1789 year I of Liberty and the following years II and III.
Development and usage
The days of the French Revolution and First French Republic saw many efforts to sweep away various trappings of the ancien régime (the old feudal monarchy); some of these were more successful than others. The new Republican government sought to institute, among other reforms, a new social and legal system, a new system of weights and measures (which became the metric system), and a new calendar.
Amid nostalgia for the ancient Roman Republic, the theories of the Age of Enlightenment were at their peak, and the devisers of the new systems looked to nature for their inspiration. Natural constants, multiples of ten, and Latin as well as Ancient Greek derivations formed the fundamental blocks from which the systems were built.
The calendar was created by a commission under the direction of the politician Gilbert Romme seconded by Claude Joseph Ferry fr and Charles-François Dupuis. They associated with their work chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, astronomer Jérôme Lalande, mathematician Gaspard Monge, astronomer and naval geographer Alexandre Guy Pingré, and poet, actor and playwright Fabre d'Églantine (who invented the names of the months) with the help of André Thouin (gardener at the Jardin des plantes of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris).
Design
Years usually appear in writing as Roman numerals. Roman numeral I indicates the first year of the republic, that is, the year before the calendar actually came into use. By law, the beginning of each year was set at midnight, beginning on the day the apparent autumnal equinox falls at the Paris Observatory.
There were twelve months, each divided into three 10-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the solar or tropical year were placed after the final month of each year and called complementary days. This arrangement was an almost exact copy of the calendar used by the Ancient Egyptians, though in their case the year did not begin and end on the autumnal equinox.
A period of four years ending on a leap day was to be called a "Franciade". The name "Olympique" was originally proposed but changed to Franciade to commemorate the fact that it had taken the revolution four years to establish a republican government in France. The leap year was called Sextile, an allusion to the "bissextile" leap years of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, because it contained a sixth complementary day.