French Republican calendar


The French Republican calendar, also commonly called the French Revolutionary calendar, was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871. The revolutionary system was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and was part of a larger attempt at decimalisation in France. It was used in government records in France and other areas under French rule, including Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Malta, and Italy.

Overview and origins

Precursor

, prominent anticlerical atheist, published the first edition of his Almanach des Honnêtes-gens in 1788. The first month in the almanac is "Mars, ou Princeps", the last month is "Février, ou Duodécembre". The lengths of the months are the same as those in the Gregorian calendar; however, the 10th, 20th, and 30th are singled out of each month as the end of a décade. Individual days were assigned, instead of to the traditional saints, to noteworthy people. Later editions of the almanac would switch to the Republican Calendar.

History

The days of the French Revolution and Republic saw many efforts to sweep away various trappings of the ancien régime ; 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, and a new calendar. Amid nostalgia for the ancient Roman Republic, the theories of the 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 new systems were built.
The new calendar was created by a commission under the direction of the politician Charles-Gilbert Romme seconded by Claude Joseph Ferry and Charles-François Dupuis. They associated with their work the chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, the mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, the astronomer Joseph Jérôme Lefrançois de Lalande, the mathematician Gaspard Monge, the astronomer and naval geographer Alexandre Guy Pingré, and the 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. As the rapporteur of the commission, Charles-Gilbert Romme presented the new calendar to the Jacobin-controlled National Convention on 23 September 1793, which adopted it on 24 October 1793 and also extended it to its epoch of 22 September 1792. It is because of his position as rapporteur of the commission that the creation of the republican calendar is attributed to Romme.
The calendar is frequently named the "French Revolutionary Calendar" because it was created during the Revolution, but this is a slight misnomer. Indeed, there was initially a debate as to whether the calendar should celebrate the Great 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 of Liberty and the following years and. It was in 1792, with the practical problem of dating financial transactions, that the legislative assembly was confronted with the problem of the calendar. Originally, the choice of epoch was either 1 January 1789 or 14 July 1789. After some hesitation the assembly decided on 2 January 1792 that all official documents would use the "era of Liberty" and that the year of Liberty started on 1 January 1792. This usage was modified on 22 September 1792 when the Republic was proclaimed and the Convention decided that all public documents would be dated Year I of the French Republic. The decree of 2 January 1793 stipulated that the year II of the Republic began on 1 January 1793; this was revoked with the introduction of the new calendar, which set 22 September 1793 as the beginning of year. The establishment of the Republic was used as the epochal date for the calendar; therefore, the calendar commemorates the Republic, not the Revolution. In France, it is known as the calendrier républicain as well as the calendrier révolutionnaire.
French coins of the period naturally used this calendar. Many show the year in Arabic numbers, although Roman numerals were used on some issues. Year 11 coins typically have a date to avoid confusion with the Roman.
The French Revolution is usually considered to have ended with the coup of 18 Brumaire, Year , the coup d'état of Napoleon Bonaparte against the established constitutional regime of the Directoire.
The Concordat of 1801 re-established the Roman Catholic Church as an official institution in France, although not as the state religion of France. The concordat took effect from Easter Sunday, 28 Germinal, Year ; it restored the names of the days of the week to the ones from the Gregorian Calendar, and fixed Sunday as the official day of rest and religious celebration. However, the other attributes of the republican calendar, the months, and years, remained as they were.
The French Republic ended with the coronation of Napoleon I as Empereur des Français on 11 Frimaire, Year , but the republican calendar would remain in place for another year. Napoleon finally abolished the republican calendar with effect from 1 January 1806, a little over twelve years after its introduction. It was, however, used again briefly in the Journal officiel for some dates during a short period of the Paris Commune, 6–23 May 1871.

Calendar design

Years appear in writing as Roman numerals, with epoch 22 September 1792, the beginning of the "Republican Era". As a result, 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 ten-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 months at the end 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 beginning of the year was marked by the summer solstice rather than 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.

Decimal time

Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was 144 conventional minutes, a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds, and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds.
Clocks were manufactured to display this decimal time, but it did not catch on. Mandatory use of decimal time was officially suspended 7 April 1795, although some cities continued to use decimal time as late as 1801.
The numbering of years in the Republican Calendar by Roman numerals ran counter to this general decimalization tendency.

Months

The Republican calendar year began the day the autumnal equinox occurred in Paris, and had twelve months of 30 days each, which were given new names based on nature, principally having to do with the prevailing weather in and around Paris. The extra five or six days in the year were not given a month designation, but considered Sansculottides or [|Complementary Days].
Note: On many printed calendars of Year II, the month of Thermidor was named Fervidor.
Most of the month names were new words coined from French, Latin, or Greek. The endings of the names are grouped by season. "Dor" means "giving" in Greek.
In Britain, a contemporary wit mocked the Republican Calendar by calling the months: :wikt:wheezy|Wheezy, :wikt:sneezy|Sneezy and :wikt:freezy|Freezy; :wikt:slippy|Slippy, :wikt:drippy|Drippy and :wikt:nippy|Nippy; :wikt:showery|Showery, :wikt:flowery|Flowery and :wikt:bowery|Bowery; :wikt:hoppy|Hoppy, :wikt:croppy|Croppy and :wikt:poppy|Poppy. The historian Thomas Carlyle suggested somewhat more serious English names in his 1837 work , namely Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, Reapidor, Heatidor, and Fruitidor. Like the French originals, they are neologisms suggesting a meaning related to the season.

Ten days of the week

The month is divided into three décades or "weeks" of ten days each, named simply:
Décades were abandoned in Floréal an X.

Rural calendar

The Catholic Church used a calendar of saints, which named each day of the year after an associated saint. To reduce the influence of the Church, Fabre d'Églantine introduced a Rural Calendar in which each day of the year had a unique name associated with the rural economy, stated to correspond to the time of year. Every décadi was named after an agricultural tool. Each quintidi was named for a common animal. The rest of the days were named for "grain, pasture, trees, roots, flowers, fruits" and other plants, except for the first month of winter, Nivôse, during which the rest of the days were named after minerals.

Autumn

Winter

Spring

Summer

Complementary days

Five extra days – six in leap years – were national holidays at the end of every year. These were originally known as les sans-culottides, but after year III as les jours complémentaires:
Below are the Gregorian dates each Republican year began while the calendar was in effect.
AnGregorian
I 22 September 1792
II 22 September 1793
III 22 September 1794
IV 23 September 1795*
V 22 September 1796
VI 22 September 1797
VII 22 September 1798
VIII 23 September 1799*
IX 23 September 1800
X 23 September 1801
XI 23 September 1802
XII 24 September 1803*
XIII 23 September 1804
XIV 23 September 1805
* Extra day inserted before date, due to previous leap year
The calendar was abolished in the year XIV. After this date, opinions seem to differ on the method by which the leap years would have been determined if the calendar were still in force. There are at least four hypotheses used to convert dates from the Gregorian calendar:
The following table shows when several years of the Republican Era begin on the Gregorian calendar, according to each of the four above methods:
AnAD/CEEquinoxRommeContinuous128-Year

XV
1806
23 September
23 September
23 September
23 September

XVI
1807
24 September*
23 September
24 September*
24 September*

XVII
1808
23 September
23 September*
23 September
23 September

XVIII
1809
23 September
23 September
23 September
23 September

XIX
1810
23 September
23 September
23 September
23 September

XX
1811
23 September
23 September
24 September*
23 September
-

CCXXVI
2017
22 September
22 September
22 September
23 September

CCXXVII
2018
23 September*
22 September
22 September
23 September

CCXXVIII
2019
23 September
22 September
23 September*
23 September

CCXXIX
2020
22 September
22 September*
22 September
23 September*
* Extra day inserted before date, due to previous leap year

Current date and time

For this calendar, the Romme method of calculating leap years is used. Other methods may differ by one day. Time may be cached and therefore not accurate. Decimal time is according to Paris meantime, which is 9 minutes 21 seconds ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

Criticism and shortcomings

in the calendar are a point of great dispute, due to the contradicting statements in the establishing decree stating:
and:
These two specifications are incompatible, as leap years defined by the autumnal equinox in Paris do not recur on a regular four-year schedule. Thus, the years,, and were observed as leap years, and the years and were also planned as such, even though they were five years apart.
A fixed arithmetic rule for determining leap years was proposed in the name of the Committee of Public Education by Gilbert Romme on 19 Floréal An . The proposed rule was to determine leap years by applying the rules of the Gregorian calendar to the years of the French Republic except that year 4000 should be a common year instead of a leap year. Shortly thereafter, he was sentenced to the guillotine, and his proposal was never adopted and the original astronomical rule continued, which excluded any other fixed arithmetic rule. The proposal was intended to avoid uncertain future leap years caused by the inaccurate astronomical knowledge of the 1790s. In particular, the committee noted that the autumnal equinox of year 144 was predicted to occur at 11:59:40 pm local apparent time in Paris, which was closer to midnight than its inherent 3 to 4 minute uncertainty.
The calendar was abolished by an act dated 22 Fructidor an and signed by Napoleon, which referred to a report by Michel-Louis-Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély and Jean Joseph Mounier, listing two fundamental flaws.
  1. The rule for leap years depended upon the uneven course of the sun, rather than fixed intervals, so that one must consult astronomers to determine when each year started, especially when the equinox happened close to midnight, as the exact moment could not be predicted with certainty.
  2. Both the era and the beginning of the year were chosen to commemorate an historical event which occurred on the first day of autumn in France, whereas the other European nations began the year near the beginning of winter or spring, thus being impediments to the calendar's adoption in Europe and America, and even a part of the French nation, where the Gregorian calendar continued to be used, as it was required for religious purposes.
The report also noted that the 10-day décade was unpopular and had already been suppressed three years earlier in favor of the 7-day week, removing what was considered by some as one of the calendar's main benefits. The 10-day décade was unpopular with laborers because they received only one full day of rest out of ten, instead of one in seven, although they also got a half-day off on the fifth day. It also, by design, conflicted with Sunday religious observances.
Another criticism of the calendar was that despite the poetic names of its months, they are tied to the climate and agriculture of metropolitan France and therefore not applicable to France's overseas territories.

Famous dates and other cultural references

The "18 Brumaire" or "Brumaire" was the coup d'état of Napoléon Bonaparte on 18 Brumaire An , which many historians consider as the end of the French Revolution. Karl Marx's 1852 essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon compares the coup d'état of 1851 of Louis Napoléon unfavorably to his uncle's earlier coup, with the statement "History repeats... first as tragedy, then as farce".
Another famous revolutionary date is 9 Thermidor An , the date the Convention turned against Robespierre, who, along with others associated with the Mountain, was guillotined the following day. Based on this event, the term "Thermidorian" entered the Marxist vocabulary as referring to revolutionaries who destroy the revolution from the inside and turn against its true aims. For example, Leon Trotsky and his followers used this term about Joseph Stalin.
Émile Zola's novel Germinal takes its name from the calendar's month of Germinal.
The seafood dish Lobster Thermidor was named after the 1891 play Thermidor, set during the Revolution.
The French frigates of the Floréal class all bear names of Republican months.
The Convention of 9 Brumaire An, 30 October 1794, established the École normale supérieure. The date appears prominently on the entrance to the school.
The French composer Fromental Halévy was named after the feast day of 'Fromental' in the Revolutionary Calendar, which occurred on his birthday in year .
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series included a story called "Thermidor" that takes place in that month during the French Revolution.
The Liavek shared world series uses a calendar that is a direct translation of the French Republican calendar.
Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series borrows the Republican calendar for one of the two competing calendars in the fictional city of Mélusine.
Jacques Rivette's 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating refers to the calendar and its hours of the day.
Alain Tanner's 1979 film Messidor presents a haphazard summer road trip of two young women in Switzerland.
The character of Ash Crimson from The King of Fighters takes many of his move names from this calendar, such as Pluviose, Ventôse, Thermidor, Fructidor, and Floréal.
In the french version of Pokémon X and Y, the radial streets of Lumiose City are named Avenue Floréal, Avenue Thermidor, Avenue Ventôse and Avenue Vendémiaire.