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Crane Brinton on the
French Revolutionary calendar The culmination...of
revolutionary propaganda [was] its new calendar. Almanacs had been from the beginning of
the Revolution a favorite and successful method of spreading the word. Collot d'Herbois
himself had won, with his Almanach du Père Gérard, a prize offered by the Paris
Jacobins for a work to spread the new ideas in simple language.
But for the Jacobins of 1794 it was not enough to print good republican
moral counsels, after the manner of Franklin, at the appropriate dates and seasons. The
whole calendar must be made over. The existing calendar perpetuated the frauds of the
Christian church (Jesus himself was probably a good sans-culotte; all the
nonsense stemmed from Paul), and was highly irrational and inconvenient.
The new calendar, based on a report of Fabre d'Églantine, was adopted by
the Convention in October, 1793. By it the year began on September 22 of the old calendar,
and was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, leaving five days (six in leap
years) over at the end of the last month. These five or six days were to be known as the Sans-culottides,
and were to be a series of national holidays. Each month was divided into three weeks,
called décades, the last day of each décade being set aside as a day
of rest corresponding to the old Sunday.
The months were grouped into four sets of three, by seasons, and given
"natural" names, some of which are rather attractive-- vendémiaire,
brumaire, frimaire (autumn); nivôse, pluviôse, ventôse (winter); germinal,
floréal, prairial (spring); messidor, thermidor, fructidor (summer). The
days of the décade were named arithmetically--primidi, duodi, on to décadi.
In place of the old saints' days, each day was dedicated to a suitable fruit, vegetable,
animal, agricultural implement.
The Sans-culottides were dedicated, the first to Genius, the second to
Labor, the third to Noble Actions, the fourth to Awards, and the fifth to Opinion. This
last was to be a sort of intellectual saturnalia, an opportunity for all citizens to say
and write what they liked about any public man, without fear of the law of libel. The
sixth Sans-culottide of leap years was dedicated to the Revolution, and was to be an
especially solemn and grand affair. The republican era was to date from the declaration of
the republic in September, 1792. When the calendar came into use, the year I had already
elapsed.
In spite of its symmetry and its poetic months of budding and of mist,
the new calendar was not a success, and Napoleon abandoned it in the year XII (1804).
Workingmen preferred one day's rest in seven to one in ten; its terminology, appropriate
to the climate of France, was singularly inappropriate to that of the Southern Hemisphere;
it embodied a new cult, and that cult, though it profoundly influenced Christians then and
since, failed completely to supplant Christian terminology. The calendar and its fate form
in many ways a neat summary of Jacobin history.
--from A Decade of Revolution,
1789-1799 (1934) |
