heated month of.the french revolutionary calendar

The historian Robert Poole makes clear in Past & Present that anecdotes about an eighteenth century mob, distressed over the British Parliament’s deletion of a week and a half from the calendar (necessary to adopting the Gregorian system), yelling “Give us our eleven days!” are apocryphal. The French Republican Calendar had radical precursors. Initiated around 1582 by the Pope whose name it bears, it was adopted by Catholics and then slowly by Protestant and Orthodox states (with Russia a straggler well into the twentieth century). Most radically, the Gregorian Calendar, which corrected astronomical incongruities in the previous system.

The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel described the calendar in a 1972 issue of the American Sociological Review as “the most radical attempt in modern history to challenge the Western standard temporal reference framework.” There had been several amendments since the adoption of a Christian calendar in the sixth century. Their history shows that time resists such taming, and that the old gods are not so easily dispersed. But for two-and-a-half weeks, in May, they tried to reform time along rational lines, to exorcise our days of dead gods and saints. In rocky Montmartre, overlooking the arrondissements of Paris, the radicals of the Commune were about to be violently suppressed by the government. That last use of the revolutionary calendar, in 1871, the year of the Commune, saw the formation of Germany, the sixth year of Reconstruction in the United States, and the publication of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Heated month of.the french revolutionary calendar