TheFrench Republican calendar (French:calendrier républicain français), also commonly called theFrench Revolutionary calendar (calendrier révolutionnaire français), was acalendar created and implemented during theFrench Revolution and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by theParis Commune in 1871, meant to replace theGregorian calendar.[1] The calendar consisted of twelve 30-day months, each divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, plus five or sixintercalary days at the end to fill out the balance of asolar year. It was designed in part to remove all religious androyalist influences from the calendar, and it was part of a larger attempt atdechristianisation anddecimalisation in France (which also includeddecimal time of day,decimalisation of currency, andmetrication). It was used in government records in France and other areas under French rule, includingBelgium,Luxembourg, and parts of theNetherlands,Germany,Switzerland,Malta, andItaly.
TheNational Constituent Assembly at first intended to create a new calendar marking the "era of Liberty", beginning on 14 July 1789, the date of thestorming of the Bastille. However, on 2 January 1792 its successor theLegislative Assembly decided that Year IV of Liberty had begun the day before. Year I had therefore begun on 1 January 1789.
On 21 September 1792 theFrench First Republic wasproclaimed, and the newNational 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. TheCommon Era, commemorating the birth ofJesus Christ, was abolished and replaced withl'ère républicaine, the Republican Era, signifying the "age of reason" overcoming superstition, as part of thecampaign 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 thecalendrier républicain as well as thecalendrier 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.[2] Immediately following 14 July 1789, papers and pamphlets started calling 1789 year I of Liberty and the following years II and III. 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 IV 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 calendar, which set 22 September 1793 as the beginning of year II. The establishment of the Republic was used as the epochal date for the calendar; therefore, the calendar commemorates the Republic, and not the Revolution.
TheConcordat of 1801 re-established the Roman Catholic Church as an official institution in France, although not as the state religion of France.[3] The concordat took effect from Easter Sunday, 28 Germinal, Year XI (8 April 1802); it restored the names of the days of the week to the ones from theGregorian calendar, and fixedSunday as the official day of rest and religious celebration.[4] However, the other attributes of the republican calendar, the months, and years, remained as they were.
The First Republic ended with thecoronation of Napoleon I as emperor on 11 Frimaire, Year XIII, or 2 December 1804. Despite this, the republican calendar continued to be used until 1 January 1806, when Napoleon declared it abolished. It was used again briefly in theJournal officiel for some dates during a short period of theParis Commune, 6–23 May 1871 (16 Floréal – 3 Prairial Year LXXIX).[5]
The prominent atheist essayist and philosopherSylvain Maréchal published the first edition of hisAlmanach des Honnêtes-gens (Almanac of Honest People) in 1788.[6] The first month in the almanac is "Mars, ou Princeps" (March, or First), the last month is "Février, ou Duodécembre" (February, or Twelfth). The lengths of the months are the same as those in the Gregorian calendar; however, the 10th, 20th, and 30th days are singled out of each month as the end of adécade (group of ten days). Individual days were assigned, instead of to the traditional saints, to people noteworthy for mostly secular achievements. Later editions of the almanac would switch to the Republican Calendar.[7]
A copy of the French Republican Calendar in the Historical Museum of LausanneExcerpt fromPierre Jacotin'sMap of Egypt (1818), including the dates of Napoleon'ssiege of Jaffa on 13-23 Ventôse VII (3-13 March 1799), and the dates of the retreat to Jaffa after thesiege of Acre on 5-3 Prairial (24-27 May) the same year
The days of theFrench Revolution and First French Republic saw many efforts to sweep away various trappings of theancien régime (the oldfeudal 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 themetric system), and a new calendar.
Amid nostalgia for the ancientRoman Republic, the theories of theAge of Enlightenment were at their peak, and the devisers of the new systems looked to nature for their inspiration. Natural constants, multiples of ten, andLatin as well asAncient Greek derivations formed the fundamental blocks from which the systems were built.
French coins of the period used the calendar. Many show the year (French:an) inArabic numerals, althoughRoman numerals were used on some issues. Year 11 coins typically have a "XI" date to avoid confusion with the Roman "II".
L AN 2 DE LA REPUBLIQUE FR (Year 2 of the French Republic) on a barn near Geneva, dating to 1793 or 17941 Floréal, Year 79 issue ofLe Fils du Père Duchêne, a newspaper published during theParis Commune.
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 apparentautumnal equinox falls at the Paris Observatory.
There were twelve months, each divided into three 10-day weeks calleddécades. The tenth day,décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the solar ortropical year were placed after the final month of each year and calledcomplementary days. This arrangement was an almost exact copy of thecalendar 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[9] but changed to Franciade to commemorate the fact that it had taken the revolution four years to establish a republican government in France.[10] The leap year was calledSextile, an allusion to the "bissextile"leap years of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, because it contained a sixth complementary day.
Each day 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 (2.4 times as long as a conventional hour), a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds (44% longer than a conventional minute), and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds (13.6% shorter than a conventional second).Clocks were manufactured to display thisdecimal 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.[11] The numbering of years by Roman numerals ran counter to this general decimalisation tendency.
The month names were based on nature, principally having to do with the prevailing weather in and around Paris and sometimes evoking the MedievalLabours of the Months. The extra five or six days in the year were not given a month designation but consideredSansculottides orcomplementary days. Most of the month names were new words coined from French, Latin, or Greek. The endings of the names were grouped by season.-dor comes fromδῶρον,dō̂ron means 'giving' in Greek.[12]
Autumn:
Vendémiaire (from Frenchvendange, which means 'grape harvest', derived from Latinvindemia 'vintage'), starting 22, 23, or 24 September
Brumaire (from Frenchbrume 'mist', from Latinbrūma 'winter solstice; winter; winter cold'), starting 22, 23, or 24 October
Frimaire (from Frenchfrimas 'frost'), starting 21, 22, or 23 November
Winter:
Nivôse (from Latinnivosus 'snowy'), starting 21, 22, or 23 December
Pluviôse (from Frenchpluvieux, derived from Latinpluvius 'rainy'), starting 20, 21, or 22 January
Ventôse (from Frenchventeux, derived from Latinventosus 'windy'), starting 19, 20, or 21 February
Spring:
Germinal (from Frenchgermination), starting 21 or 22 March
Floréal (from Frenchfleur, derived from Latinflos 'flower'), starting 20 or 21 April
Prairial (from Frenchprairie 'meadow'), starting 20 or 21 May
Summer:
Messidor (from Latinmessis 'harvest'), starting 19 or 20 June
Thermidor (from Greekθέρμη,thermē, 'summer heat'), starting 19 or 20 July; on many printed calendars of Year II (1793–94), the month ofThermidor was namedFervidor (from Latinfervidus, "burning hot")
Fructidor (from Latinfructus 'fruit'), starting 18 or 19 August
French Revolutionarypocket watch showing ten-daydécade names and thirty-day month numbers from the Republican Calendar, but with duodecimal time. On display at theMusée d'Art et d'Histoire (Neuchâtel) In Switzerland.
Each month was divided into threedécades or "weeks" of ten days each, named:
primidi (first day)
duodi (second day)
tridi (third day)
quartidi (fourth day)
quintidi (fifth day)
sextidi (sixth day)
septidi (seventh day)
octidi (eighth day)
nonidi (ninth day)
décadi (tenth day)
Décadis became an official day of rest instead of Sunday, in order to diminish the influence of the RomanCatholic Church. They were used for the festivals of a succession of new religions meant to replace Catholicism: theCult of Reason, theCult of the Supreme Being, theDecadary Cult, andTheophilanthropy.Christian holidays were officially abolished in favor of revolutionary holidays. The law of 13 Fructidor year VI (30 August 1798) required that marriages must only be celebrated on décadis. This law was applied from the 1st Vendémiaire year VII (22 September 1798) to 28 Pluviôse year VIII (17 February 1800).[citation needed]
Five extra days – six in leap years – were national holidays at the end of every year. These were originally known asles sans-culottides (aftersans-culottes), but after year III (1795) asles jours complémentaires:
1st complementary day:La Fête de la Vertu, "Celebration of Virtue", on 17 or 18 September
2nd complementary day:La Fête du Génie, "Celebration of Talent", on 18 or 19 September
3rd complementary day:La Fête du Travail, "Celebration of Labour", on 19 or 20 September
4th complementary day:La Fête de l'Opinion, "Celebration of Convictions", on 20 or 21 September
5th complementary day:La Fête des Récompenses, "Celebration of Honours (Awards)", on 21 or 22 September
6th complementary day:La Fête de la Révolution, "Celebration of the Revolution", on 22 or 23 September (on leap years only)
The Roman Catholic Church used acalendar of saints, which named each day of the year after an associatedsaint. 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 therural economy, stated to correspond to the time of year. Everydécadi (ending in 0) was named after an agricultural tool. Eachquintidi (ending in 5) 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.[15][16]
Our starting point was the idea of celebrating, through the calendar, the agricultural system, and of leading the nation back to it, marking the times and the fractions of the year by intelligible or visible signs taken from agriculture and the rural economy. (...)
As the calendar is something that we use so often, we must take advantage of this frequency of use to put elementary notions of agriculture before the people – to show the richness of nature, to make them love the fields, and to methodically show them the order of the influences of the heavens and of the products of the earth.
The priests assigned the commemoration of a so-called saint to each day of the year: this catalogue exhibited neither utility nor method; it was a collection of lies, of deceit or of charlatanism.
We thought that the nation, after having kicked out this canonised mob from its calendar, must replace it with the objects that make up the true riches of the nation, worthy objects not from a cult, but from agriculture – useful products of the soil, the tools that we use to cultivate it, and the domesticated animals, our faithful servants in these works; animals much more precious, without doubt, to the eye of reason, than the beatified skeletons pulled from the catacombs of Rome.
So we have arranged in the column of each month, the names of the real treasures of the rural economy. The grains, the pastures, the trees, the roots, the flowers, the fruits, the plants are arranged in the calendar, in such a way that the place and the day of the month that each product occupies is precisely the season and the day that Nature presents it to us.
— Fabre d'Églantine, "Rapport fait à la Convention nationale au nom de la Commission chargée de la confection du Calendrier",[17] Imprimerie nationale, 1793
Clock dial displaying both decimal and duodecimal time
Leap years in the calendar are a point of great dispute, due to the contradicting statements in the establishing decree[18] stating:
Each year begins at midnight, with the day on which the true autumnal equinox falls for theParis Observatory.
and:
The four-year period, after which the addition of a day is usually necessary, is called theFranciade in memory of the revolution which, after four years of effort, led France to republican government. The fourth year of theFranciade is calledSextile.
These two specifications are incompatible, as leap years defined by the autumnal equinox in Paris do not recur on a regular four-year schedule. It was erroneously believed that one leap day would be skipped automatically every 129 years,[19] on average, but actually five years would sometimes pass between leap years, about three times per century. Thus, the years III, VII, and XI were observed as leap years, and the years XV and XX were also planned as such, even though they were five years apart.
Clock dial displaying both decimal (inside the circle) and duodecimal time (on the outer rim)
A fixed arithmetic rule for determining leap years was proposed by Delambre and presented to the Committee of Public Education by Romme on 19 Floréal An III (8 May 1795). The proposed rule was to determine leap years by applying the rules of the Gregorian calendar to the years of the French Republic (years IV, VIII, XII, etc. were to be leap years) except that year 4000 (the last year of ten 400-year periods) should be a common year instead of a leap year. Shortly thereafter, Romme was sentenced to the guillotine and committed suicide, and the proposal was never adopted, althoughJérôme Lalande repeatedly proposed it for a number of years. The proposal was intended to avoid uncertain future leap years caused by the inaccurate astronomical knowledge of the 1790s (even today, this statement is still valid due to the uncertainty inΔT). In particular, the committee noted that the autumnal equinox of year 144 was predicted to occur at 11:59:40 pmlocal apparent time in Paris, which was closer to midnight than its inherent 3 to 4 minute uncertainty.
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.
Both the era and the beginning of the year were chosen to commemorate a historical event that 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 notes that the 10-day décade was unpopular and had already been suppressed three years earlier in favor of the seven-day week, removing what was considered by some as one of the calendar's main benefits.[20] 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 (thus 36 full days and 36 half days in a year, for a total of 54 free days, compared to the usual 52 or 53 Sundays). It also, by design, conflicted with Sunday religious observances.
Another criticism of the calendar was that despite the poetic names of its months, they were tied to the climate and agriculture ofmetropolitan France and therefore not applicable toFrance's overseas territories.[21]
The following pictures, showing twelve allegories for the months, were illustrated by French painterLouis Lafitte and engraved bySalvatore Tresca [fr].[22]
The Republican Calendar was abolished in the year XIV (1805). After this year, there are two historically attested calendars which may be used to determine dates. Both calendars gave the same dates for years 17 to 52 (1808–1844), always beginning on 23 September, and it was suggested, but never adopted, that the reformed calendar be implemented during this period, before the Republican Calendar was abolished.
Republican Calendar: The only legal calendar during the Republic. The first day of the year, 1 Vendémiaire, is always the day the autumn equinox occurs in Paris. About every 30 years, leap years are 5 years apart instead of 4, as happened between the leap years 15 and 20.[24] The lengths of the first 524 years were calculated byJean Baptiste Joseph Delambre.
Reformed Republican Calendar: Following a proposal by Delambre in order to make leap years regular and predictable, with leap years being every year divisible by 4, except years divisible by 100 and not by 400. Years divisible by 4000 would also be ordinary years. Intended to be implemented in year 3, the reformed calendar was abandoned after the death of Romme, the head of the calendar committee. This calendar also has the benefit that every year in the third century of the Republican Era (1992–2091) begins on 22 September.[25]
ER
AD/CE
Republican
Reformed
XV (15)
1806
23 September
23 September
XVI (16)
1807
24 September*
23 September
XVII (17)
1808
23 September
23 September*
XVIII (18)
1809
23 September
23 September
XIX (19)
1810
23 September
23 September
XX (20)
1811
23 September
23 September
CCXXIX (229)
2020
22 September
22 September*
CCXXX (230)
2021
22 September
22 September
CCXXXI (231)
2022
23 September*
22 September
CCXXXII (232)
2023
23 September
22 September
CCXXXIII (233)
2024
22 September
22 September*
CCXXXIV (234)
2025
22 September
22 September
CCXXXV (235)
2026
23 September*
22 September
CCXXXVI (236)
2027
23 September
22 September
CCXXXVII (237)
2028
22 September
22 September*
CCXXXVIII (238)
2029
22 September
22 September
CCXXXIX (239)
2030
22 September
22 September
CCXL (240)
2031
23 September*
22 September
CCXLI (241)
2032
22 September
22 September*
Leap years are highlighted
Extra (sextile) day inserted before date, due to previous leap year
For this calendar, Delambre's revised 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 mean time, which is 9 minutes 21 seconds (6.49 decimal minutes) ahead ofGreenwich Mean Time. (This tool calibrates the time.)
^Sylvain, Maréchal (1836).Almanach des Honnêtes-gens. Gallica. pp. 14–15.Archived from the original on 3 September 2015. Retrieved3 June 2014 – via gallica.bnf.fr.
^James Guillaume,Procès-verbaux du Comité d'instruction publique de la Convention nationale, t. I, pp. 227–228 et t. II, pp. 440–448; Michel Froechlé, " Le calendrier républicain correspondait-il à une nécessité scientifique ? ", Congrès national des sociétés savantes : scientifiques et sociétés, Paris, 1989, pp. 453–465.
^Le calendrier républicain: de sa création à sa disparition. Bureau des longitudes. 1994. p. 26.ISBN978-2-910015-09-1.
^Le calendrier républicain: de sa création à sa disparition. Bureau des longitudes. 1994. p. 36.ISBN978-2-910015-09-1.
^Richard A. Carrigan, Jr. "Decimal Time".American Scientist, (May–June 1978),66(3): 305–313.
