Another post about calendars

Last month I talked about Leap Year, that adjustment we make to the calendar every four years. I’ve been researching France during the French Revolution and thought I’d talk today about the major adjustment the radical revolutionary republicans made. Not only did they throw out church and king, but the Gregorian calendar used by other European countries as well.

Many many calendar systems ordering days, months, and seasons have been in use worldwide. This post from Wikipedia briefly describes some of them. Some are still in use for religious purposes, like this Hebrew calendar.

The Revolutionary Calendar

The first day of the Republican year was September 22nd, the day the French Republic was established and the autumn equinox. This article from Calendars through the Ages provides more detail on the system created by mathematicians and poets.

While there were twelve months to the year, neatly divided into seasonal groups of three, the measuring of days and weeks changed. Applying a decimal system, days consisted of “ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds – exactly 100,000 seconds per day.” Which doesn’t make any sense to me unless they sped up their second hands.

Each month had three weeks, each consisting of ten days. Since we have a few months in the Gregorian calendar with 31 days, this left a few extra days in the Republican calendar that were tacked on at the end of the year and given special names.

This chart shows the conversion of Republican months to Gregorian.

The Ninth of Thermidor

One of the more famous calendar days was the ninth of Thermidor when adversaries within the French Convention brought down Maximilien Robespierre, an advocate and leader of the Reign of Terror. The lengthy Wikimedia article on Robespierre explains the complex interactions of members of the revolutionary government and ensuing chaos, but here’s an excerpt:

The Law of 22 Prairial introduced on 10 June…led to a doubling of executions in Paris. Moderate judges were dismissed; Robespierre ensured only his supporters became judges, marking the beginning of the “Great Terror”. Between 10 June and 27 July, another 1,366 were executed. [The dates mentioned follow the Gregorian calendar.]

On the ninth of Thermidor, or July 27, 1794 Robespierre was arrested.

The caption of this painting is “the morning of 10 Thermidor”. That certainly looks like Robespierre on the table. He went to the guillotine that same day.

In Fiction

If you enjoy seeing history play out in the fiction you read, check out Joanna Bourne’s The Forbidden Rose. Part of the action takes place in Paris in the days leading up to the ninth of Thermidor, with a British spy hero engineering a great escape from one of the government’s prisons, and a French heroine assisting him from the outside. It’s a great read.

Do you know of any other historical romances set in Paris during this time? Please share in the comments!

Images are from Wikimedia Commons