French Republican calendar
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The French Republican Calendar or French Revolutionary Calendar was a calendar proposed during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days in 1871 in Paris.
Overview and origins
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 (which became the metric system), and a new calendar. Amid nostalgia for the ancient Roman Republic, the theories of the Enlightenment were at their peak, and the devisors of the new systems looked to nature for their inspiration. Natural constants, multiples of ten, and Latin 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 to 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 proleptically 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.<ref>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.</ref>
The name "French Revolutionary Calendar" refers to the fact that the calendar was created during the Revolution, but is somewhat of a misnomer. Indeed, there was initially a debate as to whether the calendar should celebrate the Revolution, i.e., 1789, or the Republic, i.e., 1792.<ref>Le Calendrier Républicain, Bureau des Longitudes, p. 19, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-910015-09-2</ref> 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. The establishment of the Republic was also used for the final version of 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.
The Concordat of 1801 re-established the Roman Catholic Church in France with effect from Easter Sunday, 18 April 1802, restoring the names of the days of the week with the ones they had in the Gregorian Calendar, while keeping the rest of the Republican Calendar, and fixing Sunday as the official day of rest and religious celebration.<ref>{{
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Napoléon finally abolished the calendar with effect from 1 January 1806 (the day after 10 Nivôse an XIV), a little over twelve years after its introduction. However, it was used again during the brief Paris Commune, 6–23 May 1871 (16 Floréal–3 Prairial An LXXIX).
Many conversion tables and programs exist, largely created by genealogists. Some enthusiasts in France still use the calendar, more out of historical re-enactment than practicalityTemplate:Citation needed.
Some legal texts that were adopted when the Republican Calendar was official are still in force in France and even Belgium (which was at the time incorporated into France) and have kept their original dates for citation purposes.
Calendar design
Years appear in writing as Roman numerals (usually), with epoch 22 September 1792, the beginning of the 'Republican Era' (the day the French First Republic was proclaimed, one day after the Convention abolished the monarchy). As a result, Roman Numeral I indicates the first year of the republic, that is, the year before the calendar actually came into use. The first day of each year was that of the autumnal equinox.
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.
A period of four years ending on a leap day was to be called a "Franciade." The name "Olympique" was originally proposed<ref>Rapport sur l'ère de la République, par G. Romme, Séance de la Convention nationale du 20 septembre 1793, Le Calendrier Républicain, p. 26, Bureau des Longitudes, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-910015-09-2</ref> but changed to Franciade to commemorate the fact that it had taken the revolution four years to establish a republican government in France.<ref> Séance de la Convention nationale du 5 octobre 1793, Article X, Le Calendrier Républicain, p. 36, Bureau des Longitudes, Paris 1994, ISBN 2-910015-09-2. Reproduced in Généalogie et Histoire en France — French Genealogy & History</ref>
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.
