'', a newspaper published during the
Paris 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 apparent
autumnal equinox falls at the Paris Observatory. There were twelve months, each divided into three 10-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 final month of each year and called
complementary days. This arrangement was an almost exact copy of the
calendar 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 but changed to Franciade to commemorate the fact that it had taken the revolution four years to establish a republican government in France. 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. 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 this
decimal 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. The numbering of years by Roman numerals ran counter to this general decimalisation tendency.
Months The month names were based on nature, principally having to do with the prevailing weather in and around Paris and sometimes evoking the Medieval
Labours of the Months. The extra five or six days in the year were not given a month designation but considered or
complementary days. Most of the month names were new words coined from French, Latin, or Greek. The endings of the names were grouped by season. comes from , means 'giving' in Greek. Historian
Thomas Carlyle suggests somewhat more serious English names in his 1837 work
The French Revolution: A History, namely Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious, Snowous, Rainous, Windous, Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, Reapidor, Heatidor, and Fruitidor. Like the French originals, they are
neologisms suggesting a meaning related to the season.
Days showing ten-day
décade names and thirty-day month numbers from the Republican Calendar, but with duodecimal time. On display at the
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (Neuchâtel) In Switzerland. Each month was divided into three
décades 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 Roman
Catholic Church. They were used for the festivals of a succession of new religions meant to replace Catholicism: the
Cult of Reason, the
Cult of the Supreme Being, the
Decadary Cult, and
Theophilanthropy.
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). Five extra days – six in leap years – were national holidays at the end of every year. These were originally known as
les sans-culottides (after
sans-culottes), but after year III (1795) as
les 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)
Rural calendar The Roman Catholic Church used a
calendar of saints, which named each day of the year after an associated
saint. 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 the
rural economy, stated to correspond to the time of year. Every
décadi (ending in 0) was named after an agricultural tool. Each
quintidi (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. {{Blockquote|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. == Criticism and shortcomings ==