The greatest social upheaval in recent history culminated 209 years ago in the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14th, 1789. With the cry "La Bastille est prise, et les portes sont ouvertes," the French Revolution had begun.
After a short time the monarchy had been abolished and the Republic proclaimed, and then literally at a more day-today level, popular opinion favoured a radical change in the civil calendar, to divorce it entirely from any traditional connections.
The old arrangements for dividing up the year, redolent as they were of gods and Roman emperors, must be abolished; the Academy of Sciences was ordered to produce a suitable alternative and a new revolutionary calendar was unveiled in September, 1793.
Revolutionary it was indeed, in every sense. Its 12 months were uniformly 30 days in length, and were given pretty names intended to reflect their character - like germinal, or "seed-time" which began in March, and thermidor for the sultry days that coincided with the height of summer. Many of the names were meteorological: the month beginning in what used to be October, for example, became brumaire or "mist"; "frost", or frimaire, began in November, followed by "snow", or nivose, in December, "rain" or pluviose in January, and "wind", ventose, in what had once been February.
Since the 12 months together amounted to only 360 days, the extra five or six required to keep in step with Nature were added here and there and designated festivals or public holidays. These were not, as might have been the case in many countries, sacred to the memory of long-forgotten national saints or heroes, but were intended to encapsulate the very spirit of the Revolution itself; they were dedicated respectively to virtue, genius, labour, opinion and rewards.
The seven-day week was totally abandoned, and each month was divided into three decades, with the last day of each decade being a rest day. Each member of the new 10day week was given a nice new name - that of an animal, a tree or flower.
The new calendar, however, never quite caught on. It was widely used for a time in conducting the affairs of State, but the ordinary people found it hard to change from the Gregorian system they were long accustomed to; one of their complaints was that they now had only one day off in 10, instead of one in seven. The experiment was finally abandoned on January 1st, 1806, when the Emperor Napoleon proclaimed that henceforth "le calendrier gregorien sera mis en usage dans tout l'empire francais".