Little House on the Prairial – An Irishman’s Diary about revolutionary calendars

According to the short-lived French revolutionary calendar, today (May 29th, or 10 Prairial, as it was known) would be the day of the "Scythe". This was in keeping with a system that exalted nature and to a lesser extent work at the expense of religion. In each decimal week, nine days were dedicated to a plant or animal. The 10th – the day of rest, paradoxically – was named for an implement.

Not that the scythe was ever just an implement. In modified form, with the angle of the blade straightened, it became a weapon, like the pike. It was then the “war scythe” – as used, for example, by the Polish and Lithuanian peasants who rose against Russia in 1863. But the classic scythe, with a crooked handle and right-angled blade, was strictly for mowing grass or corn.

Whetstone

We had one on the farm where I grew up, and although it looked like a museum piece even then, it was still used occasionally in places inaccessible to machinery. I used to watch, fascinated, as my father sharpened it with a baton-shaped whetstone – sliding the stone up one side of the blade and down the other in almost continuous motion, until the edge was like a razor.

After that, he could easily persuade it to fell slender swaths of grass or hay, with minimal effort. But whenever I tried, the grass would just lie down under the blade and rise again later unharmed. The only thing I could cut with it reliably were the more brittle thistles and ragwort on the hill behind our house – a job that was delegated to me annually and was guaranteed to produce blistered palms.

Actually, the thistles and ragwort weren’t quite the only thing I ever cut. One day, sweeping the blade through a dense clump of weeds, I heard a yelp.

My blood froze; then a black blur – our pet labrador – shot out of the thicket, tail between legs, and sprinted down the hill like a greyhound on steroids until disappearing into the safety of his kennel.

When I coaxed him out of it later, I was relieved to find he was missing nothing except a tiny section of the tip of his ear. The poor dog. He never quite forgot the trauma, although the scythe was permanently decommissioned soon afterwards.

The revolutionary calendar lasted only about 12 years, until Napoleon abolished it. One of the reasons it failed was that the old Biblical concept of a day’s rest in every seven was more popular, even with atheists, than the decimal system. And yet, 223 years on, it retains a romantic appeal. You can still follow it – literally and metaphorically – via Twitter @JacobinCalendar.

The French weren’t the only revolutionaries to attempt chronological reform. A later generation, the Bolsheviks, had more than one calendar. First they joined western Europe in adopting the Gregorian over the Julian, which is why the “October Revolution” is commemorated in November. Later they made more radical changes, including abolition of Sundays and the introduction of 72 five-day weeks. That system didn’t last either.

The most fanciful new calendar of all, probably, was one devised by the poet Ezra Pound. It too marked a revolution, albeit literary rather than political. It was dedicated to James Joyce, his then hero, and began at the moment (midnight on October 29th, 1921), when Joyce wrote the last word – "yes" – of Ulysses.

Thereafter, for a time, Pound took to dating letters as if that was Day 1 of Year 1 "p.s.U." (post scriptum Ulysses). But he was soon overtaken by another enthusiasm – for Benito Mussolini. And when the Italian fascist devised his own new calendar, Pound adopted that instead. You can still see evidence of Mussolini's system on Milan's central railway station, which according to an inscription was completed in year "IX" of the Era Fascista.

The French calendar had a short second life in the late 19th century, during what it would have insisted was the year 79. In fact that was how the Communards themselves styled it when, after their country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, they declared a people’s republic in Paris.

It happened during what everybody else believed to be the month of May 1871. And the rebels were quickly crushed, reduced to a poignant last stand at Père Lachaise cemetery. There, where that skilled scythe operator, the Grim Reaper, stored his harvests, they were mown down not by blades but by machine guns. They didn't even last until scythe day. The final massacre was on May 28th, aka IX Prairial, the day of "Wild Garlic".

@FrankmcnallyIT