The Revolution's's Overthrow of Time
The French Revolution of 1789 Produced the World's Most Confusing Calendar
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8202bfa2-1378-4805-ad81-5e012a68719f_900x685.jpeg)
When Resentment and Suffering Boiled Over
The French Revolution of 1789 occurred when the court of King Louis XVI was unable to address the mounting frustration of a population going hungry.
Angry crowds with pitchforks, axes, spears and a few firearms were able to overcome military units guarding the Bastile in Paris. Violence ensued as mobs of poor people rioted against the upper classes, looting and destroying some of the homes of the wealthy. Blood ran in the streets.
One of the outcomes of this revolution was a determination that France would never again put up with the Old Regime’s excesses. This might have been okay except that zealots among those who had usurped power took matters to extremes and began abolishing anything and everything that even hinted at the old status quo. Unfortunately, this included not only Christian themes and references but the calendar with all its Christian dates and and almost anything else the revolutionists didn’t like.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5819faf4-7fde-4842-a5a4-329442f03671_1280x640.jpeg)
This destruction of everything “old” was driven from the top by radical intellectuals whose stated desire was to “wipe the slate clean” and start everything over without the taint of past knowledge, of past practices, of aristocrats or the “bourgeoisie” or of Christianity. This hubris extended to getting rid of the way we reckon time itself, actually trying to rearrange the hours on the clock, the days of the week, the months themselves, to “metricize” time, no less.
Well, they screwed up. Time is a product derived from perceiving and encoding the cyclical motions of Earth and the heavens, not of man’s arrogance. Man is not the “measure of all things”.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbfc9141e-78a1-426b-9f1e-3ef32dcf7832_587x202.png)
It’s truly amazing that Earth spins on its axis and all the planets whirling around our sun have been doing that for billions of years with near clockwork precision. Clockwork precision! How is that possible? How can worlds as big as these move so predictably, eon after eon and repeat their cycles with such minute accuracy? Ancient peoples around the world observed these movements and recorded them with circles of stones and markings on antlers and holes drilled through rocks and in mythological tales of gods and goddesses and fearsome beasts.
Later, as civilizations advanced, brilliant observers developed theories about these timed movements and laid the groundwork for the development of a more robust astronomy and mathematics.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F258acc57-eb8a-4e03-9080-da7a17fb9a29_1685x353.png)
But you didn’t have to be a genius to see that the cycles of day and night and the repetition of the seasons and the phases of the moon were something bigger than a mere contrivance. It was plain that the appearances and disappearances of planets at predictable points on the horizon throughout the year and across thousands of years were very accurate signatures of time itself.
But, non, non, non, the French revolutionists would have none of that. Nosir! They would just start all over with their calendar, abolishing Christmas, Easter, the terms A.D. and B.C., any “saints day”, even the names of the days themselves, the names of the months, the names of the seasons and even the number of days, weeks and months of the year. It was purely an intellectual project. And it was purely nuts.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8880e10-17c2-443b-ab8c-ec9bbb6768d9_900x496.jpeg)
Here are a few examples of the months in the new French Republican Calendar :
(If you’d like to see the rest of this story please become a paid subscriber and you’ll get it and a really good recipe, too)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Eat Your History to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.