![french revolutionary calendar french revolutionary calendar](https://rylandscollections.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/jrl15060106.jpg)
The three spring months signified seed time, flowering time and meadow – Germinal, Floréal and Prairial – followed by the summer months of Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor, or summer harvest, heat and summer fruit. The winter months were named Nivǒse, Pluviǒse and Ventǒse, months of snow, rain and wind. Autumn consisted of the months Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire, to signify respectively harvest, mist and cold. Names for the new months were invented to correspond with natural phenomena, climatic and agricultural. The cult of the republic, as Hampson puts it, was becoming ‘something of a religion in its own right’ (1981, p.
![french revolutionary calendar french revolutionary calendar](https://web2.0calc.com/img/question-preview-image/french-revolutionary-calendar.png)
#French revolutionary calendar free#
To a deputy who argued that year I should be 1789 rather than 1792, another deputy replied, to applause: ‘We have been free only since we have no longer had a king’ (Furet, 1996, p.
![french revolutionary calendar french revolutionary calendar](https://assets.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images/podcasts/images/8/8658dd0c-baa7-4412-9466-918650a0013d/episodes/c/cfeb7ecb-2141-4aab-9af8-beec2c96aaeb/cover_medium.jpg)
Dates before 1792 – including 1789 itself – were expressed as, for example, ‘the year 1789 of the Old Regime (ancien régime)’. The year 1792 was retrospectively renamed ‘year I’ to mark a new era in the evolution of mankind dating from the establishment of the republic, and the year began on 22 September, the date of the founding of the republic. The new calendar was introduced in 1793 after the replacement of the monarchy by the republic. The use of Roman numerals also suggested a classical, pre-Christian epoch.Ĭlick to view Plate 3: Calendar for Year III of the French Republic, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. The Convention sought to mark a clean break with the past by establishing a new revolutionary, republican era to replace the traditional Christian era. In October 1793 the Convention decreed the introduction of the revolutionary calendar based on a 10-day week (and originally even a 10-hour day) and a year of 12 months of equal length (30 days each, to which extra days were added at the end of the year). At the lowest level came the distribution to the army of Le Père Duchesne to stimulate the fighting men's revolutionary ardour. Always confident of their own understanding of the ‘general will’, the Jacobins aimed to shape public consciousness and to propel it in given directions through art and the media. As the dominant group in the Convention by 1793, the Jacobins regarded themselves as mandated to enact the ‘general will’ of the people in a sense inspired by Rousseau: not as the aggregate weight of the individual aspirations of 28 million Frenchmen, but as the expression of that which, as virtuous men and citizens, Frenchmen ought to want. We considered earlier the universalist principles of 1789 deriving from the Enlightenment that inspired the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the redivision of France into departments. 5 Enlightenment, universalism and revolution 5.1 Revolutionary calendar and metric system