ABSTRACT
No one ever said the first four years of the French Revolution were not confusing enough. Starting in the fall of 1793 they get even more confusing. Some brief corrections from the end of the last chapter are in order. The Battle of Cholet did not occur on October 17, 1793, but on
26 Vendémiaire II. Bailly was not executed on November 11, but on 21 Brumaire II. These dates come from the republican calendar, which the Convention
had adopted in October. Until then, France had been using the Gregorian calendar – the familiar calendar of seven-day weeks and uneven months still in use today. The republican calendar replaced that schedule with a new system of 12 30-day months, each divided into three ten-day weeks, or décades. The remaining five days (six, in leap years) would come at the end of the 12th month. The new calendar grew in part out of a larger move to standardize
weights and measures. French peasants had long complained of the different measurements that existed in Old Regime France. The Revolution’s reform of weights and measures resulted in the metric system, the system of grams, meters, and liters that still exists today. The metric system applied one set of weights and measures to all of France, just as the Decree of August 11, 1789 declared that one set of laws would apply to all of France, a more “rational” system based in the ideas of the Enlightenment. The republican calendar shared some of those tendencies, especially
its embrace of the number 10. Its main author was Gilbert Romme, a mathematician-turned-Montagnard politician, and never a fan of the Catholic Church. Grégoire would later write what was clear from the start: the republican calendar was “invented by Romme to destroy Sundays: that was his goal, he acknowledged it to me.”1
