Maréchal gave his full blessing, proudly declaring that “The calendar… must not resemble in any respect the official annuals of the apostolic and Roman church.” And so the New Years of the regime would be on “Primidi” (the first day of the week) of the first month of “Vendémiaire” (named for the grape harvest) in the First Year of Liberty. An auspicious autumnal equinox on what had once been September 21, 1792, now marked the first day of the new age. A far more radical calendar would be established by the National Convention in 1793, or rather the Second Year of Liberty, as they backdated to when the First Republic was inaugurated. A year before the Revolution, the notorious atheist Sylvain Maréchal designed his own system, eliminating the saint days of the Roman Catholic year and replacing Christmas with Newton’s December 25th birthday. The French Republican Calendar had radical precursors. How much more unsettling would it be when it was not just eleven days erased, but indeed Monday through Sunday, January through December, and the very years themselves? But the legend’s endurance exhibits how “cultural losses sustained when the… calendar was overturned” engendered resistance. The historian Robert Poole makes clear in Past & Present that anecdotes about an eighteenth century mob, distressed over the British Parliament’s deletion of a week and a half from the calendar (necessary to adopting the Gregorian system), yelling “Give us our eleven days!” are apocryphal. Initiated around 1582 by the Pope whose name it bears, it was adopted by Catholics and then slowly by Protestant and Orthodox states (with Russia a straggler well into the twentieth century). Most radically, the Gregorian Calendar, which corrected astronomical incongruities in the previous system. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel described the calendar in a 1972 issue of the American Sociological Review as “the most radical attempt in modern history to challenge the Western standard temporal reference framework.” There had been several amendments since the adoption of a Christian calendar in the sixth century. Their history shows that time resists such taming, and that the old gods are not so easily dispersed. But for two-and-a-half weeks, in May, they tried to reform time along rational lines, to exorcise our days of dead gods and saints. In rocky Montmartre, overlooking the arrondissements of Paris, the radicals of the Commune were about to be violently suppressed by the government. That last use of the revolutionary calendar, in 1871, the year of the Commune, saw the formation of Germany, the sixth year of Reconstruction in the United States, and the publication of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
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