Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 3.34A, the Republican calendar.

So greetings from the past. By the time this episode goes live, I think I will be in London.

Did you guys know that General Manjani Bergoin is buried in Westminster Abbey?

I've played my cards right then I was there yesterday and should have already taken a picture of me with my General Manjani T-shirt standing next to his marker.

And we'll see if the hotel Wi-Fi lets me upload a picture of that along with the episode.

Anyway, we are here today to talk about the famous French Republican calendar, the attempt by the revolutionaries to completely reinvent how humans mark the passage of time.

When you head out there into the world, you might find people calling it the French Revolutionary Calendar, but as we'll see in a second that is actually a misnomer, and for a very particular reason.

But if you accidentally call it the French Revolutionary Calendar, don't beat yourself up. And if you hear somebody call it the French Revolutionary Calendar, don't beat them up. It's no big deal. And nobody likes a pet.

After the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, patriotic revolutionaries took to informally calling it the dawn of the era of liberty, and often specifically referring to 1789 as Year One of the Age of Liberty.

But this was all merely poetic expression. As the revolution progressed, however, more and more stuff started happening and more and more things started getting reformed, time itself did finally come under scrutiny.

As you may know, space came under scrutiny as well, which is where the meter comes from, but that's a story for another day, because we're here to talk about revolutionary time, not revolutionary space.

The urge to remake the markers of time really came from two main currents. First, enlightenment science and its desperate obsession with rationalizing everything.

Second, anti-clirical radicals who wanted to abolish any lingering sway held by the Catholic Church on the good citizens and citizens of France.

After the insurrection of August the 10th, which seemed to have finally truly swept aside the Oncyon regime, the movement to remake the calendar went from interesting conversation in the salons to actual working commission of the National Convention.

Now just to get this out of the way, technically the National Convention rushed ahead on this, and just as they were abolishing the monarchy in September 1792, they also declared 1792 Year One of the French Republic, and ordered all public documents to be so dated.

But it was only public documents that were so dated, and it's unclear just how widespread the practice was.

Plus, there was some disagreement about when exactly the Year should start, and whether the rest of the calendar should be capped or whether a whole new system should be devised.

So, the Convention appointed a commission to make a recommendation.

This commission was chaired by Charlotte Giberrorm, who was by disposition a mathematician, but who had also become a prominent national politician since being elected into the legislative assembly in 1791.

Giberrorm gathered up a collection of men to help study the issue and make a recommendation, and though the majority of the men he consulted were all Enlightenment science nerds, mostly astronomers, chemists, geographers, and mathematicians, there were also a few appointees from the more liberal art side of the world, the most prominent being poet, playwright, and spinner of fictitious foreign plots, Fabra de Galantina.

Now, the first major question that presented itself was, are we going to craft a revolutionary calendar or a Republican calendar?

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