Time and the French Revolution 1789 - year XIV

Many historians have portrayed the French republican calendar of 1793 as a tool of dechristianization directed against the Catholic Church (Aulard 1927; Andrews 1931; Godechot 1968). However, a close examination of speeches, debates, and pamphlets from 1793 places this enterprise in another light than that of anti-clerical zeal. The key architects of the calendar emphasized instead its positive pedagogical character. Fabre d’Églantine, the Parisian poet and deputy who devised a new moral nomenclature of time, explicitly linked the calendar to a “philosophical anthropology” (Baczko 1989) which had roots in the writings of eighteenth-century materialists like Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. This philosophical pedagogy emphasized the power of images to form and reform ideas, beliefs, and habits. Produced at the behest of the Committee of Public Instruction, the republican calendar was designed as an instrument of moral education, inculcating the ideals of the Revolution. The different elements of the calendar reform—the regenerative agricultural imagery, the association of each day with a plant or animal, and even the sonorities of the names of the months—contributed in various ways to a concerted program of reeducation, in which the supplanting of Christian beliefs was more of an incidental corollary than a central aim.

Review of new books by Marisa Linton, Richard Taws, and Sanja Perovic

Isis, 2019

This chapter offers a detailed consideration of how the French Revolution, from being viewed as a template for the actions and ideological position of the United Irishmen, ultimately came to signify a lot more in the Irish context. Building on the ideas of the French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in particular, it argues that that the ‘real’ of the French Revolution came in time to exert very different effects on the Irish and French public spheres.

Isis , 2019

This essay explores the astronomical works of Pierre de Lille, a little-known French participant in the debates on calendar reform during the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–1517). It argues that astrological ideas coupled with eschatological beliefs motivated his astronomical propositions to reform the Julian calendar. De Lille conceived the calendar solar year as a unit of a great cosmic year spanning 7,153 years, the duration that he assigned to the now-obsolete theory of the motion of trepidation of the eighth sphere. Although his use of this astronomical model for astrological speculations about world chronology was not new, de Lille gave an original and bold reply to Pico della Mirandola’s devastating critique of astrology. The astronomical model and its astrological implications were eventually contested at the court and in academia in France, but the alliance of chronology, astrology, and apocalypticism was to play a major role during the second half of the sixteenth century in Lutheran thought.

KronoScope, 2009

This article traces the idea of decimalized systems of time reckoning, from their first articulated designs and implementation in the French revolution to our day. The paper analyzes how decimal time was the product of a broader rationalizing project that successfully reformed weights and measures (with the invention of the decimal metric system) and money (with the introduction of the franc as a decimal currency), but failed in bringing the chronological and calendrical reform into fruition. Finally, some hypotheses are suggested to explain why contrary to the global success of the metric system and decimal currency, plans for a fully decimalized time system were never accepted.

Past and Present, 1995

The Historian, 2011