The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutio...