19

Tall Poppies

Rue de l’Odéon, Paris 6me. December 2017. 10 a.m. 3°C. The doorbell rings in midmorning. It’s our post–lady with a sheaf of card–bound almanacs, one of which we purchase—our Christmas tip in polite disguise. The almanac includes a calendar, with the saints’ names for each day. Times of sunrise and moonrise. A map of France; another of our region, Île–de–France; Paris itself; and the Métro. The printer has shoehorned a few recipes into leftover space. Next to them, less interesting than baked pork chops and chicken en brochette, is a cramped map of the European Union.

DANTON PROBABLY EXPECTED FABRE, HIS SPY ON THE COMMISSION, to do no more than keep his ears open and mouth shut. But he may not have been entirely surprised when his protégé emerged as the most vigorous champion of a Calendrier républicain.

For someone with political ambitions, it was a dream project. The Gregorian calendar, conceived by a tyrant and modified by a pope, embodied everything the revolution abhorred. The man who substituted a republican alternative could expect the gratitude of the nation.

The other members of the commission were not about to provoke someone as well–connected as Fabre. They decided to let him wear himself out. When he got bored and lost interest, his elders and betters could step in. Until then, they followed the instincts of generations of seat warmers and time servers, sending their apologies to most meetings and only turning up with sufficient frequency to justify their stipend. By default, Fabre was left in charge.

Fabre had never held office, nor did his history suggest a fitness to do so. But knowledge and experience no longer counted. Paradoxically, ignorance was a survival characteristic. Egalitarian cultures often cut down to size those who dare lift their heads above the mob. In revolutionary France, the so–called tall poppy syndrome applied literally. Thousands of scholars and intellectuals would die on the guillotine for no better reason than that they knew more than the sans–culottes, and showed it.

The theatrical flair with which Fabre approached the calendar project was typical. Sketching the parameters in broad strokes, he left others to fill in the gaps. Once they were done, he reemerged to become its public face. Any pronouncements or updates to the Convention were done by him.

Some key decisions had already been made. It went without saying that any updated calendar must incorporate that avatar of republican France, the metric system, based on multiples of the number ten. As a first step, Fabre lengthened the hour from sixty to a hundred minutes. Ten such hours made up a day. As the new day was substantially shorter—1,000 minutes, compared to the old day’s 1,440—he extended the week from seven days to ten, called a décade, with the tenth a day of rest. Three décades made a month, and twelve months of equal length a year.

Since they had their origin in ancient religious rituals, day names also had to go. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday became primidi (day one), duodi (day two), and tridi (day three), followed by quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi, and décadi.

So far, so straightforward. This part of the scheme wasn’t even particularly novel. Others who had tried to rationalize the calendar had suggested similar changes. In 1788, poet, atheist, and anarchist Pierre–Sylvain Maréchal published his Honest Man’s Almanac, which substituted the names of famous men from history for those of saints. Ahead of his time, Maréchal suffered the full force of the church’s disapproval. He was imprisoned for four months and forbidden to ever publish again under his own name.

With the architecture of the new year established, Fabre and his helpers made an even more sweeping change. The Republican year would not commence around the anniversary of Christ’s birth but rather with a date more significant for the Frenchman on the land—the end of the harvest. The first day of the year became the former October 6. But for symmetry, and with an eye to symbolism, Fabre backdated it to the autumnal equinox, September 22, one of only two occasions when day and night are equal in length.

Each November, with the grapes and grain gathered in, farmers traditionally laid the dust of the harvest with a wine made from freshly pressed Gamay grapes and matured for just three weeks. They saw no reason to change this custom simply because some fool in Paris was fiddling with the calendar. As they drank their Beaujolais nouveau in the autumn of 1793, the more thoughtful among them might have intuited that the wine, young and fresh but with little character, reflected the nature of the new calendar, if not of the revolution itself.