Acapulco, Mexico. Christmas 1975. 10 p.m. 15°C. In the dark of the hotel balcony overlooking the bay, three guitarists play as the waiter juggles cups and silverware. Lifting a ladle to chest height, he sets it alight and pours burning cognac in a stream of blue flame. The velvet night retreats for a few moments, then closes in once more.
REVISING THE CALENDAR MIGHT HAVE ENDED WITH THE IMPOSITION of the metric system on the counting of day and years, but no revolution does things by halves. Powered by Fabre’s ambition, the project built up unstoppable momentum.
More than internal disruption, revolutionary France feared invasion, particularly by Catholic Austria and Italy. The threat posed by the pope and the Vatican was more than ideological. France took seriously the possibility of an Italian army invading to free the imprisoned Catholic clergy. In July 1792, amid rumors of such a force headed for Paris, the mob slaughtered almost two hundred imprisoned priests, monks, nuns, and bishops.
Even more were murdered the following September during further riots, ignited in part by Fabre’s rabble–rousing speeches to the Convention. Danton deprecated the killings in public, but rationalized in private that they had their favorable side; if there really was a fifth column within Paris, its members would now be too scared to act.
The Reformation in Germany and England may have substituted a more rational style of belief, but in Italy and France the Roman church remained omnipotent. Backing its power was the threat of hellfire, illustrated in church paintings and emphasized repeatedly from the pulpit. Excommunication and the damnation that followed could bring kings crawling in rags to the pope, begging forgiveness for having challenged his omnipotence.
Rooting out any lingering influence of the church came high on the list of revolutionary priorities. Purging the new calendar of all religious doctrine would demonstrate that the French farmer lived and died not according to some superstitious schedule conceived of by foreigners but in response to the turn of the seasons as experienced in his own fields and vineyards.
Having renamed the days of the week to remove their associations with the Gregorian calendar, Fabre turned to the months. Discarding their names, all of which celebrated pagan festivals, he substituted others that evoked the countryside and nature.
The months were given names ending in one of four syllables. Those of fall terminated in “aire,” winter months in “ôse,” spring months in “al,” and summer in “dor.”
The first month of the revised calendar, Vendémiaire, coinciding with the grape harvest, or vendange, ran from the former September 22 to October 21. It was followed by Brumaire, the month of mists, named for brume, the French word for “fog,” then by Frimaire, from frimas (frost).
Nivôse was snowy, from the Latin for “snow,” nivosus. Pluviôse—from the Latin pluviosus—was rainy, and Ventôse windy, from the Latin ventosus.
In Germinal, from the Latin germinis (bud), grain germinated. Floréal, from floreus, was the month of flowers, followed by Prairial, from prairie, the French word for “meadow,” which the first explorers gave to the grasslands of the American West.
Finally, the months of high summer concluded with “dor,” from doron, the Greek word for “gift.” Grain was reaped in Messidor, from the Latin messis (harvest), while Thermidor, the former August, took its name from the Greek thermon (heat), and Fructidor from the Latin fructus (fruit), leading back to Vendémiaire.
In the redistribution of days, weeks, and years, a day was left over at the end of each year. These became public holidays for the ordinary citizens, the sans–culottes. The consummate adman, Fabre labeled them sans–culottides, holidays for the trouserless ones.
La Fête de la Vertu would celebrate good works. La Fête du Génie would recognize talent or skill, and La Fête du Travail honor labor. On La Fête des Récompenses, awards would be made and honors conferred, and a fifth day, La Fête de la Révolution, would honor the achievements of the revolution with solemn splendor and high ritual. On the last holiday, La Fête de l’Opinion, citizens would be permitted to say what they liked about any public figure without risk of prosecution for libel. (Unfortunately the calendar didn’t survive long enough for any of these festivals to be celebrated, least of all the last, which promised to be memorable.)
At this point, Fabre and his helpers set down their pens, leaned back, and savored the sense of a task skillfully, even brilliantly completed. On every level, their creation appeared a total success. In offering to the people of France a means of relating their lives to the natural world, the calendar achieved a harmony of intellect and labor that the American poet Walt Whitman, writing nearly a century later of the American ideal, would call “something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.”
In its embrace of the modern over the antique and its sense of a rational new society, the calendar embodied the purest spirit of the revolution. A kind of poem, it reflected this divine beauty and echoed the music of the spheres. It mirrored the universe as it would one day be metered by Foucault’s pendulum: inexorable, essential, eternal.
How could it fail? But as the old—and, in terms of the Republican calendar, politically unacceptable—joke goes, “If you want to see God laugh, show him your plans.”