Tuileries Palace, Paris. December 1804. Court jeweler Martin–Guillaume Biennais places the wreath of fifty solid–gold laurel leaves on the balding head of Europe’s most powerful ruler. Napoléon frowns and glances upward, as if to see the object encircling his forehead. “Too heavy.” “But, Your Imperial Highness . . .” “I said, ‘Too heavy!’” Back in his workshop, Biennais snips off six leaves. They remind him of his six daughters, each in need of a dowry if she’s to marry well. Hmmm . . .
IN DOING AWAY WITH THE CHURCH, THE REVOLUTION ALSO DISCARDED the ceremonies that offered consolation to those left to mourn. Piled into carts, the corpses of the guillotined were taken by night to any place where pits existed large enough to accommodate them. Existing cemeteries such as the Madeleine were soon overwhelmed. The bodies of those imprisoned at the convent of Picpus were buried in mass graves dug on its grounds. Others were dumped in an ancient opencast gypsum mine, later to become the Cimetière de Montmartre.
A new cemetery, the Cimetière des Errancis, or “cemetery of the wandering,” was hurriedly opened in March 1793. Situated in northern Paris’s eighth arrondissement, on what was then the city’s outer edge but is near today’s Parc Monceau, it is reputed to have displayed over the entrance the sign “Dormir. Enfin!” (To sleep. At last!) Within two years it closed, having absorbed the bodies of 1,119 victims.
Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Fabre d’Églantine were buried there in April 1794, followed in July by Robespierre and Saint–Just. They were joined by Charles–Gilbert Romme, colorless chairman of the calendar commission. Condemned in May 1795, he committed suicide before he could be guillotined. When an expanding city reached the cemetery in 1848, their skeletons were transferred to the underground ossuary known as the Catacombs, where they lie, unmarked, with thousands of other anonymous dead.
For four years after the death of Robespierre, a five–man committee known as the Directoire, or Directorate, ruled France.
Since the revolution was still technically in progress, the state stuck to Fabre’s calendar. Nobody had time to think about revising it. In one of the most corrupt periods in France’s history, abstractions took second place to profiteering.
With the young Napoléon Bonaparte as its muscle, the Directoire created satellite states all over Europe and looted them to keep the French economy afloat. If a state couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the exorbitant taxes demanded, artworks were plundered from its museums and stately homes and sent to augment the Louvre’s collection.
Outside France, the Republican calendar was comprehensively mocked. American president John Quincy Adams called it an “incongruous composition of profound learning and superficial frivolity, of irreligion and morality, of delicate imagination and coarse vulgarity.” British poet George Ellis, tongue in cheek, published his suggestion for an English version in which the months would be called Snowy, Flowy, Blowy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy, Breezy, Sneezy, and Freezy.
In the French countryside, life remained so arduous that Fabre’s calendar was simply ignored, though the few who gave it serious thought found plenty to criticize.
Its Paris–centricity, for a start. Language and imagery both were based on the weather its framers saw out their own windows. A southerner like Fabre should have been aware that snow and frost were almost unknown in Provence and along the Riviera. Who in those areas could relate to the wintry imagery of Pluviôse, Frimaire, and Brumaire?
As for Lafitte’s illustrations, they bore as little relationship to the women of rural France as the models in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue do to the average woman on any American or British beach.
More important, Fabre and his team, in their urge to make everything new, had ignored the degree to which the Gregorian calendar not only imposed a way of life but also reflected one. Over centuries, the church and those ordinary French men and women who worked on the land had developed a relationship with which, for good or ill, both were comfortable.
The traditional religious feasts may have been dictated by the church, but people welcomed them as an excuse to relieve the monotony of their lives. Celebrating the saint’s day of a loved one had become second nature in most families. Wishing them “Happy Manure Monday” wasn’t the same. And having to wait nine days for Sunday made the week intolerably long. Some frivolously misinterpreted this rule. Told that every tenth day was now a day of rest, they put down their tools on the new “Sunday” as well as the old one. After numerous complaints, the fifth day of each décade was made a half holiday, with work finishing at noon.
Worst of all, those who created the calendar knew nothing of running a farm. The treatment of two autumn feasts, Michaelmas and Martinmas, was a prime illustration.
The Feast of Saint Michael on September 29, known as Michaelmas, loomed large in the French farming year. Traditionally the conclusion of the harvest, it was the day from which all leases were dated and on which land rents were paid and workers hired. It also inaugurated the legal year, marking the beginning of tenure for magistrates and other holders of high office. At one time, the church thought it so important that they declared it a holy day of obligation, on which all Catholics were required to attend mass under pain of mortal sin.
At this time of year, geese, hatched in the spring and fed through the summer and fall, were at their fattest. Rather than keep all of them through the winter, farmers killed one and enjoyed a rare roasted bird, a change from the stews and soups on which they existed the rest of the year. A few birds were kept for Christmas, a cheap substitute for the more exotic and expensive turkey. Any geese not eaten were cooked, cut up, and conserved in their own fat for later use in such winter dishes as the unctuous mixture of white haricot beans, sausage, salted pork, and preserved goose known as cassoulet. Nothing of the bird was wasted. Wing feathers provided quills for writing, and the soft down of the breast made an ideal filling for pillows and quilts.
Michaelmas was also the last day on which blackberries could be picked. By tradition, Lucifer, ejected from heaven, fell onto a blackberry bush and cursed the fruit, making it poisonous. The legend disguised a practical lesson: once they became ripe, the berries, if left unpicked, could develop a poisonous fungus. Also, as they ripened and hung low to the ground, foxes and wild dogs urinated on them to mark their territory. Wise wives picked the berries early and used them to make a Michaelmas pie, mixing the still–tart fruit with sweeter apples and a touch of nutmeg and clove.
The manner in which Michaelmas was observed in Britain and France emphasized even more their national differences. In Britain a pervasive gloom characterized the feast, a contrast to its gaiety in rural France. For British farmworkers who’d failed to win a contract, Michaelmas, as the day on which rents must be paid, could mean a “moonlight flit,” the whole family sneaking away by night, carrying their possessions. In 1836, satirist George Cruikshank made this the subject of one of his caricatures.
A family does a moonlight flit on Michaelmas.
Cruikshank, George. A Family Does a Moonlight Flit on Michaelmas. Author’s collection.
Charles Dickens captured some of the desolation in his description of Michaelmas in his 1853 novel, Bleak House:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier–brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
The French celebrated the Feast of Saint Martin, Martinmas, on November 11, with even more ceremony than Michaelmas. With the harvest over and the penitential season of Advent looming, it was an opportunity to carouse. Traditionally, Martinmas was also the day on which pigs, fed on kitchen scraps through the summer, were slaughtered and their meat salted down or hung up to air–dry into hams and sausages.
And yet on the new calendar, neither of these important feasts was even mentioned. Were they no longer to be observed? If so, when were pigs to be butchered? A slaughter needed organization: the pig sticker called from the next village; the family rallied to help bleed, skin, and prepare the carcass; others to salt down the joints, cut up smaller pieces of meat for sausage, and drain the blood for boudin noir. Surely they weren’t suggesting that pigs should be fed through the winter? Both the animal and its owners would starve.
Bureaucrats also complained of the new system. The need to transpose dates between the Republican and Gregorian calendars disrupted official documents and complicated international communications. The London Times found Fabre’s calendar “productive of endless inconvenience in mercantile transactions, in comparing dates of letters and bills of exchange, and possessing not one advantage in return, as it was not even astronomically just.”
It survived through the last days of the Directoire and was still in place on Brumaire 18, Year VIII (November 9, 1799), when Napoléon Bonaparte led the coup d’état that formally ended the revolution.
“In revolution there are two types of people,” said Napoléon, “those who make it and those who profit from it.” Determined to be part of the second group, he adopted the best ideas of the revolution, including the legal system, renamed the Code Napoléon, and the metric system. He kept Robespierre’s plan for a network of schools and academies designed to identify the keenest young minds and train them in science, technology, and management. It would lead to the lycée system and a society more effectively educated than most of the world.
The church was restored as an official institution, though no longer as the state religion. As with those other advances of the revolution retained under the First Empire, it was tolerated so long as it was regulated.
The Concordat that authorized this change took effect from Easter Sunday, Germinal 28, Year X (April 18, 1802). The same law reintroduced the Gregorian calendar, and Sunday became again the official and sole day of rest.
Napoléon was crowned—or rather, crowned himself—emperor of the French on Frimaire 11, Year XIII (December 2, 1804), taking the crown from the hands of the pope’s representative and placing it on his own head. It was only when he felt completely in charge of the new state that he abolished the Republican calendar, effective January 1, 1806, returning France to the Gregorian calendar that preceded it. The creation of Fabre d’Églantine had survived a little over twelve years.