Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: writing the history of the republican calendar
- 1 Time and history
- 2 The French republican calendar, 1793–1806: a narrative account
- 3 Cultivating the calendar: the calendar and republican culture in the Year II
- 4 The clash with religion
- 5 Work and rest
- 6 Republican hours
- Conclusion: the legacy of the republican calendar
- APPENDICES
- 1 Timeline of key events, 1788–1806
- 2 The republican calendar: a glossary
- 3 Names of the days of the republican year
- 4 Concordance for the Gregorian and republican calendars
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Cultivating the calendar: the calendar and republican culture in the Year II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: writing the history of the republican calendar
- 1 Time and history
- 2 The French republican calendar, 1793–1806: a narrative account
- 3 Cultivating the calendar: the calendar and republican culture in the Year II
- 4 The clash with religion
- 5 Work and rest
- 6 Republican hours
- Conclusion: the legacy of the republican calendar
- APPENDICES
- 1 Timeline of key events, 1788–1806
- 2 The republican calendar: a glossary
- 3 Names of the days of the republican year
- 4 Concordance for the Gregorian and republican calendars
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Time has not been kind to the papers of many of the French Revolutionaries; perhaps no others have been as widely dispersed as the manuscripts originally belonging to Charles Gilbert Romme, the creator of the French republican calendar. Although some of his papers, scattered through national and regional archives and libraries, can be consulted in France, many remain in Moscow. Following a sale by a Russian émigré in 1939, the Museo del Risorgimento, in Milan, purchased a small collection of Romme material and in consequence, among the papers of Camillo Cavour, Massimo D'Azeglio and Giuseppe Mazzini, three cartons containing seventy dossiers belonging to Romme can be consulted. This collection reveals the range of Romme's intellectual interests, including an extensive pre-revolutionary correspondence with savants, notably botanists and astronomers, often with political commentary. The collection also includes six notebooks in which Romme worked out the days of the new, republican months from vendémiaire, associating each one with rural produce or agricultural tools in a draft for the Annuaire du cultivateur, an almanac based on the new calendar that aimed to share the latest agronomic innovations with rural citizens, and in which hoes, apples and hares replaced saints' days and dominical letters. The Annuaire embodied what was to become the agricultural and pastoral symbolism inherent in the republican calendar, a close connection between the year and rural life which attempted to make the calendar both simple to use and tied intimately to the rhythms of everyday life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Time and the French RevolutionThe Republican Calendar, 1789-Year XIV, pp. 59 - 82Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011