The French Republican Calendar: Time, History and the Revolutionary Event

This paper recovers the power, real and symbolic, that the French revolutionaries associated with calendar time. The Republican calendar was crucial in establishing the French Revolution as an irreversible rupture with the past but never succeeded as a viable time-frame. Drawing on this double-sided aspect of revolutionary time, this paper demonstrates some of the difficulties in conflating revolutionary rupture with a modern experience of time. It does so by contrasting the Revolution's intentional time-frame, which was global and cosmological, with the shorter historical time-frame of revolutionary events, in which the Revolution failed to institute a total rupture with the past.