POLITICS AND POETICS

WHEN WE TRIED TO REWRITE TIME

LUZ ARETÊ BÁEZ

September 16, 2025

What if we fired January, abolished Sundays, and gave the year a radical makeover? The French Revolution tried exactly that, naming months after fog and flowers, measuring days in tens, and starting history over at Year 1. It didn’t last, of course, but neither did the Soviets’ five-day week or Auguste Comte’s thirteen-month shrine to philosophers. This is the story of calendars that dreamed too big—and why time keeps slipping back into its old, messy shape.

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Time, as the French Revolution once demonstrated, is political. You can behead a king, abolish the church, and even rewrite the calendar if you are sufficiently convinced that the old world must go. In 1793, the revolutionaries did exactly that. The year began not with January, but with Vendémiaire, the season of the grape harvest. Weeks were outlawed—too Catholic, too Gregorian, too smug with their Sundays. Instead, the Revolution introduced ten-day cycles called décades and decimal time—a calendar tuned to both reason and the rhythms of nature. At noon, a proper citizen of the Republic would look up not at 12:00 but at five o’clock, because the day had been divided into ten hours, each with 100 minutes, each minute with 100 seconds. Time, like monarchy, was decapitated and rebuilt.

The French Republican calendar—also known, with slightly more drama, as the French revolutionary calendar—was one of the strangest and most poetic bureaucratic inventions in history. It lasted only thirteen years, from 1793 until Napoleon, with his usual sense of pragmatism and disdain for unnecessary experiments, returned everyone to the Gregorian calendar. But for a short, feverish moment, the French not only imagined a new political order, but gave it its own calendar.

When your revolution produces both mass executions and a very neat Excel spreadsheet.

What was the logic? To purge time of Christianity. The Gregorian calendar, with its saints’ days and church-approved structure, was a constant reminder of the old regime. The revolutionaries, enthralled with reason and geometry, wanted a calendar aligned with the natural world. Each month had thirty days, neatly divided into three ten-day décades. No Sabbath. No saints. Just productivity. On the tenth day of each décade, there was a short break—décadi, a day of republican rest, though not quite enough to make up for the nine days of relentless work leading up to it. Imagine the groans of peasants who had finally overthrown their aristocratic masters only to find themselves with longer weeks and fewer holidays.

Months named after fog and frost: poetry by decree, bureaucracy by design.

If nothing else, the calendar was beautiful. The months were named with rustic lyricism by the poet Fabre d’Églantine, and sounded like a poem written by farmers who had recently discovered guillotines: Vendémiaire (from vendange, grape harvest), Brumaire (fog), Frimaire (frost), Nivôse (snow), Pluviôse (rain), Ventôse (wind), Germinal (germination), Floréal (flowering), Prairial (meadow), Messidor (harvest), Thermidor (heat), and Fructidor (fruits). There were no “Augusts” or “Decembers” here, only a sensual, seasonal loop that felt almost pagan in its intimacy with the natural world. To be born in Messidor sounded infinitely more romantic than being born in July.

Springtime of the people: Nothing says revolution like cuddling pigeons between beheadings.

Even the extra days at the end of the year, the five or six sans-culottides, were renamed for revolutionary virtues—Virtue, Talent, Labor, Convictions, Honor. They were not so much days off as days of ideological contemplation, the French Revolution’s version of a mindfulness retreat, except with more public executions.

The French also tried to decimalize time. Instead of twenty-four hours, the day had ten. Instead of sixty minutes, hours had one hundred. Theoretically, this was simpler, more rational. But it was also profoundly alien. Imagine explaining to your neighbor that you’ll meet at 4.5 o’clock. Watches had to be redesigned. Clocks had to be recalibrated. It lasted barely two years because the confusion was unbearable. The revolutionaries could remake the calendar, but not the daily rhythms of people’s lives. Decimal time was quietly retired, leaving behind a few strange relics, such as experimental clocks that now sit in museums—mute witnesses to a failed attempt to make time logical.

Meet me at 4.5 o’clock sharp. Yes, you’ll need a new watch.

Ultimately, the Republican calendar was too clever for its own good. The peasantry hated the ten-day weeks, and even urban citizens found themselves nostalgic for Sundays and saints. The church, stripped of its sacred calendar, simply persisted underground, as churches tend to do when governments try to abolish them. By 1806, Napoleon, who had little patience for administrative poetry, restored the Gregorian calendar, though the names of some months—like Thermidor—remained etched in political memory. The “Thermidorian Reaction,” the conservative backlash that followed Maximilien Robespierre’s fall, is named after a month in a calendar that barely anyone could remember how to read.

The French Republican calendar was the first—and perhaps the boldest—attempt to radically rewrite time. But it wasn’t the last. The dream of rationalizing time continued to haunt utopians, engineers, and political fanatics long after the guillotine went quiet.

Color-coded efficiency: families never saw each other, but the factories never slept.

Fast-forward a century and you find the Soviet Union trying its own experiment in time: the Soviet revolutionary calendar (1929–40). The Bolsheviks were allergic to Sundays, seeing them as bourgeois relics of religion. They introduced a five-day workweek (known as the continuous workweek, or nepreryvka), where workers were divided into color-coded groups and rotated their rest days so that the factories never stopped. Imagine the chaos: Your “weekend” could be on what used to be Wednesday, while your spouse’s might be Friday. Families never had a day off together. The goal was industrial efficiency, but it was socially catastrophic. After ten years, the seven-day week was grudgingly restored.

Unlike the French, the Soviets kept their Gregorian months, but the underlying idea was the same: Strip time of its religious scaffolding and bend it toward the state. If the French Republican calendar was a love letter to nature, the Soviet calendar was a love letter to the factory whistle.

The nineteenth century produced its own time-reform enthusiasts, none stranger than Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who proposed the Positivist calendar in 1849. Comte, a man who believed that humanity needed a “religion of humanity,” designed a calendar of thirteen months, each twenty-eight days long, named after intellectual giants—Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Homer. Every day was dedicated to a historical figure, like a secular saint’s day. Comte thought this would encourage rational reverence for human progress rather than divine miracles. Nobody adopted it, but the idea was hauntingly similar to the Republican dream: a calendar that told us who we were, not who God wanted us to be.

Every day a philosopher. Happy Shakespeare 3rd, everyone—don’t forget your Descartes 9th dinner plans.

In the twentieth century, US engineers got involved. Moses B. Cotsworth, a British accountant, designed the international fixed calendar—a thirteen-month, twenty-eight-day system meant to streamline commerce. Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, even used it inside his company for decades. Each month began on a Sunday and ended on a Saturday, making payroll, accounting, and production schedules blissfully predictable. But the rest of the world, stubbornly attached to its irregular months, refused to budge.

Of course, the French didn’t invent rational timekeeping. The ancient Egyptians had a civil calendar with twelve months of thirty days plus five “festival days,” similar to the Republican design. The Mayans, for their part, had multiple overlapping calendars—one solar, one ritualistic—so complex that even today we marvel at their astronomical precision. But these were not revolutions against time; they were alignments with it. The French revolutionaries, by contrast, wanted to sever time from tradition and start history over at Year 1. It was a calendar not of observation, but of defiance.

What all these experiments have in common is a profound impatience with the ordinary, illogical way we measure time. The Gregorian calendar is undeniably a mess: February sulks with twenty-eight days, while August and July strut around with thirty-one. Weeks are seven days for no particular reason other than ancient Babylonia’s love of the number seven. And yet, for all its irrationality, the Gregorian calendar has something these reforms lack: cultural momentum. The weight of centuries, the familiar rhythm of holidays, the quiet comfort of Sundays, keep it going.

The French Republican calendar, by contrast, was too perfect to survive. Its neat rows of thirty days, its lack of religious holidays, its poetic but alien names—all of it reminded people that they were living in someone else’s experiment. It was both too beautiful and too cold. You can endure Messidor and Thermidor only so long before longing for Christmas.

In the end, these calendars—French, Soviet, Positivist—tell us less about time than about our desire to control it. Time is a human fiction, a set of conventions layered over the natural flow of seasons and days. The French wanted to write a new narrative, one in which the past was abolished and the future started now. The Soviets wanted time to serve the factory. Comte wanted it to bow to philosophy. Each of these efforts failed, but the impulse remains strangely appealing. Who hasn’t fantasized about throwing away this absurd January-February-March nonsense and starting fresh with something cleaner, sharper, more poetic?

Yet time, like language, is too collective to be remade by decree. The French could chop off the head of a king, but they couldn’t convince a farmer to celebrate Fructidor instead of harvest season. Time slipped back into its old shape the moment no one was watching.

The French Republican calendar may have been short-lived, but it left behind a residue of poetic grandeur. It reminds us that even the most utilitarian thing—a calendar, a clock—can be infused with vision. There is something touching in the idea of replacing January with Floréal or dedicating a day not to saints but to Virtue or Labor. It was not a practical calendar, but it was an attempt to live differently, to see the year as something more than an accounting trick.

We might laugh at these failed experiments, but perhaps they deserve more sympathy than mockery. They were reminders that time is not immutable. It is not the ticking of a cosmic clock, but a story we tell ourselves to mark beginnings and endings. The French revolutionaries, the Soviets, the Positivist philosophers—they all tried to rewrite that story, and for a brief moment, they succeeded.

Luz Aretê Báez (b. 1952 in Asunción) is a Paraguayan writer and amateur horologist whose work probes the emotional and philosophical dimensions of time. Her only published book, “Cuando Intentamos Reescribir el Tiempo” (1979), blends memoir, speculative fiction, and metaphysical diagrams, drawing on Guaraní temporal concepts. Now in her seventies, she lives reclusively in rural Paraguay, rumored to still annotate timepieces and write unpublished reflections on time’s elasticity.

Cover image: Down with kings and queens, down with Sundays.