The Calendar in Revolutionary France
Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics

This study explores the reinvention of the calendar during the French Revolution and its long-lasting cultural effects.

Sanja Perovic (Author)

9781107025950, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 August 2012

290 pages, 14 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.54 kg

'The Calendar in Revolutionary France is an exhilarating book that invites one to think about the calendar and its history in ways that move between different time scales and that complicate the terms through which we imagine historical periodization altogether.' Deborah Elise White, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily-accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a Revolutionary calendar. The experiment lasted from 1793 to 1805, and prompted all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it and its relationship to individual, community, communication and creative life. This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. Tracing the parallel stories of the calendar and the literary genius of its creator, Sylvain Maréchal, from the Enlightenment to the Napoleonic era, Sanja Perovic reconsiders the status of the French Revolution as the purported 'origin' of modernity, the modern experience of time, and the relationship between the imagination and political action.

Introduction
1. From myth to lived experience: the literary and cultural origins of the revolutionary calendar
2. Between the volcano and the sun: Sylvain Maréchal against his time
3. History and nature: the double origins of Republican time
4. Death by volcano: revolutionary terror and the problem of year II
5. Unenthusiastic memory: imagining the festive calendar
6. Perishable Enlightenment: wearing out the calendar
7. The end of the lyrical Revolution and the calendar's piecemeal decline
Conclusion
Chronology of Gregorian and Republican calendars
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Literary studies: general [DSB]