The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time

What I Read

In this article, the author describes the attempt by the French to recast time through an entirely new calendaring system. This attempt was fueled by political efforts, and ultimately failed. The author hypothesizes that the failure was because of the system’s lack of relationship to establish timekeeping metrics, and because of the creators’ attempts to entirely destroy its predecessor rather than make incremental adjustments.

Timekeeping is a social convention, one that is grounded in arbitrary selections of historical moments (such as the birth of Jesus.) It has no natural basis—even the relationship of time to the sun rising and setting is arbitrary, and has not been selected as the generally accepted way of judging time.

The French “Revolutionary Calendar” was an attempt to create a new beginning moment for time: September 22, 1792, which was the day that the French Republic was formed. The existing timekeeping mechanism was entirely changed, under the guise of being more logical and rememberable, but the change was actually intended to link time to a key political event (the world began when the French “won.”) This new calendar was “almost total” and the creators of the calendar “attempted not only to gain social control by imposing a new rhythm of collective life, but also to bring about a total symbolic transformation.” It was a push against religion, with a change in “critical dates” to avoid coinciding with existing religious demarcations.

The creators of the calendar overindexed and overemphasized secularization, and the new calendar was rejected 12 years later. Modern social life, it is concluded, “would have been impossible without temporal coordination,” and abrupt changes to such a system cause disruption; enough disruption ultimately leads to a rejection of the change.

Research Value

Paul encouraged me to read this as we were talking about the unique nature of studio time. In studio, time is broadly coordinated to align with the arbitrary nature of the university’s academic calendar, but within that broad coordination exists a project with its unique ebb, flow, and tracking metrics. Students work across a project with vague critical dates (such as a key critique or a point of assessment), but each of those students may be at a unique part of the project at a unique moment. This is not a flaw, because it allows a process of creative exploration and problem solving to exist, and a solution to mature, on its own terms. But learning the cadence of studio time is a miniature example of the French Republican calendar: it upsets all existing norms that a student may have learned.

If there is a discrete and tangible takeaway for educators, it is that the introduction of studio time needs as much anchoring in established norms as a new yearly calendar, or it will be just as disruptive. Additionally, because studio time exists for students alongside “normal time” (in other classes, in jobs, and in all of the other parts of life), they will need a way to organize and manage the new timekeeping and the established timekeeping in parallel.