Leftists have a history of making life harder for working people.
God, Who rested on the seventh day “from all His work which He had done,” commanded that man should do likewise.
As part of their de-Christianization campaign, the French revolutionaries over 230 years ago rebuffed this divine commandment. Instead, they determined that anyone who managed to survive their historic bloodletting would have to rest on the final day of a 10-day cycle marked on a new calendar no longer commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ.
“An almost identical anti-clerical measure was applied nearly a century and a half later by Stalin.”
Fortunately for those who labor today, this calendar, like the bloodthirsty republic that invented it, is no more.
The leftist regime that guillotined an estimated 17,000 people during the Reign of Terror determined that moving forward, every year would be divided into 12 equal months each comprising 30 days. These 12 months would then be followed by five days that didn’t belong to any month.
Each month was divided in three equal parts, which the leftists referred to as decades because they had 10 days: Primidi, Duodi, Tridi, Quartidi, Quintidi, Sextidi, Septidi, Octidi, Nonidi, and Décadi.
Gilbert Romme, the Montagnard politician who oversaw the short-lived calendar’s development, noted in 1793:
“While the supposedly enlightened leftists’ new week had extra days, it didn’t have additional days of mandated rest. Romme noted that only the 10th day was the ‘day of Repose.'”
In addition to having more workdays between days of rest, the new week disrupted church attendance — by design.
Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel noted that:
“The new calendar also stripped common folk of all the holy days, including Christmas, that filled up their rejected Christian calendar. They were instead allotted the five days that didn’t fit into any particular month to celebrate select values of the revolutionaries, including revolution and industry.”
Unsurprisingly, the French people resented the new calendar.
While coming between working people and their weekends was far down the list of the things the French revolutionaries got wrong, the Anno Domini of that particular failure is nevertheless worth marking.
Although it made an 18-day reappearance in May 1871, the French Republican calendar was abolished in 1806 by the republican turned dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.
