The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics [Paperback]

This study explores the reinvention of the calendar during the French Revolution and its long-lasting cultural effects.This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. 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.This study traces the course of the Revolutionary Calendar, from its cultural origins to its decline and fall. 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.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 Mar?chal, 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 Mar?chal 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 lƒ*