The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics by Sanja Perovic (review)

In this ambitious, original, interdisciplinary study, perceptions of time are approached along two intersecting paths: the history of the French Republican calendar instituted in the autumn of 1793, and the literary career of Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803), a prolific writer and propagandist best known as a sympathizer with Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals of 1796 and therefore as a precursor of nineteenth-century socialism and communism. The Republican calendar, with its ten-day weeks, fanciful names of months, and dating of the Year I from the moment of the proclamation of the French Republic in September 1792, has often been invoked as the most striking example of the revolutionary desire to break with the Ancien Régime and the rhythms of Catholicism. Yet, since it lasted only twelve years and provoked more controversy than adherence, the calendar has rarely been analysed in much depth. Maréchal, too, has suffered from neglect. His scorching atheistic and anarchistic views have drawn attention, but no one before Sanja Perovic had really considered him a literary innovator whose views would illuminate attitudes towards time in particular. By weaving these two strands together, the author hopes to transform explanations of the French Revolution, which, ‘while often studied as a political, social, or cultural event, instead poses primarily a problem in the history of representations of time’ (p. 4). Proving the primacy of temporal questions is actually beyond the purview of the book, which first must excavate the representations of time underlying the calendar and Maréchal’s prodigious and heterogeneous publications and then, most importantly, show their interrelationship. The connection appears most convincing at the beginning of the story, for Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens, burnt as blasphemous in 1788, was a prototype of the 1793 Republican calendar. Alternating between the two very different subjects of the calendar and the works of Maréchal, Perovic detects a series of formative tensions: between myth and lived experience, nature and history, lyric and narrative, and cyclical and linear time. The stakes are high, and Perovic offers countless brilliant insights along the way, even if the strategy of interchange is not entirely successful. Maréchal remains an enigma: never arrested for his participation in the Babeuf conspiracy, he spent his last years publishing increasingly furious tracts against religion, private property, and all forms of organized polity, even while buying houses for a leisured retirement with his devoutly Catholic wife. If Maréchal was a literary innovator, no one noticed. The calendar, meanwhile, limped towards its final official demise, but not before it had permanently imprinted itself on the political imagination. Was its failure the result of a shift from a lyrical to a narrative understanding of the Revolution? This conclusion makes too much of a tension that is surely present between lyric, myth, nature, and cyclical time on one side, and narrative, lived experience, history, and linear time on the other. The calendar and the Revolution itself straddled both.