The Emancipation of the Past, As Due to the Revolutionary French Ideology of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PAST, AS DUE TO THE REVOLUTIONARY FRENCH IDEOLOGY OF LIBERTÉ, EGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ Marita Mathijsen Calendar When, as little children, we begged my granddad to reveal his age, he used to respond: ‘Why don’t you make the sum yourselves? I was born in the year one hundred’. Granddad was born in 1892, and it pleased him to make his grandchildren exert their brains. At that age we did not fully capture what was behind it all, even though granddad explained to us that in 1792 the French had introduced a new calendar to demonstrate that a new age had come about. On 20 September 1793 Charles-Gilbert Romme, one of the delegates to the National Convention in Paris, had addressed the meeting in full session. Romme declared that the customary calendar had been the chronology of cruelty and lies, of falsity and servitude. Th e past should be closed, a new chronology should serve as a sign of the rupture with the past. He had already prepared it in full. A couple of days later the Convention adopted the new calendar. It was made retroactive to the fi rst day of the republic, 22 September 1792. Romme, mathematician and revolutionary politician, designed the new calendar as a mathemat- ical system. Each month counted thirty days, each week ten days. Th e day was divided into ten hours of one hundred minutes each, which in their turn counted one hundred seconds.1 Th is left each year with fi ve supernumerary days, leap years with six. Th ese became national holidays, known as the ‘sans-culottides’. With its point of departure taken in the decimal system, Romme’s design was also an ode to the primacy of scientifi c rationality over tradition and backward historical knowledge. It ran in parallel with the unitary proposals for the metric system that the revolutionaries introduced as well. In Romme’s 1 Clocks with a dual system, for ten hours as well as twelve, may on occasion be spotted at antique auctions and in museums. 22 marita mathijsen scheme the months of the year were given names to commemorate the revolution, with names like Peuple, Jeu de Paume, la Bastille.2 Contradictions: Th e past destroyed yet celebrated We encounter here one of those contradictions that history so oft en presents us with. Romme wants to renounce the past; by means of his new calendar the revolutionary government wants to make a clean break with the past. But Romme uses the names of the months to write history, for although the history is recent, it is history nonetheless. Th e names that Romme uses for his calendar serve to commemorate certain events. Th e very act of commemorating past events is nothing but a template itself adopted from the past, so we fi nd Romme think- ing historically aft er all. Even so, the names that he proposed were not adopted by the Convention, because the delegates could not come to an agreement. Th eir failure to agree did not concern the historical turn as such, but rather the historical names selected—these would fi xate too much things still very much in fl ux, as so much history might still be expected to take place. Th e Convention settled for a compromise. It derived the names of the months from nature, and that is how Wine month came about, and Fog month, and Cold month, and Nivôse, Snow month. It is not just the new calendar that testifi es to the paradoxical rela- tionship that the Revolutionaries maintained with the past. Th ey destroyed without mercy archival collections and historical buildings, abbeys, and churches. Louis XV’s bronze equestrian statue was pulled down from its pedestal and melted down, the way Saddam Hussein’s was in our day.3 Tens of thousands of prints were distributed that represented how Louis XVI was beheaded on the Place de la Concorde 2 See for the calendar and the plea by Romme: Mark Elchardus, ‘De Republikeinse kalender . “niets minder dan een verandering van religie” ’. Onderzoeksgroep TOR (Tempus Omnia Revelat), De opstand van de intellectuelen. De Franse revolutie als avant-première van de moderne cultuur (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 19891), 102–139, here 131–132; Robert Gildea, Th e Past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 40–41. 3 Cf. for the destruction of statues by the Revolutionaries: Gildea 1994, 21; Domi- nique Poulot, Musée, nation, patrimoine 1789–1815 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 136–139. Th e same occurred in Th e Netherlands. Cf. J.R. Kuiper, Een revolutie ontrafeld: politiek in Friesland 1795–1798 (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 2002)..

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