Revolutionary Time and Regeneration LYNN HUNT ABSTRACT Beginning in 1789 and escalating in intensity into at least 1793, a new temporal schema took shape in which revolutionary time pulverized the foundations of the old order. Revolution came to mean rejecting the past, introducing a sense of rupture in secular time, maximizing and elongating the present in order to turn it into a moment of personal and collective transformation, and shaping the future in accordance with the discoveries made in the present. Time ceased being a given. It became a medium of endless potential for change that could be willed, that is, enacted by conscious choice. In the opening lines of his report to the National Convention on the new republican calendar, P.F.N. Fabre d’Eglantine explained the logic of the revolutionary reform of time: «The regeneration of the French people, the establishment of the republic, have necessarily led to the reform of the common era [l’ère vulgaire]. We can no longer count the years in which kings oppressed us as a time in which we have lived». A new calendar, he argued, would produce a new people: «it is therefore necessary to replace these visions of ignorance with the realities of reason and priestly prestige with the truth of nature»1. The «realities of reason» and «truth of nature» required a rational calendar divided into twelve equal months of 30 days each. The 1 P.F.N. Fabre d’Églantine, Rapport fait à la Convention nationale dans la séance du 3 du second mois de la seconde année de la République française, au nom de la Commission chargée de la confection du calendrier par P.F.N. Fabre-d’Eglantine, Imprimé par ordre de la Convention, Paris 1793, pp. 1-2. «Diciottesimo Secolo», anno I, 2016, pp. 62-76. LYNN HUNT months were named after a seasonal element: Germinal, for instance, connoted germination of seeds, while Floréal stood for the month of flowering. Each month had three ten-day divisions called décades («a common numerical name») and days called primidi, duodi, etc. up to décadi in order to eliminate any trace of extraneous imagery2. At the end came five days (six in leap years) of ‘sans-culottides’ devoted to uplifting festivals. The calendar was doomed for many reasons. It reset time at the foundation of the French republic ensuring that it would never be used outside of French-controlled territories or be embraced by opponents of the republic within France. Because it began in the third week of September, the months did not coincide with Gregorian calendar months, making any translation between the two calendars all the more difficult. The abolition of Sunday as a day of rest and of religious observance once every seven days in favor of décadi every ten guaranteed resistance in the working classes and among the Catholic devout. Despite all these obstacles, the republican calendar regulated official communication for more than a decade3. Although the reform of the calendar failed to take root in the way that the metric system eventually did, the experiment with the calendar captures in the most dramatic fashion the revolutionary obsession with time. This preoccupation took many forms ranging from the most general to the very specific. It was fueled by the conviction that revolutionaries could institute a rupture with the past and in the process recast the political consciousness of the citizenry. The desire for rupture first drew on and then propelled forward a startling rejection of many past practices from the determination of the Third Estate’s deputies to the Estates General not to meet 2 Ibidem, pp. 9-10. 3 M. Shaw, Time and the French Revolution: The Republican Calendar, 1789-Year XIV, The Royal Historical Society and The Boydell Press, Rochester (NY) 2011; S. Bianchi, La bataille du calendrier ou le décadi contre le dimanche. Nouvelles approches pour la réception du calendrier républicain en milieu rural, «Annales historiques de la Révolution française», 312, 1998, pp. 245-264; S. Perovic, The Calendar in Revolu- tionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2012. 63 Revolutionary Time and Regeneration separately from the other two estates in May-June 1789 to the tearing down of royal statues in 1792, the renaming of streets and squares and even cities, the introduction of new secular names for children (Brutus, Tell, Tricolore, etc.), and the preference for the use of citoyen[ne] rather than Monsieur or Madame in common speech4. To truly break with the past, regeneration had to be achieved as quickly as possible. The calendar was meant to be a public statement of an already accomplished rift. As Gilbert Romme, its main architect explained, this was «one of the most important operations» undertaken toward «the progress of the arts and the human spirit», an undertaking that could only succeed «in a time of revolution» [un temps de révolution]. By its very existence, the calendar effaced eighteen centuries of fanaticism; now «time opens a new book of history» that will capture «the annals of regenerated France»5. Romme was not alone in speaking of ‘revolutionary time’ as something very different from what had come before. From the very beginning of the French Revolution, in July 1789, commentators searched for ways of expressing their sense of the compression and therefore acceleration of time. The newspaper Révolutions de Paris referred in its second issue to «the innumerable multiplicity of events these last eight days […] a thousand pens would not suffice to trace all the details». That third week in July 1789 seemed «a week that was for us six centuries»6. Every unexpected turn of events had the same effect. After the king’s attempted escape in June 1791, Jeanne-Marie Roland wrote, «we are living through ten years in twenty-four hours; events and emotions are jumbled together and follow each other with a singular rapidity»7. 4 L. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984, pp. 52-86; S. Bianchi, Les ‘prénoms révolutionnaires’ dans la révolution française : un chantier en devenir, «Annales historiques de la Révolution française», 322, 2000, pp. 17-38. 5 G. Romme, Rapport sur l’ère de la République: séance du 10 septembre 1793, Imprimé par ordre de la Convention Nationale, Paris 1793, pp. 1-2. 6 Révolutions de Paris, Dédiées à la Nation, vol. 2 (Du samedi 18 au 25 juillet 1789): pp. 1 and 7. 7 C. Perroud (éd.), Lettres de Madame Roland, vol. 2: 1788-1793, Imprimerie nationale, Paris 1902, p. 325, Letter to Henry Bancal, 11 July 1792, Paris. 64 LYNN HUNT Within weeks of the fall of the Bastille, it became customary to identify this quickening of time with revolution. The fact that Louis-Marie Prudhomme named his paper Révolutions de Paris from its first appearance on 18 July 1789 gives some hint of this. On the evening of 6 October 1789, Jacques-Pierre Brissot dashed off his first account of the ‘October Days’ (5-6 October 1789) for his newspaper Le patriote françois: «The events that have taken place right in front of us appear almost like a dream [...]. We cannot give a detailed account today of this astonishing Revolution»8. Contemporaries clearly sensed that something momentous was happening from July 1789 onward, but the significance of revolutionary time did not congeal all at once. After all, calendar reform was not proposed until the fall of 1793. Keith Baker argues that a change in the meaning of revolution occurred sometime in the second half of 1789, probably around the October Days. When Prudhomme first published his paper in July, revolution still meant an unexpected and dramatic event. But as one event became a succession of them, participants and observers, such as the journalists associated with Révolutions de Paris, began to detect a distinctive rhythm, a special revolutionary dynamic, and the emergence of an entirely new epoch that was separating itself from the ‘ancien régime’9. The term ancien régime changed in tandem with revolution. It had been used infrequently before 1789 to refer to former regimes, such as the Gauls before Clovis or the way an abbey was run before it was combined with another10. Starting in the spring of 1789, during the quarrels over voting by head, pamphleteers who opposed voting by order used it to refer to the previous dominance of the privileged orders: «Suivant l’ancien régime, la noblesse & le clergé, qui ne sont 8 «Le patriote françois», No. 63, Mercredi 7 octobre 1789, p. 3. 9 K.M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, p. 221. 10 Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence civile, criminelle, canonique et bénéficiale, vol. 13, Chez Panckoucke, Paris 1777, p. 302; and vol. 48, Chez Panckoucke et Dupuis, Paris 1781, p. 13. 65 Revolutionary Time and Regeneration pas ensemble que la trentième partie de la nation, ont chacun séparément une force égale à tout le reste des citoyens»11. Before long, though it is difficult to say exactly when, the ancien régime became the former regime, that which had been superseded. In a 1789 tract on the rights and obligations of a ‘free people’ (a phrase that in itself signified that a transformation had occurred), the author urged his fellow citizens to vote carefully because «L’Égoïsme, qui sous l’ancien régime pouvait tout, et menait à tout, causerait aujourd’hui la destruction générale»12. By 1790, at the latest, Jean- Paul Marat regularly fulminated against those, such as Necker, whom he suspected of trying to maintain or restore the ancien régime: «Aujourd’hui même il sollicite l’assemblée de lui accorder de grands, de prompts secours, sous prétexte d’empêcher la dissolution de l’état, de régénérer les finances, mais uniquement pour affermir l’admini- stration, pour le mettre en état de perpétuer l’ancien régime»13.