you say you want a revolution

The more history you read, the clearer it becomes that certain events, even ones that have no tangible effect on most, have the power to radically alter how humans look at themselves, and by extension the world. The French Revolution was one of these watershed periods, demonstrating the best and worst of human nature, how lofty idealism can collapse into abject horror.

But I mostly like it because it ushered in the first national adoption of the metric system. And when I mean metric system, I mean metric SYSTEM. The revolutionaries were so determined to purge any aspect of the old regime, they threw everything out the window, replacing anything they considered outdated or illogical or religious or royal. They actually took the kings, queens and jacks off of playing cards. They even started calling queen bees "lady bees", so it's no wonder that systems of measurement based around the length of a king's foot were simply unacceptable. But they didn't stop with the meter, the kilogram and the liter. They decimalized time itself.

This is a decimal clock, representing the day according to French Revolutionary Time. The length of the day is divided into 10 decimal hours, each of which consists of 100 decimal minutes, which are 100 decimal seconds long. For those of you keeping score, that means day is exactly 100,000 decimal seconds long, each of which is exactly 0.864 standard seconds. And yes, I did that math in my head.

This is nothing compared to what they did with the calendar. Shockingly, they settled on the year being 12 months long, which must've been hard for anyone who secretly dreamed of a uniformly decimal universe. C'est la vie. To step away from the religious nature of the Gregorian calendar (half the months are named after gods), they named each month according to whatever the weather was like in Paris that time of year. Seriously. Starting the year with the autumnal equinox (September 22 or 23), the months went as follows, translated from the pseudo-Latin the French were making up words in:

• Grape Harvest
• Fog
• Frost
• Snowy
• Rainy
• Windy
• Germination
• Flower
• Pasture
• Harvest
• Summer Heat
• Fruit

I prefer the satirical British version: Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Slippy, Drippy, Nippy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Wheaty, Heaty and Sweety. And as stupid as the names are, they're still better than the days of the week, which were just "Day 1" through "Day 10".

The whole thing was one gigantic mess. They were missing five days from the year and had to insert in five festival days at the end just to keep the damn thing accurate (six on leap years!). The French were probably pretty happy to have those days off, though, because with the new decimal week they had to work nine days in a row instead of six before getting to their sanctioned day of rest. And then, there was the fact that they couldn't decide on what would be considered Year One - 1789 (the year of the Revolution) or 1792 (the year the Republic was formed) - so no one was quite sure what year it was.

It's a mystery that it never caught on.

I think decimal time is emblematic of the problems revolutions or any huge social upheavals run into - you just can't remold every little detail of society to your grand design. It pisses people off.