The days have names
The French Republican rural calendar: 360 named days, and the machine that named them. ← Calendar Contraptions
The old calendar named every day after a saint. Revolutionary France wanted a calendar with nobody's relics in it, so the Convention's commission — the poet Fabre d'Églantine doing the naming — gave every day of the year a name from the countryside instead: what grows, what works, what lives. The result is a farmer's almanac disguised as a calendar, and it is the piece of the contraption with the most personality.
The priests assigned the commemoration of a so-called saint to each day of the year: this catalogue exhibited neither utility nor method; it was a collection of lies, of deceit or of charlatanism.
— Fabre d'Églantine, report to the National Convention, 1793
The naming machine
The machine is beautifully simple. Twelve months of thirty days; each day of the month gets a name by its position alone:
Days ending in 5 (quintidi) are animals — 36 of them, from horse, ox and dog to bee, cricket and crayfish. Days ending in 0 (décadi) are tools — the plough, the rake, the sieve, the beehive — which is fitting, because décadi was also the day of rest. Everything else is a plant — 264 of them — except in Nivôse, the first winter month, where nothing grows in the Paris basin: there the plants stand down and minerals take the slots (peat, coal, clay, iron, mercury…). The five or six days left over at year's end are the festivals — Vertu, Génie, Travail, Opinion, Récompenses, and in six-day years, Révolution — and they get no day name at all. That makes 264 plants, 24 minerals, 36 animals and 36 tools: exactly 360.
The months carry the scheme too: autumn months end in -aire (Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire), winter in -ôse (Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse), spring in -al (Germinal, Floréal, Prairial), summer in -idor (Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor — from the Greek for "giving"). The system was so persuasive that on many printed calendars of Year II, Thermidor appears as Fervidor, "burning hot" — a variant nobody ever quite repealed.
And the names were meant to be useful: each product sits on the day when, in the fields around Paris, nature actually presents it. That claim was optimistic — a grape named on a late-September slot is late for the south of France — but it is the whole charm: a calendar you could learn agriculture from.
The 360 days
Each month below shows its three décades. Every date is the day's nominal anchor — where it sits in an average year; the real French year starts on the September equinox, so the anchors slip a day or two from year to year. Spelling varied between printed editions (you will find Amaranthe and Amarante, Thymèle and Thimelé in different sources); this table follows one consistent modern transcription.
Borders mark the exceptions: animal (quintidi) tool (décadi) mineral (Nivôse only)
Famous days, named
The epoch itself: 22 September 1792, the day the Republic was proclaimed. A year of French history begins with a bunch of grapes.
27 July 1794: Robespierre's fall, the end of the Terror. History's pivotal blackberry.
9 November 1799: Napoleon's coup ended the Republic. The calendar outlived it seven years; the leadwort never stood a chance.
How it ended
Like everything else in this corner, the names were politics. The ten-day week was aimed squarely at the Church: décadis replaced Sundays as the day of rest, and for a stretch around 1798 a law even required marriages to be celebrated on décadis. The Concordat of 1801 brought Sunday back (from April 1802), and on 1 January 1806 the senatus-consulte of 22 Fructidor An XIII retired the whole calendar. It surfaced once more, briefly, under the Paris Commune — 16 Floréal to 3 Prairial, An LXXIX, eighteen days in May 1871.
The names themselves were the gentlest part of the machine, and they keep surfacing: on French seed packets and cheese labels, in wine vintages, in the month-names French speakers still use for coup dates. A calendar that named a day "plum" or "grape" is easier to love than one that named it after a beheaded saint — which is exactly what its author was counting on.
What this page doesn't do
It does not keep time: these are calendar dates, and "today" means your device's own date. It refuses dates before 22 September 1792, when the calendar begins. The day-to-name mapping is fixed forever (day 5 of any month is an animal), so the only machinery is the same equinox-based French converter as the five counters piece — with its known limits past 2200. And the category counts above are not decoration: they are a complete partition of the 360 days, checked by this page's own code.