of sieve). All very simple when you get the hang of it, which few French citizens did, or seemed to want to.
Shaw was reaching the end of his tour, and his audience was beginning to pull away, shaking heads. He paused at 15 February, represented by hazel. ‘It’s very appropriate, as today we’ve just heard the news that Michele Ferrero has passed away at the age of 89, who made his fortune from Nutella.’ Shaw’s penultimate stop in the room was at the 10th of Thermidor. This was Republican high summer, and the day (28 July 1794) when Robespierre was executed. The Terror was eating its own. The day was represented by a watering can.2
Insane and wonderful as it was, the utopian French Republican calendar seems to have existed outside time. From today’s perspective it appears as absurd as the prospect of a global commune or free money, but it is only routine and time itself that has brought us to this judgment. Earth has many calendars in which it has set its frame, and all blend logic, natural science and arbitrariness to their cause. The calendric system of time that apportions our lives into a semblance of progressive shape – and perhaps, we hope, consistent meaning – is not something that may be conclusively proven or even relied upon. One day we may wake up, as did the citizens of Auvergne and Aquitaine, and find that Tuesday is not where it used to be, and that October has gone completely.
The Republican calendar was also unusual in one other respect. It was history overnight, and unrecognisable from what had preceded it; it destroyed what calendrical historians like to call the ‘deep fixity’ of all earlier conceptions.3 Previously, or so we would like to assume, calendars in Europe and the civilised ancient world had progressed gradually with emerging astral awareness and mathematical computation. Religious calendars also built upon each other, drawing on common baselines of solstice, equinox and eclipse.
But we’d be wrong to believe that the French Revolutionary calendar was the first to impose a political perspective upon the days. All calendars impose order and control to a greater or lesser degree, and all are political in their own way (particularly the religious ones). The ancient Mayan calendar, for example, was a beautiful and truly baffling thing, intricately maintaining two years in parallel, one of 365 days and one of 260. The 260-day system, or Sacred Round, contained 20 different names of days, including Manik, Ix, Ben and Eiznab, and these ran on the perimeter of an inner circle of 13 numbers, so that the year ended on 13 Ahau. The 365-day calendar contained 18 months of 20 days each, but as this made up only 360 and rendered it out of step with lunar and solar cycles, the remaining five days were judged fateful, with Mayans wont to stay indoors and pray to the Gods lest terrible things occur. These were terrible religious prophecies, an indication of the power of the priesthood. The Aztec calendar of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries ran on similar cycles, and institutional control: disparate provinces of a vast empire were purposely unified by religious festivals and other dates. (The Aztec calendar culminated in the New Fire ceremonies performed at the end of the full cycle every 52 years.)
We will be more familiar with the Julian calendars (effective from 45 bc, and consisting of 12 months and 365.25 days, based on a solar year), and the Gregorian reform of 1582, which retained the Julian months and lengths but slightly shortened the duration of the year (by 0.002 per cent) to accommodate more accurate astronomical rotations and reposition the date of Easter to the date it was first celebrated.4 The Gregorian calendar took a while to be widely accepted, with the grudging adoption by Catholic countries causing anomalies throughout Europe. When Edmond Halley observed a total solar eclipse in London on 22 April 1715, much of the rest of Europe saw it on 3 May. Great Britain and its American colonies finally switched over in 1752, but not without a bit of half-hearted rioting from people shouting ‘Give us back our eleven days!’ Japan only changed in 1872, Bolshevik Russia came in at the end of the First World War, and Greece in 1923. Turkey clung on to its Islamic calendar until 1926.
The apparent arbitrariness of how we have chosen to govern our lives was expertly parodied by B.J. Novak in the New Yorker in November 2013. ‘The Man Who Invented the Calendar’ wrote plainly of the great logic of his invention: ‘A thousand days a year, divided into twenty-five months, forty days a month. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?’ Things go well for the calendar initially, but the first crisis hits after four weeks. ‘People really hate January and want it to be over,’ the inventor noted. ‘I tried to explain that it’s just a label, and that ending it wouldn’t make any difference, but no one got it.’ On 9 October, the inventor writes: ‘Can’t believe I haven’t written in so long! Summer was amazing. Harvest was amazing . . . This year has been amazing and it’s still only October. There’s still November, December, Latrember, Faunus, Rogibus, Neptember, Stonk . . .’ He soon decides to end the year earlier than planned, and he receives huge acclaim from friends. But there is disquiet around Christmas: ‘December 25th – Why do I feel so lonely today?’ and ‘December 26th – Why am I so fat?’
By the time of the Second French Revolution in 1830, no one dared suggest new calendars or clock dials.5 Instead, another obsession seemed to engulf early nineteenth-century France, or at least its psychoanalytical casebooks: the act of looking back became a certifiable disease. Medical studies of the 1820s and 1830s were fascinated with what appeared to be an outbreak of nostalgia.
One of the earliest cases concerned an elderly occupant of a lodging in rue de la Harpe, in the Latin Quarter. This man took great pride in his apartment and was devastated when he heard the news that it was to be demolished to make way for street improvements. So devastated that he took to his bed and, despite his landlord’s assurances that his new home would be better and brighter, refused to budge. ‘It will no longer be my lodging,’ he complained, ‘the one I loved so much, that I embellished with my own hands.’6 He was found dead in his bed just before the demolition, having apparently ‘suffocated of despair’.
Another example, also from Paris, featured a two-year-old boy named Eugéne who couldn’t bear to be separated from his wet nurse. Returned to his parents, Eugéne became limp and pale, with eyes fixed on the door from where his nurse exited. When returned to his nurse, all joy broke loose. Such cases rendered French citizens useless to the state. The cultural historian Michael Roth has classified nostalgia as ‘an affliction that doctors regarded as potentially fatal, contagious, and somehow deeply connected to French life in the middle of the nineteenth century.’ The common cause was an over-fondness for one’s earliest memories, and in a century of intended modernity, nostalgia cast the patient as an outcast, destined for the madhouse or the jail. The affliction was first classified in 1688 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who aligned the Greek words nostos (or homecoming) with algos (pain). Earlier in the century the affliction mal de corazón had seen a group of soldiers sent home during the Thirty Years War, and it did seem to be a disease that particularly afflicted the army. Swiss soldiers could apparently be left in puddles of tears if they heard cowbells, reminding them of their native pastures, not least the milking song ‘Khue-Reyen’. This was such a weakener that anyone who played it – or consciously hummed it – was liable for the firing squad. Today we might just be homesick or unhappy. But nostalgia was the first disease associated with time, its victims longing for days gone by.7
But nostalgia is not a disease of the past. Nowadays we are nostalgic for all sorts of things, even if the analyst’s couch has been vacated for more critical concerns. We like retro and vintage and distressed and heritage, and we adore history (history as a subject worthy of academia and literature barely existed before the French Revolution). The Internet thrives on the desire of the middle-aged (mostly men, it must be said) to buy back a lost youth, be it auctionable toys or salvageable cars (time has not withered these things, only increased their resale value). Nostalgia is increasingly viewed not as a punishable disease but as a consumerist one, and its connotations are no longer entirely negative. As we shall see in a later chapter, a desire to turn back the clock pervades an increasingly popular way of living: the slow life (incorporating slow food, mindfulness, a back-to-the-lathe ‘maker’ mentality) has long since transformed itself from a dilettante’s