Octidi 18 Nivôse
CALENDAR, n. Timely, right? I looked this word up for reasons that will become clear below, but I figured the first newsletter of January was a great moment to tell you about it. We get “calendar,” meaning the way we organize our months and years (as in “the Gregorian calendar” or “the Islamic calendar”), from “calends/kalends,” the name of the first day of any month in the Roman calendar. Accounts were due on this day, so an account book in Latin is a “calendārium.” We still use “calendar” to mean both the record, whether print or digital, of the days and also the overall system.
(Speaking of the Kalends, a long time ago this newsletter did also discuss the Ides.)
In Capital-R Romance, I revisited Peter McPhee’s The French Revolution: 1789-1799 and read his book Living the French Revolution: 1789-1799 for the first time. Both are academic nonfiction. They cover similar ground, but the second is focused on the experience of people in rural France, especially peasants. I read these as research for my current novel draft, but who cares. I’m here to share a historical anecdote.
The story’s no good without context, though. You need to know that the Revolutionaries, in founding their Republic, made a new calendar. It was part of their whole reorganizing-the-world deal that included new administrative districts (the départements that are more or less still in use in France today) and new measurements (the metric system, now in every sensible country!). The Republican calendar had new years (Year I of the Republican Era starts September 22, 1792), new months (with names like Floréal and Germinal), new weeks (they’re ten days now), and new days (the tenth day of the week, the one for rest, is called décadi).
A date might look like this, with the day of the week, the day of the month, and the year as a Roman numeral: octidi 18 nivôse CCXXXII. (That’s today. “Nivôse” is the snow month, corresponding to late December through late January. Also, in French, months are not capitalized, but since this newsletter’s in English, I’m sorta splitting the difference.)
The calendar has illustrations! Here’s the allegory of Frimaire, the frost month, late November through late December. Probably drawn by Louis Lafitte and printed by Salvatore Tresca in 1797-1798 (you know, Year VI or Year VII).
Source: Gallica
I can’t believe I’ve apparently never talked about the Republican calendar in this newsletter before?? I love it. Every day celebrates a plant or an animal or something to do with rural life (instead of a saint). The 18th of Nivôse, for instance, celebrates limestone; many of the days in this first month of winter celebrate soil and minerals instead of plants, though days ending in 5 are always devoted to an animal and days ending in 0 honor an agricultural tool.
It’s whimsical and wonderful and just this perfect encapsulation of the Revolution simultaneously at its best and most idealistic—truly committed to starting anew, and celebrating nature and peasant labor every day from here on out—and its most fragile and impossible. Unlike départements and kilograms, the Republican calendar isn’t a good system; they never quite worked out the math on their leap years. More fundamentally: they really thought they could cancel Sunday?
(Mathematically inclined readers may have noticed that one day off every ten days is less rest than one day off every seven days. The peasants certainly noticed.)
The Revolutionaries threw out the old calendar because it was inextricable from Catholicism, which was no longer allowed. Instead they worshipped Republican virtues like reason.
Got it? Okay, here’s the story:
In the village of St-Vincent, north of Le Puy (Haute-Loire), the patriot priest rose on a décadi to read a paean to the goddess of reason when the women present rose as one, turned their backs on the altar of liberty and the priest, lifted their skirts and exposed their buttocks as a sign of contempt. The priest complained bitterly to the authorities of these ‘gestes gigantesques et obscènes’ [my translation: ‘immense and obscene gestures’], but the practice spread to other villages. (Living 133)
History is always the most fun when it’s about butts.
Here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
A Power Unbound (bi m/gay m, both cis, historical, fantasy) by Freya Marske. I wrote about the other two books in this trilogy, A Marvellous Light and (at great length!) A Restless Truth. A Power Unbound is a fitting end to the trilogy—the same delicate, precise prose, perfect for this book’s spectacular balancing act of a big action-packed fantasy plot and a deep, emotional (and kinky) romance. I loved spending more time with the main characters from the other books and meeting more houses with personalities. Every minute spent with this book was wonderful, and I was sad to see it end. I will absolutely reread this series.
Double Exposure (cis f/nonbinary, contemporary) by Rien Gray. Rival art thieves with a messy past affair find themselves trying to heist the same set of long lost, scandalous photos—connected to a potential murder—from the Chicago Art Institute. Lots of sexy hostility, expensive suits, high art, blueprints, climbing harnesses, charity galas, and lies. This is a ton of fun and very stylish. The sexual tension is as delicious as the dramatic irony, and the book feels as well researched as the heist. I love that the problem in the romance is that each world-class thief thinks the other is too good at their craft to ever make a mistake.
Bet on It (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Jodie Slaughter. I love nothing more than watching two dodos make a pact—not to have sex, or to have sex only in certain circumstances, or to have sex but not have any feelings about it—and then fail spectacularly. This is an excellent example. Aja, a Black woman from Washington, DC who struggles with generalized anxiety disorder, moves to the small town of Greenbelt, South Carolina to help with her mental health. She has a panic attack in the grocery store there and a kind stranger talks her through it. They meet again a few days later at the town’s bingo night, which Aja has been attending as a sort of coping strategy and way to get out of the house. Her only friend is a quirky, sharp-tongued little old white lady, who turns out to be the grandmother of the handsome stranger who witnessed Aja’s panic attack. His name is Walker, and he knows what to do about panic attacks because he’s living with complex PTSD from both his parents struggling with addictions. Coming home to Greenbelt is fraught for him, but he does it to take care of his grandmother after she breaks her arms. He wants to leave and Aja wants to stay, so they definitely can’t fall in love. They really, really like each other, though. They handle it by making a bingo-based sex pact, which might be unique in all of romance. This book absolutely lives up to both its hilarious premise and its more serious subject matter.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, Naomi Klein has made a couple chapters of her recent book Doppelganger—about constantly getting mistaken for conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, but also about the idea of having a shadow self—available for free on her website. They’re about Jewishness and Zionism and settler colonialism and genocide and Israel and Palestine, and they are a great read.
That said, US-based discussion of Palestine is always, always dominated by Jewish voices, and even when we are saying things I agree with (as Klein is), we should strive to correct the balance. We should listen to Palestinians. In my continuing quest to read more Palestinian writers, I read Rifqa, a volume of poetry by Mohammed El-Kurd that honors his grandmother, Rifqa El-Kurd, an icon of Palestinian resistance (this piece in The Nation is an excerpt of the book). It’s a breathtaking, heartwrenching read.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back in your inbox on duodi 2 pluviôse CCXXXII, or Sunday, January 21, 2024.
