Shockingly, as well as watching Shrine tonight (more times than I care to admit) I've been researching various calendar systems in the process of creating fictional calendars, and France's post-revolution calendar is KILLING me. Seriously. Killing me.

Following the revolution, an assortment of people who really should have know better implemented a calendar that lasted exactly 13 years before it collapsed under the weight of its own ineptitude. To start off, here are the names of the months:

1. Vendémiaire
2. Brumaire
3. Frimaire
4. Nivôse
5. Pluviôse
6. Ventôse
7. Germinal
8. Floréal
9. Prairial
10. Messidor
11. Thermidor
12. Fructidor

I realize they were going for an agricultural theme. And I don't speak (much) French. But, no matter what language you speak, I don't think this bodes well at all.

And it keeps getting better. The weeks were ten days long, and the year began in the fall; as Wikipedia notes:

The calendar was abolished because having a ten-day work week gave workers less rest (one day off every ten instead of one day off every seven); because the equinox was a mobile date to start every new year (a fantastic source of confusion for almost everybody); and because it was incompatible with the secular rhythms of trade fairs and agricultural markets.

And this doesn't even get started on the fact that their "rules" for leap years were mutually contradictory, so even people who understood the calendar system couldn't figure out where leap years fell because it wasn't mathematically possible to calculate them.

But the coup de grâce (sorry) is that every single day of the year, all 365 or 366 of them, is associated with an animal, tool, plant or mineral in lieu of the traditional Roman Catholic saints. (They were trying to divorce themselves from the traditionally Christian origins of the calendar.) Needless to say, when you have to come up with that many of them, homeland-specific, while also planning a revolution, you get ... desperate. Apparently, if Wikipedia can be believed, there were days honoring:

-the shovel
-topsoil
-manure
-the parsnip
-gypsum
-saltpeter (which, in case you don't know, is crystalized urine)
-tuna
-lava
-puffball mushrooms
-the watering can

And more! The full, hilarity-inducing list is at Wikipedia. There's a day dedicated to the sack. I realize that sacks are important, but important enough to name a calendar day after?

Christmas is - wait for it - a day that's devoted to ... sulphur. A.K.A. brimstone.

I cannot imagine how this cunning plan went awry.

I apologize to the French, I really do, because, seriously, it's not like my country doesn't have its own silly and bizarre historical appendixes (Emperor Norton I of San Francisco, anyone?), but, really. A DAY NAMED AFTER MANURE.