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For a few weeks I’ve been making a calendar in my spare time. It’s a Gregorian calendar but it marks the days of the French Republican calendar also. I wanted to finish it by the new year and sell it somehow. Unlike me, most people I know hate email and never want to check their inbox (I love email). Everyone I polled said that if they were going to buy a calendar which comes as a daily message, they’d rather have it arrive in their social media dms of choice. If I manage to get it together, I suppose something could be coded up to deliver in preferred ways, but where to market? My respondents suggested shopify or etsy, with ads made on tiktok. I’m sure they’re right, but I’m so old.
Inspired by anticleric Sylvain Maréchal’s 1788 Almanach des Honnêtes-gens - Almanac of Honest People - the revolutionaries of France created the Calendrier Républicain Français - the French Republican Calendar, with a very deliberate absence of royal and religious references. It was used by the French government from 1793-1805 and, ever so briefly, by the Paris Commune.
These are gorgeous. And we’d definitely use it. We’ve had a revolutionary calendar on our kitchen wall since Year 223. The seasons makes so much more sense when they start on the solstices and equinoxes! Then one month is early summer, one is mid and one is late. Instead of this mess where seasons start on the 20th, so they don’t line up with anything.