(Reuters)
THE FIFTH COLUMN
I don’t suppose Karl Marx imagined the problems he was causing when he titled an essay of his The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon. Oh, no — I’m sure he thought it was very, very clever indeed.
Unfortunately, it has left later generations struggling to explain what it means to people who ask primary questions such as “What is a brumaire? And why did Louis-Napoleon have 18 of them?”
One almost wants to reply: “Well, a brumaire is a kind of confectionery, made of millefeuille pastry, with extra butter, and filled with fruits du jour, with a generous amount of coulis drizzled on the side. And of course the whole thing would be XXXL-royal in size.
“Now Emperor Louis-Napoleon really liked these fancy pastries, as he would, and one day he happened to eat 18 of them, and then he exploded. Thus ended the Second French Empire.”
But that would be ahistorical. Le 18 brumaire is in fact a date — that on which Napoleon Bonaparte, the first Napoleon, seized power in France in 1799. He crowned himself emperor in 1804. Half a century later, his nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (who had earlier been elected president) seized power and mounted the imperial throne. He chose the 48th anniversary of his uncle’s coronation on 11 frimaire, back in 1804, although by 1852 the date was actually December 2.
After the French Revolution, you see, the new regime (one of enlightened rationality) switched the country to decimal weights and measures.
It introduced what we now know as the metric system, and great thanks to them for that, but it also decimalised time. So there were 10 hours in a day, not 12, and 10 days in a week, renamed a décade. The days were then numbered (primidi, duodi, tridi, et cetera), and you had the 10th day off. Yippee.
When it came to the months, it proved impossible to make 10, so the revolutionists satisfied themselves by renaming them, part-seasonally: brumaire is the misty season, fructidor is fruitful, thermidor is hot, and so on. No, they didn’t use capital letters.
Nowadays climate change would probably make this kind of calendar less feasible. In Johannesburg, for instance, December would have to be renamed Monsoon. And the calendrier révolutionnaire was roundly satirised by a Brit wit, for one, as “Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy and Nippy …” (Do look up the full list on Wikipedia.)
Clocks were remade to reflect the new decimal time system, but the 10-hour day and week lasted only about three years in France. The names of the still-duodecimal months of the year, along with the system of counting years since the foundation of the Republic, remained until Napoleon (the first one) abolished them just in time for 1806 to begin with a new January 1.
And now it’s germinal in South Africa. Here, have a brumaire. They’re freshly baked.