Commentary
Revolutionaries often don’t know when to stop. In France of the 1790s, radicals, not content with creating a constitutional monarchy, abolishing feudalism, and establishing a bill of rights, attempted to create a whole new kind of human–utterly rational, uprooted from old loyalties and places, fitted to be a citizen of a new kind of nation.
The old clock, calendar and measurements were abolished–time and space were decimalized, 10 hours in a day, ten days in a week, distances standardized. The reckoning of years from the birth of Christ had to go, what had been 1792 A.D. became Year One. The old provinces were erased, replaced by a grid-work of départements of nearly identical shape, regardless of local history, dialect, or geography….