Editing French Republican calendar (section)

=== Rural calendar ===
The Roman Catholic Church used a [[calendar of saints]], which named each day of the year after an associated [[saint]]. To reduce the influence of the Church, [[Fabre d'Églantine]] introduced a rural calendar in which each day of the year had a unique name associated with the [[Rural economics|rural economy]], stated to correspond to the time of year. Every ''décadi'' (ending in 0) was named after an agricultural tool. Each ''quintidi'' (ending in 5) was named for a common animal. The rest of the days were named for "grain, pasture, trees, roots, flowers, fruits" and other plants, except for the first month of winter, Nivôse, during which the rest of the days were named after minerals.<ref>{{cite book |author=Edouard Terwecoren |author-link=Edouard Terwecoren |title=Collection de Précis historiques |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6nIXAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA31 |date=1870 |publisher=J. Vandereydt |page=31}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez, Prosper Charles Roux |title=Histoire parlementaire de la révolution française |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WU4QAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA415 |date=1837 |publisher=Paulin |page=415}}</ref>

{{Blockquote|Our starting point was the idea of celebrating, through the calendar, the agricultural system, and of leading the nation back to it, marking the times and the fractions of the year by intelligible or visible signs taken from agriculture and the rural economy. (...)

As the calendar is something that we use so often, we must take advantage of this frequency of use to put elementary notions of agriculture before the people – to show the richness of nature, to make them love the fields, and to methodically show them the order of the influences of the heavens and of the products of the earth.

The priests assigned the commemoration of a so-called saint to each day of the year: this catalogue exhibited neither utility nor method; it was a collection of lies, of deceit or of charlatanism.

We thought that the nation, after having kicked out this canonised mob from its calendar, must replace it with the objects that make up the true riches of the nation, worthy objects not from a cult, but from agriculture – useful products of the soil, the tools that we use to cultivate it, and the domesticated animals, our faithful servants in these works; animals much more precious, without doubt, to the eye of reason, than the beatified skeletons pulled from the catacombs of Rome.

So we have arranged in the column of each month, the names of the real treasures of the rural economy.  The grains, the pastures, the trees, the roots, the flowers, the fruits, the plants are arranged in the calendar, in such a way that the place and the day of the month that each product occupies is precisely the season and the day that Nature presents it to us.
| author=Fabre d'Églantine|title="Rapport fait à la Convention nationale au nom de la Commission chargée de la confection du Calendrier",<ref name="Rapport Fabre">{{Gallica|id=bpt6k48746z.image|t=Convention nationale. Rapport fait à la Convention nationale, dans la séance du 3 du second mois de la seconde année de la République Française, au nom de la Commission chargée de la confection du Calendrier; Par Ph. Fr. Na. Fabre-D'Eglantine,... Imprimé par ordre de la Convention nationale}}</ref> Imprimerie nationale, 1793}}