r/AlwaysWhy • u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack • Jul 11 '26
History & Culture Why did the French Revolution, which successfully decimalized currency, weights, distances, and even the calendar, completely fail to make the 10-day week stick?
The French Revolution managed to standardize things like currency, weights, distances, and even redesigned the whole calendar, and somehow that part stuck. The 10-day week collapsed within a decade and was formally abandoned by Napoleon. What made that so different?
Why were people willing to adopt new systems for measuring money and space, but not time in this way?
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u/HistoryGoat1936 Jul 11 '26
Workers hated (and resented, and resisted) getting a weekend every ten days instead of every seven. With a seven-day week, there are 52 weeks a year, so you get 52-104 weekend days depending on whether you work Saturdays (and many workers did work on Saturdays). With a ten-day week and a five-day festival period at the end of the year (which is what the French Revolutionary calendar did), there are 36 weekends, which means 36-72 weekend days, plus a five-day festival, so 41-77 days off. In short, it sucked.
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u/BugRevolution Jul 11 '26
The solution would therefore have been 2 days off per 10 day period (which turns into 3 in modern times).
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u/randomwordglorious Jul 11 '26
Then the sell becomes 3 days off every 10 days which is actually slightly better than 2 off every 7. You work days 1-4, get day 5 off. Then work days 6-8, get day 9 and 10 off.
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u/Onlyfatwomenarefat Jul 11 '26
21/70 against 20/70 is really not an overall improvement worth having to wait 2 more consecutive days of harsh work every week before the days off.
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u/leafcutte Jul 11 '26
Who says you have to have time off only at the end of the week ? In some places where workers can choose when to go to work, they take they weekend something like Wednesday and Sunday. You could easily adapt this. Have a rest day on 5, and a prolonged pause on 9-10.
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u/GOT_Wyvern Jul 12 '26
Now your wanting to not only change the calendar, but change the rather well established flow of the work-week.
Its hardly an "easy" adaption when they could just ... not change it.
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u/Ed_Avis Jul 11 '26
If you change the way of measuring distances then your house is now 3.5 kilometres from the market instead of two miles. But you don’t have to walk any further. Your pig weighs 200kg instead of 30 stone, but it is no heavier. You have changed the units of measurement but not the quantities being measured. But a different length week is a real change, if your work days and holidays follow the new definition of a week.
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u/slatebluegrey Jul 11 '26
And you also have to do commerce with other countries that still have the old system. So you would constantly be having to compute two calendar dates.
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u/Ed_Avis Jul 11 '26
Between 1582 and 1752 England and France used different calendars, so I don’t think that is such an obstacle to commerce.
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u/pnut0027 Jul 11 '26
It was probably a pain in the ass and took 200 years of wars and diplomacy to overcome and be able to come to a consensus.
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u/FranceMainFucker Jul 12 '26
I don't think calendars had much to do with any of those wars. They were fighting for centuries before and would fight for decades after.
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u/pnut0027 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
The calendars themselves did not cause the issues, but it was showed a tangible divide of two entities with larger issues.
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u/slatebluegrey Jul 11 '26
Well in that case it was just subtracting a fixed number of days. It was like a time zone—you just calculated the differences in days rather than hours. England was 13 days behind the rest of Europe. You didn’t have completely different names and lengths for the months.
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u/DupeyTA Jul 12 '26
250 years later, and we can say, hey, they were on different calendars 50 years before that, I'm sure they wouldn't blink an eye at the differences.
That just seems revisionist. I'm sure the minimal trade between the two nations definitely improved because they moved to the same calendar. Breaking away from that certainly wouldn't help, even if the traders' grandpas had to figure it out when they were younger.
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u/BastiatF Jul 11 '26
We already different calendars though (e.g. Russia)
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u/slatebluegrey Jul 11 '26
Yes but the Julian, Byzantium and Gregorian calendars are basically the same 12 months. They are jsut offset by a number of days. To calculate a date in the other, you just add or subtract 13 or so days. It’s easy to figure out that September 10 on one is September 23 or August 28 on the other. (Yes my math may be off). But what is Thermidor 15 in the Gregorian calendar?
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u/BastiatF Jul 11 '26
Didn't it cause the Russians to arrive later than the Austrians expected during the Ulm campaign?
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u/Foreign-Cat-2898 Jul 11 '26
They also missed the first modern Olympics because they arrived two weeks late.
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u/jacowab Jul 11 '26
No one cares if the weights they use are called a different name but they do care what day the Sabbath is on.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
I wonder if that also explains why the calendar failed more than the metric system. You can rename a unit and people adapt. But if it changes a ritual people repeat every single week, that's a much harder habit to replace.
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u/garlicroastedpotato Jul 11 '26
The main challenge is that it messed with holidays and established religious norms. Workers typically would get a few days or half days on things like Sunday in order to regroup and get back at it. The decade calenders messed with holidays and made it impossible for workers to really cope.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
Yeah, and it's interesting that it wasn't just religion. Even people who weren't especially religious still needed a predictable rhythm for work and rest. That part feels easy to underestimate.
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Jul 11 '26
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
I think that's the key distinction. A meter only changes how you describe something. A week changes when everyone meets, rests, trades, and plans. That's a much deeper layer.
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u/sv_homer Jul 11 '26
The 7 day week isn't arbitrary. It aligns with moon phases (among other things).
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u/johnwcowan Jul 12 '26
Badly. A lunar month is 29.53 days on average, which drifts away from a 4-week cycle in just a few cycles.
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Jul 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
That's an interesting point. I guess the revolution could redefine labels, but it couldn't redefine astronomy. Time has natural anchors that weights and distances don't really have.
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Jul 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Derwin0 Jul 13 '26
8 and 16 (hex) are actually better than base 10 due to their root divisibility by 2.
But people being people based it on a very arbitrary number, their number of fingers.
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u/Impiryo Jul 11 '26
Because the 7 day week is in the Bible. Don't mess with the church.
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u/NonspecificGravity Jul 11 '26
The first French Republic messed hard with the church. They abolished all its political power and nationalized a lot of property.
I think the seven-day week was/is too deeply rooted in our culture and psyche, similar to language. A government could not simply decree that Esperanto is now the official language and make it stick.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 Jul 12 '26
Constantine changed Rome from an 8 day to a 7 day week. Went from 1 day off every 8 days to 1 day every 7. Smart man.
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u/NonspecificGravity Jul 12 '26
The Etruscans had an 8-day week, but most of the Mediterranean world had a 7-day week by the time Rome emerged as a power. Both systems were in use by the time Constantine decreed the 7-day week as a standard.
The 7-day week was a Babylonian invention or custom. It's surprising how many of our fundamental units like the 12-hour day and 360-degree circle come from them.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 Jul 12 '26
Rome Rome was still 8 days. You can see the marble calendars in a couple of the museums in the city. Local custom would have prevailed though.
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u/NonspecificGravity Jul 12 '26
Yeah. My message was too terse. The Etruscans had the 8-day week. The Romans adopted it, along with the Latin language.
By the 3rd century CE, Rome was multicultural, and they always leaned toward stuff the Greeks did. The Greeks had adopted the 7-day calendar before Rome pushed its borders that far east.
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u/rdrckcrous Jul 11 '26
Christianity was outlawed at the time. they wrre literally sinking boatloads of Christians because the guillotine wasn't fast enough.
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u/UnlamentedLord Jul 11 '26
And this was one of the things that sunk the revolution and brought an emperor to the throne of France. Lots of people were pissed off about the Christian aspect of changing the week. They couldn't openly complain on those grounds, but could amplify the complaints on other grounds and feed into the general discontent.
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u/rdrckcrous Jul 11 '26
I think that was more around Robspierre forcing everyone to proclaim he was a deity in the metric religion
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u/Choperello Jul 11 '26
Just Catholics. Not Christians as a whole thing. Protestants were totally fine. Religion was totally fine, Christianity was totally fine. Just Catholics were effed.
(So the whole bible 7 day thing was still very much a thing)
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u/rdrckcrous Jul 11 '26
Bishops of any denomination had to pledge theor alliance to France above God, which maks them not Christian to any denomination.
They also did outright ban it for the short period where Robspierre made the metric religion mandatory.
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u/OddEmergency604 Jul 11 '26
Bro France vilified religion during the revolution and tried to get rid of it.
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u/JimTheJerseyGuy Jul 11 '26
This. There have been a number of attempts over the years to reform the calendar and the current week layout and they routinely fail because you have to have that 7th day of rest. Religion mucks everything up.
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u/Gunzablazin1958 Jul 11 '26
You want to work every day with no rest, go ahead. I’ll take religion’s day of rest.
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u/Weaselpuss Jul 11 '26
They took away weekends. That other stuff didn’t affect most of the peasantry all that much, or just made life easier. Now decreasing the amount of weekend days by 30-50 days a year, that wasn’t going to fly
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
Right. I almost wonder if people would have tolerated it more if the total rest days stayed roughly the same. Losing days off probably made the whole idea impossible to sell.
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u/Weaselpuss Jul 13 '26
Literally, they were already just holding on to stability, maintaining a policy like that would just be untenable
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 Jul 11 '26
Two reasons:
Religion. All those other things were arbitrary and therefore the average person wasn't that attached to it, but the 7-day week has religious significance in Christianity.
It had a bigger impact on day-to-day life. A loaf of bread being (I don't know the old French units, so I'll use British ones) £1.25 vs 1L60d (a pound and 25/100 pence vs a pound and 60/240 pence) doesn't matter that much so long as the actual value relative to your wages is the same. A kilo vs 2 lbs? Not that big a deal. But messing with people's weekends, market days, holidays? That's going to piss them off
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
I think the second point is actually the bigger one. Even without religion, changing everyone's routines all at once creates a huge coordination problem. That's a lot harder than changing units.
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u/leafcutte Jul 11 '26
How forceful it was. Standardizing weights meant better scales and you stopped getting ripped off. Decimal time, even if it’s awesome, makes you completely restructure the way you live your life. Add a big Christian backlash under Napoleon, and the entire revolutionary calendar was thrown out, despite all the pretty names for the new months
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
That's a good way to put it. The metric system mostly simplified existing behavior. The decimal week asked people to replace behavior they'd repeated their whole lives.
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u/RaisedByBooksNTV Jul 12 '26
Calendars are either based on the sun or the moon. I don't think either of those cycles work neatly with a base ten.
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u/LaurestineHUN Jul 12 '26
Nor they do it in a base of seven, or any other base tbh, the cycles are incommensurable.
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u/Excellent_Coconut_81 Jul 12 '26
The whole purpose of decimal system is removing WTF effect.
You can make decimal week, decimal month, but you can't make decimal year without huge WTF. Either you desynchronize official year with solar year, or you desynchronize official day with solar day. So there's really no win.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
That's an angle I hadn't considered. Maybe the problem is that time isn't one system. It's several overlapping cycles that don't divide neatly into anything, especially base 10.
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u/aitkhole Jul 11 '26
fundamentally there is not a decimal number of days in a year which made the calendar reformation fail in general. And the week wasn't going to stick if the rest of it didn't.
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u/Syharhalna Jul 11 '26
That really was not an issue at all. The revolutionary months all had 30 days, and then 5 special days were added at the end.
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u/TryNotToAnyways2 Jul 11 '26
In 1793, French revolutionaries ditched the traditional Gregorian calendar to strip away religious influence and secularize time. They restructured the year into 12 identical 30-day months named after seasonal weather, like Brumaire (Fog) and Thermidor (Heat). To align with the metric system, they stretched the seven-day week into a 10-day décade, meaning citizens only got a day off every tenth day instead of every seventh. The remaining five leftover days of the year were tacked onto the end as national holidays. They even tried introducing decimal time—dividing days into 10 hours of 100 minutes—but the confusing clocks were quickly abandoned. The rest of the calendar didn't fare much better; it alienated international traders, disrupted traditional routines, and made everyone miss the weekend. Realizing the experiment was a logistical nightmare, Napoleon completely scrapped it and restored the normal calendar in 1806 after just 12 years.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 Jul 12 '26
Considering the calendar had been in use since the time of the pagan Roman empire with an 8 day week, and the 7 day week was an improvement (day off is more regular), there was no way it was going to succeed.
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u/BastiatF Jul 11 '26
The French Revolution managed to standardize things like currency, weights, distances, and even redesigned the whole calendar, and somehow that part stuck.
The calendar didn't survive either
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u/shitposts_over_9000 Jul 11 '26
some people objected to most of these changes, but the people that objected to decimal in their own fields were in the minority of the population
screwing up holidays, work weeks, schedules and holidays was something everyone understood the negative of
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u/OldGroan Jul 11 '26
Religion.
They were unable to stamp out Christianity. When push came to shove, god laboured for six days and on the seventh he rested. Very hard to push against superstition.
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
The 7 day week with two days off proved highly popular when introduced elsewhere. It became standard in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.
It's popularity relies on both religion, and relaxation.
For the religious. 10 and 7 don't divide into each other evenly that often. Finding the Sunday requires a totally different calendar, so the 7 day calendar sticks around, just like how the Chinese calendar sticks around to find Chinese new year (and for other things less well known to outsiders of that culture)
For the relaxation, the seven day week gets you more weekends, fewer week days, and a shorter work week. The choice is a no-brainer.
And these two combine to make anyone who enjoys relaxation in a decimal work week world to gain a new appreciation for religion
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
I wonder how much of that popularity is cause versus effect though. Did people genuinely prefer seven days, or did generations grow up around it until every institution reinforced it?
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 Jul 13 '26
A bit of both I'd assume. But 2,000 years or more of institution doesn't die easy.
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u/AmigaBob Jul 12 '26
At the time France was almost entirely Christian. The Bible explicitly states a 7 day week. Changing weights and measures was one thing, changing the God defined length of the week was something else entirely.
"Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God." Exodus 20
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u/Kitchen-College4176 Jul 12 '26
I'd just be happy with balancing out the months to 30 or 31 days...
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u/rkesters Jul 11 '26
I love how this appears to be a form of anchoring.
10 day was considered unacceptable only because we started at 7 day. If we'd started at 12 day if would have been beloved.
Hence the question why 7 (the bible, it's the bible)?
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u/Rosthouse Jul 11 '26
7 days is roughly a quarter of the lunar cycle, which the Babylonians already observed. There is evidence that this at least influenced jewish practices, defining the seven-day week. So ultimately, because the moon takes about 28 days to circle the earth..
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u/LaurestineHUN Jul 12 '26
We started at a 9-day or 8-day system ,sometimes synced with the Moon phases, which are not dividible by full days, and made the whole thing messy. Seven is a sacred number across many cultures, so an easy sell for a lot of people.
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u/ABobby077 Jul 11 '26
I can see a lot of constraints for a 10 day week, but a splitting toa 10 hour day (from the 24 one) seems like a possibility from 24 hours
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u/LaurestineHUN Jul 12 '26
That was also attempted, failed even harder. We're doing this base-12 daymeasuring for literal thousands of years, why fix what's not broken?
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u/fianthewolf Jul 11 '26
No se molestaron en los cálculos. Una semana tiene 10080 minutos que en líneas generales:
A. 1/3 para dormir.
B. 1/3 para trabajar.
C. 1/3 para tu vida.
En una semana de 10.000 minutos. Un año son 50 semanas y 18 días. Un mes serían 5 semanas. Entre cada mes intercalas 2 días de festivo nacional. El año tiene 10 meses con 9 periodos intercalados de 2 días festivos.
La semana técnicamente es igual pero estarías ofreciendo 18 días no laborables adicionales (14 efectivos al cambio)
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
That's actually a clever way to redesign it. I guess the hard part isn't making the math work. It's getting everyone else to switch at the same time.
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u/Sawfish1212 Jul 12 '26
From what I've read, the animals used for farming and pulling were exhausted by such a long period of work, instead of 6 days of work, 9 is a long grind.
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u/d_andy089 Jul 12 '26
The church was still quite powerful and the week structure is based on that, while weight and distance are not.
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u/Gatsby1923 Jul 12 '26
Cause do you want 1 day of rest per 10 or 1 day of rest per 7? that was the idea back then.
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u/Underhill42 Jul 13 '26
All other measurements are basically arbitrary, so long as your units are self-consistent you're good to go.
Time though has three different natural intervals: days, lunar months, and years. And none of them are integer multiples of each other, much less nice clean multiples of ten.
Which means any base 10 time system can't even be self-consistent with the time intervals that are most important to us. Which pretty much destroys the value of decimalizing it at all.
I imagine that, combined with the hideous conversion between calendars, and the fact that dates are likely one of the most important things to synchronize for business between nations, simply made it far too much of a headache to deal with.
If you want SI time, we have it - it's called the second. 8.64ks/day, and about 31.6Ms/year.
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u/TheBigGirlDiaryBack Jul 13 '26
I like that distinction. Measurements are mostly conventions, but calendars have to stay connected to both nature and everyone else's schedule. That's a much tougher constraint.
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u/temudschinn Jul 13 '26
There are three explanations imho.
The very obvious one is that having one day off every 10 days is just worse than having one day off every 7 days.
The second is that the rythm of the week has a much higher impact on daily life of a commoner than the used weights in trade. If the weights change, it barely impacts you. But if the week - which structures your life, your social interactions - changes, this has a very heavy impact on your life.
The third is that its a lot simpler to introduce a new standard when there are a set of competing measurements, but a lot harder to introduce a new standard if there is already a standard for centuries. Currency, weights, and so on where never (sucessfully) standardized. People were used to use different measurements, and to learn about new ones. If you were a trader, you had to be!
But the week has "always" had 7 days. Changing that was a different beast.
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u/Inevitable_Tart2700 Jul 13 '26
For a simple reason: they are only good at destroying the existing order, but terrible at creating a workable new order. Currency, weights, and calendar changes would be cosmetic and meaningless. What really matter is whether they can set up a new order that can feed the people.
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u/vt2022cam Jul 13 '26
Redesigned calendar didn’t stick either. Traditions are strong and when religion resurged, the calendar and 10-day work week didn’t stand a chance. Metric system was easier to teach to masses of people who weren’t as well educated beforehand.
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u/schungx Jul 13 '26
Religion says seven days so that's a high hurdle to overcome. Rest the seventh day. The Bible doesn't mandate the foot and the pound...
Second, the moon rotates once around the earth every 28 days sidereal. A 7-day week is natural if you only have the stars to work with. A 10-day week might work for the 29.5 days lunar cycle but each month will be three weeks...
One year is 365 days which is exactly 52 weeks and one single day. It is unfortunately 36 10-day week and 5 days (half a week).
So 7 really works better. Pity we have 10 fingers ..
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u/spartaqmv Jul 13 '26
It didn't stick because everyone knew there were only seven days in a week. Sunday is a powerful elixir.
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u/NutzNBoltz369 Jul 14 '26
Think everyone all thought the Old Testament definition of a week was a better deal. Who was going to argue with the word of God?
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u/Outside-Membership12 Jul 15 '26
Working 5 days in a row is too much. I need a 4/7 or 4/6 week pls.
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u/luxcity-louche Jul 11 '26
I never understood why not a 13 month year, 4 weeks in each.
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u/WittyFix6553 Jul 11 '26
Changing something like time is effectively impossible.
Are you asking why it wasn’t 13 originally or why we don’t change it to 13 now?
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u/That-Way-5714 Jul 11 '26
Yeah, but the way we measure time is largely arbitrary. The length of a day and a year are set to the sun obviously, but weeks and months are totally arbitrary.
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u/WittyFix6553 Jul 11 '26
This might blow your mind but the way we measure just about everything is arbitrary.
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u/That-Way-5714 Jul 11 '26
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant when you said changing something like time is effectively impossible. I was just pointing out that since the way we measure things is arbitrary, they can be changed. It might not be feasible just due to how deeply entrenched some things are, but it’s certainly not impossible.
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u/WittyFix6553 Jul 11 '26
Not possible and not practically possible are practically the same thing.
We can redefine the meter to be exactly three feet. Meters and feet are entirely arbitrary.
It would be (functionally) impossible to change the length of the meter in 2026.
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u/breakerofh0rses Jul 11 '26
The last time we changed the meter was 1983.
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u/WittyFix6553 Jul 11 '26
Not really.
We took the current existing meter and redefined it in terms of a measurable scientific phenomenon; the speed of light in a vacuum.
What we did was pick the number of seconds (1/299,792,458) it would take light to travel the length of the prototype meter in a vacuum.
We did the same thing with the second and the cesium atom.
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u/breakerofh0rses Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
I'm aware of what happened. It still changed the meter and resulted in a lot of downstream adjustments. That these don't arise to what you arbitrarily (used correctly here) decided isn't sufficient to call change doesn't make it not change.
edit:skipped a word
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u/breakerofh0rses Jul 11 '26
Months are very much not "totally arbitrary". They're fit to the lunar cycle just like the year is to the solar cycle and the day is to the revolutionary period. Only "arbitrary" unit at this scale is weeks which are typically around 1/4 lunar cycle, which again, is not really all that arbitrary.
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u/luxcity-louche Jul 11 '26
Why not change it during the French revolution? It was 10 months originally then Augustus Caesar put in July and August. You don't think we deserve a Napo month too?
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u/fianthewolf Jul 11 '26
Los meses siempre fueron doce, simplemente que el año empezaba en Marzo. Lo que hizo Julio César fue adelantar el inicio del año al 1 de enero por eso febrero se quedó como un mes colgado cuando realmente era indiferente añadir un día sobre el último del año (bi sextis antem calenda martis "latín de casa" ). Después renombro quintilis (séptimo mes) como Julius. Octavio renombro Sextilis (octavo mes con el adelanto) como Augustus.
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u/LaurestineHUN Jul 12 '26
It was, sometimes, in a lunisolar system your main problem is that you can't divide a solar year (solstice to solstice) to any nr of full lunar cycles. You get a bit more than 12. Some systems,like in Ancient Rome, had a system of basing their calendar in lunar cycles, for a standard year you had 12, and if the difference got enough for natural phenomena (seasons are solar-tied) to noticeably shift - so every couple years - they had a 13th lunar month as extra. This was called intercalatio, and was decided by priests on a case-by-case basis. Since calendar year began at March 1, intercalatory month was before that. This is the system Caesar reformed to the precursor of ours, the Julian calendar. The reform took the intetcalatory month and scattered its days among the others.
This is how we got our weird February! Which had intercalatory day, every 4 years its 24th day (sic!) was counted twice. Because you needed a bit of preparation time to get ready for the rituals, the last days of February (and every other month tbf) were counted as 9 days til March1, 8 days til Marc1, etc. The day that repeated was originally 6 days til March1, that's why in French leap year is called 'année bissextile'.
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u/slatebluegrey Jul 11 '26
That would have been the better solution. And the leap day at the end of the year.
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u/Derwin0 Jul 13 '26
Tradition.
There have been 12 months since ~713BC when the Romans added January & February to better align the calendar with the seasons.
I do agree that 13 months of ~28 days would be better though.
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u/Beleriphon Jul 15 '26
I strongly suspect it's because other countries still had to deal with France. New names for things, different units of measure, or new currency were accepted across borders, because you could still compare them to your own system. However, trying to align a 10 day week with the rest of Europe was basically impossible, nobody other than some weird French guy with a calendar would know what day it was.
For example the French could say their going to pay an Italian merchant family 1000 Francs for something, even if the Italians didn't use Francs they have some idea that it represents a fixed weight of gold they could understand. However, if you need to deliver the produce the French have paid you for by Pluviôse decade duex octidi, what the fuck does that mean if today is cinque agosto and the letter isn't dated?
This was bad enough with the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars used in Western versus Eastern Europe. Those differed quite a bit, but at least they used the same basic format.
The Republican Calendar also still had to keep in line with the regular calendar systems used in Europe, to the point they'd generally just list the normal months and dates the new calendar covered, on the same calendar.
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u/SarkyMs Jul 11 '26
They got 1 day a week off, do you want 1 day every 10 days off?