In 1789, the French people rose up, overthrew their king, and tried to build a whole new society from scratch. They were so excited about new ideas that they didn’t just change the government. They tried to change time itself.
The revolutionary calendar started in 1793. Months got new names like Brumaire (“foggy”) and Thermidor (“hot”). Each month had three 10-day weeks called décades. People didn’t love losing their weekends - under the old calendar, Sunday was a day off; under the new one, only every 10th day was. Even time was decimalized: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
Most of it flopped. Decimal time was so confusing it was abandoned within two years. The new calendar lasted longer, but in 1805 Napoleon brought back the regular one. Today the only big leftover from this experiment is the metric system - which works so well that most of the world still uses it.
