The saints whose names had been attached to the days were abolished. They were replaced by objects of republican veneration, animals, vegetables, minerals, tools, &c. Each Decadi was consecrated to an agricultural implement, the plough, the watering-pot, the pitchfork, &c.
Each Quintidi was consecrated to a useful animal, the horse, the ass, the pig, the trout, &c.
The eight other days of the decade were consecrated to plants, &c. It was difficult to find 288 useful plants, but by bringing in such as the nettle, the dandelion (under its vulgar French name), strange plants discovered in a herbal dictionary, together with the manure heap and a few useful minerals, the saints were entirely replaced. To popularise these substitutes for the ci-devant saints an appendix to the Decadaire or Annuaire (for the term Calendar was abolished as savouring of superstition) gave popular information, in the crudest terms, on the diseases for which the vegetables and herbs were recommended by the scientific advisers of the Republic.
To complete this system, the circles of the globe, and all other circles, were divided into 400 degrees, divided decimally. The day was divided into 10 hours, of 100 decimal minutes, each of 100 decimal seconds.
The republican division of the day was not generally put into practice except in official documents, probably because the Jacobin leaders found it personally inconvenient. Decreed as obligatory in Frimaire, an II, it was suspended in Germinal, an III, yet that it was extant, if not in force, up to 1800 is shown by a police-report of an occurrence on ‘21 Brumaire an VIII à 2 heures 10 minutes décimales,’ i.e. at 5 A.M.
The story of the means by which the unpopular republican measures were enforced has not yet been told. Some idea of it may be guessed from a remark of de Bonald (1817):
I believe that the same firmness, rigour, and lavish expenditure, used to establish, or rather to try and establish, uniformity of weights and measures, would have been sufficient to establish uniformity of religion.
If in a country which had experienced Louis XIV’s system for establishing uniformity of religion, this could be said of the means by which the republican weights and measures were enforced, it is evident that the new system met with anything but the welcome usually supposed.
But a man had arisen who delivered France, for a time at least, from the more objectionable parts of the republican measures, and the good he effected in this way had doubtless much to do with his popularity. From the time of his Consulate, at the end of 1799, the rigour of the system was gradually relaxed. His contempt for the mathematician-advisers of the Republic, whom he had found to be incapable in public business, was probably brought to a climax by the following event.
The ordnance survey-maps of France were on Cassini’s scale of 1/86,400, i.e. 1 line to 100 toises (which is the proportion of the second to the mean day). A new map having been made on the metric scale of 1/100,000, Napoleon soon found this out, and ordered the map to be restored to the old scale.