Straight lines and grandiose schemes — Napoleon the gardener

On 1 January 1806, a little over one year after his coronation, the Emperor Napoleon ordered the abolition of France’s new republican calendar and a return to the old Gregorian model. Over the past seven years republicans had grown used to ‘empire creep’, but even for those who had been forced to watch the principles of the revolution dismantled one by one and a republican general metamorphose into Emperor of the French, this last insult carried a peculiarly symbolic charge.

For all its engaging dottiness — each new year, coinciding with the autumnal equinox, would begin on a different date — the short-lived republican calendar had embodied some of the most attractive and fragile dreams of the revolution. Instituted in 1793 and backdated to the founding of the republic, it represented not just a break with a calendar ‘soiled on every page with the prejudices and falsehoods of the throne and the church’, but a recognition and celebration of man’s place in the natural world. Ruth Scurr explains:

It was divided into 12 months of 30 days, each with names that were neologisms inspired by nature… In the new calendar, the weeks were ten days long and each of the days was named after a plant, animal or tool used by agricultural labourers… turnip, chicory, medlar, cauliflower, truffle, olive, orange and so on. The extra five (or six in a leap year) days left over from decimalising the Gregorian calendar were called ‘Sansculottides’, or without-breeches days, in honour of the nickname given to the ordinary revolutionaries who turned out on the streets… to protect the new republic.

It is the ambivalent relationship of Napoleon — the man who consigned Brumaire, Frimaire, Thermidor, Fructidor and all the rest of the revolution’s newly minted months to a semi-comic footnote of history — to the natural world that is the subject of Scurr’s new biography.