Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
engineers, and to a lesser extent, commercial businesses, despite occasional
resistance that pointed to its suspicious French origins.
In time as well as space, revolutionary France proposed dramatic changes.
“The calendar reform of the French Republic was essentially an extension of
their concurrent metric reform” (Macey 1989:35). Central to these changes
was a radically secular, decimal calendar proposed by the dramatist Fabre
d'Eglantine, a poet hired by Robespierre, which was free of saints' days and
their feudal connotations, thus erasing France's temporal connection with
the past in one fell swoop (Zerubavel 1977). It began on the autumnal equi-
nox and was based on the ancient Egyptian calendar of 12 months of 30 days
each and a
five-day holiday called
Sanculottides
(because
culottes
, or long
pants, were aristocratic garments, those
sans culottes
, originally a derogatory
term, were held to be populists). It began with New Year's day on the autumn
equinox, September 22, 1792. Weeks had ten days rather than seven, which
entailed nine consecutive days of labor (which was one of the reasons for its
downfall). Names of the months and days were changed to new ones based
on agriculture and
fi
flora and fauna, including Vendémiaire (grape harvest),
Brumaire (foggy), Frimaire (frosty), Nivôse (snowy), Pluviôse (rainy), Ventôse
(windy), Germinal (budding plants), Floréal (
fl
(flowery), Prairial (meadows),
Messidor (reaping), Thermidor (hot month), and Fructidor (gathering fruit).
The revolutionary calendar, however, was short-lived: 14 years later, in 1805,
Napoleon reinstated the Gregorian calendar in a political deal with the
Catholic church (Galison 2003). (Similarly, Stalin unsuccessfully attempted
to introduce a
fl
five-day and then six-day week in the Soviet Union in the
1920s, only to abandon it in 1940.)
fi
Early modern time-space compression in perspective
The early modern period centered on the rise to hegemony of capitalism on a
global basis and, accordingly, the formation of a worldwide market dominated
by Europeans for Europeans. Colonial empires, stitched together by maritime
routes, formed a very visible political hand that assisted and sustained the
invisible hand of the market and commodity production. Early modern global
expansion was overwhelmingly maritime in nature, and was manifested in the
coastal littorals that played key roles in the formation of overseas colonies.
While the material bene
ts to Europe as the core of the new global system
were undeniable, the conquest of the Americas also brought with it profound
ideological repercussions, including the annihilation of older, medieval imagi-
nations. In the wake of the collapse of these feudal horizons, new forms of
identity sprang up. In discovering the “Orient”—that vast complex of di
fi
erent
societies and cultures that lay outside of Europe, the “West” discovered itself.
The time-space compression of colonial modernity therefore was accom-
panied by a widespread discursive repositioning of Europe as the motor of his-
tory and non-Europe as its passive objects, a view that continues perniciously
today (Blaut 1993).
ff
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