Reading Group, Revolutionizing Time: The French Republican Calendar
When:
—
Venue:
TBC
No booking required
Dr. Sanja Perovic, Senior Lecturer in French, King's College London
One of the most unusual decisions of the leaders of the French Revolution - and one that had immense practical as well as symbolic impact - was to abandon customarily accepted ways of calculating date and time to create a revolutionary calendar. This revolutionary experiment lasted from 1793-1805 and raises all sorts of questions about the nature of time, ways of measuring it, and its relationship to individual, community and individual life. This talk introduced the French Republican calendar, explaining its origins and showing how it can help us understand the revolutionary view of history and political action.
Dr. Perovic researches eighteenth-century French literature and thought, with a specific focus on the relations between the Enlightenment and Revolution, and has broader interests in the representations of time. Her first book, The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge UP 2012) considers the unique role played by the French Republican calendar in the construction of revolutionary time. This interest in the temporal is also the subject of an edited volume, Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France: Fragments of Religion (Continuum 2011), which looks at the role played by notions of an epochal divide between a 'premodern religious past' and a 'modern present' in narratives of secularization.
Contact name:
Ann Lewis