The Republican Calendar

One of the things I love about doing family history is how much history I learn in the process!  It's not like I haven't always loved and studied history, but let's face it, history is not nearly as interesting without some context and some imagining of yourself in the big picture. Family history makes history much more relevant and even exciting, at least for me!

The first thing I had to learn about when I started looking at French records pertaining to my Coquigne family was the Republican calendar, and I'm not talking about the elephants in American politics. I'm talking about when the new French Republic came out of its first convention in 1793, one thing that emerged was a new calendar which marked its start date as the day the Republic was proclaimed, the autumn equinox, 22 September, 1792. Seven-day weeks became ten-day cycles, months were given new poetic names pertaining to nature, and every day of the year had its own special name. This new and unique system remained in place for all of 13 years, just long enough probably to make everybody back then a little crazy, never mind those of us in the future.

So if you're now me trying to find the birth record of your gggg-grandfather, Pierre Francois Coquigne, who was supposedly born on 16 Dec 1796, none of the French records show dates that look at all familiar! Even if you know enough French to get by, you might be tempted to say "Never Mind". That thought went through my brain for about 10 seconds, and then I started searching for words I didn't recognize in my limited French vocabulary, starting with Vendémiaire. Once I realized that word represented the beginning month in the Republican calendar, I was on my way. Thanks to this fabulous website, I was able to enter a date of 16 Dec 1796 and convert it to what it would have been in the Republican calendar, the result in this case being 26 Frimaire An V (year 5 of the new Republic). Given that the French records are naturally in date order, I was able to follow these clues right to the baptism record of PF Coquigne. Et voila!