The Month of the Grape Harvester: Vendemiaire and the French Revolutionary Calendar

When the French Revolution set out to remake the world, it even remade time. It swept away the old Christian calendar and began the year not in the dead of January but with the grape harvest. The first month of the Republic was Vendémiaire — “the month of the vintage” — and its very first day was named, simply, after the grape. For a few radical years, the French year began with wine¹.

Remaking time

In 1793 the revolutionaries introduced a wholly new calendar, designed to sweep away the Christian order of Sundays and saints’ days and to root time instead in reason and nature⁴. The year was divided into twelve months of exactly thirty days, each split into three ten-day “weeks” called décades, with a few extra festival days at the end.

The poet Fabre d’Églantine was given the task of naming the new months, and he did it beautifully — christening each one after the weather or the work of its season⁶. The result was a calendar that read like a poem to the French countryside, and it opened, fittingly for a nation of wine-lovers, with the harvest of the grapes.

Vendémiaire: the month of the vintage

The republican year began at the autumn equinox, around 22 September, with the month of Vendémiaire — a name taken directly from the Latin vindemia, meaning the grape harvest or vintage². In the wine districts of France, this was precisely the season when the grapes came in, so the new nation quite literally started its year in the vineyard.

Vendémiaire led into Brumaire, the month of mist, and Frimaire, the month of frost — the whole autumn quarter named for the turning of the agricultural year. Winter, spring and summer followed in the same spirit, from snowy Nivôse to flowering Floréal to the harvest heat of Thermidor.

A calendar of grapes and plants

The revolutionaries pushed the idea right down to the individual day. In place of the old calendar of saints, every single day of the year was renamed after something from rural life — a plant, a fruit, an animal or a farm tool⁴.

The first day of the new republican year was named, simply, ‘Grape.’— 1 Vendémiaire³

And so the very first day of the republican year, 1 Vendémiaire, was Raisin — Grape. The days that followed honoured saffron, the chestnut, the crocus and the plough. It was a quiet revolution in itself: where the old year had been organised around the Church, the new one was organised around the soil, the harvest and the vine.

Vendémiaire and the rise of Napoleon

The grape-harvest month has one more claim to fame — a violent one. On 13 Vendémiaire of the Year IV (5 October 1795), a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte crushed a royalist uprising against the revolutionary government in the streets of Paris with a famous “whiff of grapeshot”⁵. The victory launched his career, and for a while he was known as “General Vendémiaire.”

It was a fitting irony, then, that Napoleon himself would end the calendar that had made his name. As emperor, he abolished the Republican calendar and restored the old Gregorian one on 1 January 1806, and France’s brief experiment of beginning the year with the vintage came to a close¹.

When the year began with wine

The Republican calendar lasted only about twelve years, and today it is remembered mostly as a curiosity⁴. But it captured something true about France. A country whose life was so bound up with the vine, when it tried to build a new world from first principles, chose to start its very year with the grape harvest — and to name its opening day after the fruit that has shaped French history more than any other. For a few extraordinary years, in the newborn Republic, time itself began with wine.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The role of wine in the French Revolution
• Wine and the unification of Italy
• Rationing of wine in World War I

References

1. Fondation Napoléon (napoleon.org) — The Republican Calendar. ↑
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Vendémiaire. ↑
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — The 12 Months of the French Republican Calendar. ↑
4. World History Encyclopedia — French Republican Calendar. ↑
5. World History Encyclopedia — 13 Vendémiaire. ↑
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — French Republican calendar. ↑

Recommended reading

French Wine: A History

Rod Phillips

A definitive history of French wine, deeply attuned to how central the vine and vintage are to French life.

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

A grand history of wine that captures its place at the very heart of French culture and identity.

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