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France’s new leaders—fishmongers, cobblers, and butchers, and lots of lawyers and journalists—also set out to invent a new, nonreligious calendar. Created by the Committee of Public Instruction, the “revolutionary calendar” is exactly what one would expect from a government commission.

It began with “Year 1,” which, for simplicity, was the previous year, 1792. Based on “reason” and “nature,” the revolutionary calendar had twelve 30-day months, divided into three 10-day weeks. Inasmuch as this didn’t account for all the days in a year, the leftovers were tacked on as complimentary days: Virtue Day, Genius Day, Labor Day, Reason Day, Rewards Day, and, on leap years, Revolution Day. George Orwell had it easy in some ways.

The years were further divided into four-year spans called “Franciades.”

Each month was given a crackpot name that was supposed to sound like a Greek or Latin word for seasonal attributes: Vendémiaire (harvest); Brumaire (mist); Frimaire (cold); Nivôse (snow); Pluviôse (rain); Ventôse (wind); Germinal (seeding); Floréal (flowering); Prairial (meadow); Messidor (summer harvest); Thermidor (heat); and Fructidor (fruit). (The new calendar also included an observance known as “Kwanzaa,” which to this day no one has ever been able to explain.)

The British recast the new French months as “Slippy, Nippy, Drippy; Freezy, Wheezy, Sneezy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Heaty, Wheaty, and Sweety.”

Napoleon mercifully abolished the French Revolutionary Calendar on January 1, 1806, twelve years after its creation. Only the strong arm of a military dictatorship could save the French from themselves.

Even clocks and personal names weren’t spared this out-with-the-old insanity. Clocks were redesigned in decimal time, with a second being equal to 0.864 normal seconds, 100 seconds making one minute (which was now 86.4 seconds), and 100 minutes making an hour (144 minutes to the rest of the world). This is why freedom lovers everywhere detest the metric system.

Citizens were forced to drop their Christian names, which were deemed tyrannical and superstitious. One revolutionary proposed that the Convention issue a decree abolishing all Christian names at once.32 The clubs urged people to adopt “civic” names, such as Brutus—the Roman who assisted in the knifing of his friend Caesar, prompting the dying Caesar to ask (in Shakespeare’s words), “Et tu, Brute?” But then in another instant the adopted Roman names fell out of fashion, were duly renounced, and were replaced with names from the preposterous French calendar, leading to such names as “Fig-Pumpkin Ligeret.”33 You know Figgy? He’s my cousin! I’m Brie Surrender-Vomit.

Yes, the French Revolution was just like the American Revolution.

The mob’s consuming hatred of Marie Antoinette would finally be satiated with her public execution during the Reign of Terror. The revolutionaries had already come for the queen’s eight-year-old son, Louis XVII, in July 1793. (In other important business that summer, the Convention decreed that William Pitt, prime minister of the United Kingdom, was “the enemy of the human race.”)34 Antoinette put up a fight, refusing to relinquish her son, but young Louis was literally torn from her arms. Six months earlier, the morning after the king had been guillotined, Antoinette had wiped away her son’s tears, instructing him that a king should not cry. She then set him down, stood, and saluted him as the new king.

What awaited her young son was worse than the guillotine. He was turned over to an illiterate cobbler, Simone, who was instructed to reeducate the boy into hating his parents and loving the revolution. Young Louis was dressed in revolutionary clothes and made to curse his mother and sing revolutionary songs. Under the influence of the extreme left-wing journalist Jacques Hébert, Simone beat and brainwashed the boy into saying his mother had committed incest with him.35

By the fall, Marie Antoinette was ill, hemorrhaging constantly, and possibly dying from tuberculosis. She was only thirty-seven, but her