Much More Complicated than Just Leap Year

I admit it: I have trouble keeping track of how many days are in each month. And yes, I did have to go look up on google to see if tomorrow is going to be March 1st or February 29th (just so everyone knows, its March 1st). What can I say? The calendar is confusing. But calendars get so much worse than our simple Gregorian calendar. Case in point, the French Republican Calendar.

French Revolutionaries decided that the Gregorian calendar was not democratic enough. So they applied reason and logic to the system and rewrote the calendar. In it, there are 4 seasons, each with 3 months. Each month has 30 days. So far, this sounds fairly good and normal. However, everything gets a little strange when you get down to days and weeks. Each month has 3 weeks of 10 days each (think of how grossly long their work week would be!). Since this doesn't quite work out to the right amount of time, there are five extra days at the end of each year not associated with a month or season (six on leap years, but there's a whole controversy as to how often there should be a leap year).

Because French Revolutionaries are fairly thorough folks, don't expect that they just forgot about hours and minutes. Oh no- they completely changed that, basing their new system on the extremely rational concept of base-ten and decimals. Therefore, each day had 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. As you can imagine, this system was incredibly complicated and hard to get used to, so it was dropped after only a short while.

This calendar ended up being used by the French government for 12 years. If it were still around today, the current date would be Decadi (last day of the week) 10 Ventose (Windy month, Winter season) CCXIX.