Thank God for Sundays — and the failure of the French Republican calendar

God, Who rested on the seventh day “from all His work which He had done,” commanded that man should do likewise.

As part of their de-Christianization campaign, the French revolutionaries over 230 years ago rebuffed this divine commandment. Instead, they determined that anyone who managed to survive their historic bloodletting would have to rest on the final day of a 10-day cycle marked on a new calendar no longer commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ.

‘An almost identical anti-clerical measure was applied nearly a century and a half later by Stalin.’

Fortunately for those who labor today, this calendar, like the bloodthirsty republic that invented it, is no more.

The National Convention, the assembly that governed France from 1792 to 1795, decreed in late 1793 that “the vulgar era”