The ten days of the decade were called: primidi, duodi, tridi, quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi and décadi. Each 'metric' day was divided into ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds. Each month was thirty days long, divided into three 'decades' of ten days each. The year would no longer begin on 1 January, but at the autumn equinox and anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic: 21 September. The result was implemented for 13 years between 17 1 and is known to history as The French Revolutionary Calendar. Romme had been commissioned to provide 'a more scientific division, more in phase with the movements of the heavens, the seasons and tradition'.
The Catholic church that had been such a dominant force in pre-revolutionary France had come to be seen as 'anti-revolutionary' and the Gregorian Calendar, with its saints' days and religious holidays, was a powerful symbol of that church's underlying influence. It was a period marked by a strong sense of new beginnings and radical reform in many areas of public and private life in France. One year after that proclamation, on 20 September, 1793, a mathematician named Gilbert Romme presented his proposal for a completely new calendar. However, the period of radical change associated with Robespierre's terror and the guillotine did not begin until after the tumultuous summer of 1792, when the new, largely Jacobin legislative assembly called the National Convention sat for the first time and immediately proclaimed France a republic. The French Revolution is often considered to have begun on 14 July, 1789 with the storming of the Bastille.
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