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The French Republican Calendar and Day Images

1-minute read • Updated on

I recently came across and interesting historical calendar called the French Republican Calendar. It was an 18th Century attempt to create a decimal-based calendar. The interesting part of the calendar from a memory techniques point of view is that every day of the year had a unique name like “grape”, “saffron”, and “chestnut”.

French Republican Calendar

The Art of Memory Wiki has lists of the day names.

One of the interesting aspects of having an image for every day is that it would create a peg to attach information to. Even after 10 years, one would only have 10 memories attached to a single peg image like “grape day” or “saffron day”.

I haven’t tried this technique, but thought that readers might be interested in experimenting with it.

Read more on Wikipedia.

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will
will

Great Catch! The days seemed to be grouped by season....and not month. So...that part of it would have little utility....but the concept is unique...for sure.

Having 365 unique pegs (pictures) does solve the "what happened on July 4th of last year"....but the reverse does not seem to work out. So....If for example I had the peg "fireworks" for July 4th. And it was June 10th...and I wanted to think about my schedule for the following month (July).....it may not be that easy to recall that I have a party at my brother's house on July 4th.

If you could suggest a work around for this.....I would be appreciative.

Thanks!!