Amongst the legacies of the Revolution, the calendar and the meter were to know different fates. The authors remind us that they represented two complex images, both very much tied to the political and philosophical character of the Revolution, as instruments of collective regeneration within an order governed by Reason. The authors' discussion of the debates around the calendar evokes the image of the republican rupture with the past, the calendar inaugurating a new era and they describe, as the metric system was established, the ideal of the triumph of rationality to which it corresponded in the minds of its promoters. In both cases, here were essential elements of the ideological struggle of the Revolution against the « Ancien Régime ».
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Froeschle-Chopard et al. (1990) studied this question.