The story of the means by which the unpopular republican measures were enforced has not yet been told. Some idea of it may be guessed from a remark of de Bonald (1817):
I believe that the same firmness, rigour, and lavish expenditure, used to establish, or rather to try and establish, uniformity of weights and measures, would have been sufficient to establish uniformity of religion.
If in a country which had experienced Louis XIV’s system for establishing uniformity of religion, this could be said of the means by which the republican weights and measures were enforced, it is evident that the new system met with anything but the welcome usually supposed.
But a man had arisen who delivered France, for a time at least, from the more objectionable parts of the republican measures, and the good he effected in this way had doubtless much to do with his popularity. From the time of his Consulate, at the end of 1799, the rigour of the system was gradually relaxed. His contempt for the mathematician-advisers of the Republic, whom he had found to be incapable in public business, was probably brought to a climax by the following event.
The ordnance survey-maps of France were on Cassini’s scale of 1/86,400, i.e. 1 line to 100 toises (which is the proportion of the second to the mean day). A new map having been made on the metric scale of 1/100,000, Napoleon soon found this out, and ordered the map to be restored to the old scale.
‘Je la veux sur l’échelle de Cassini, et je me moque des divisions décimales’ (letter to the Minister of War, 1809).
The republican calendar and era were used until the end of 1805, when Napoleon restored the Gregorian calendar and its era; thus 11 Nivose, an XIV, was the last day of the republican system.
But the republican idea of a new calendar and a new era is not dead; it has so little died out that a calendar and era devised by a French mathematician and sociologist in 1852 is now actually used, not only in France, but in England, and also in Brazil, by the followers of this reformer.[55]
In this Positivist Calendar the saints of the old calendar and the agricultural produce of the revolutionary calendars are replaced by great men and women; typical great men, from Moses and Homer to Descartes and Bichat, giving their names to the 13 months, each of 28 days. There is an extra day at the end of the year, and two extra days in leap-year. This system has the advantage of the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of the month always falling on the same day of the week.