Wacky French Calendar and Clock Variation..."The Décade"

This does make one consider why or how we arrive at our arbitrary measure of a week being seven days. I had never thought about it or questioned it until recently. I had always just assumed that there was a logical reason for the 7 day week. I suppose you could say there is logic in it, although you could just as easily say there isn't any as well....

Years appear in writing as Roman numerals (usually), with epoch 22 September 1792 the beginning of the 'Republican Era' (the day the French First Republic was proclaimed, one day after the Convention abolished the monarchy). As a result, Roman Numeral I indicates the first year of the republic, that is, the year before the calendar actually came into use. The first day of each year was that of the There were twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the solar or tropical year were placed after the months at the end of each year. Each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute had 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was more than twice as long as a conventional hour; a minute was slightly longer than a conventional minute; and a second was slightly shorter than a conventional second. Clocks were manufactured to display this decimal time, but it did not catch on and mandatory use was officially suspended April 7 1795, although some cities continued to use decimal time as late as 1801.