The French Revolutionary Calendar (or Republican Calendar) was officially adopted in France on October 24, 1793 and abolished on 1 January 1806 by Emperor Napoleon I. It was used again briefly during under the Paris Commune in 1871. The French also established a new clock, in which the day was divided in ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds - exactly 100,000 seconds per day.
The calendar was adopted more than one year after the advent of the First Republic (there was no year 1), after a long debate involving the mathematicians Romme and Monge, the poets Chénier and Fabre d’ Eglantine and the painter David. The mathematicians contributed equal month division, and a decimal measures of time. The poets contributed the name of the days, choosing the names of plants, domestic animals and tools; the months rhyme three by three, according to the "sonority" of the seasons. The Eiffel Tower shown at right was built in commemoration of the French Revolution, and was built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1889.