One does not have to be a scholar of the French Revolution or a specialist in the history of calendars to appreciate the mystique of the Republican Calendar, instituted in France from 1793 to 1805. There is something deeply fascinating in the thought of tampering with the experience of time. With this book Sanja Perovic joins the ranks of scholars, among them Eviatar Zerubavel, Matthew Shaw, Bronislaw Baczko, Isser Wolloch and George G. Andrews, who have studied the history of this astonishing historical event.

I should start by describing what this book is not. First, it is not a history of the Republican Calendar per se. There is, of course, much historical work to be found in its pages, as well as discussions of the meaning and use of history itself. But the whole premise of the book is altogether something different. Second, this is not a book based on pure archival or historical research. Perovic's analysis draws as much from the genre of literary theory as from historiography. Historians who approach this book waiting for references to obscure manuscripts and never-before-seen archives will be disappointed. That is not to say that they are absent, or even uncommon, just that Sanja Perovic does not base her argument solely on their use. The whole book rests on a semi-meta level, alternating between primary and secondary literature.

What, then, is the aim of the book and how does it add to existing scholarship on the Republican Calendar? In the author's own words, she aims to show how ‘revolutionary time was experienced in its own present’ (p. 4); how ‘the French Revolution … poses primarily a problem in the history of time’ (p. 4); and how, by not taking the calendar's failure for granted, it can be shown that ‘it was abandoned not because it was bereft of meaning, but because it had accumulated too many diverging interpretations of the Revolution’ (p. 5). Sanja Perovic wants to ‘take seriously the fact that the Calendar lasted thirteen years’ and ‘use the calendar's long decay to discuss the instability of the categories of past and future during this period’ (p. 5). All in all, this is a rather tall order and one she engages in with vigour, drawing on a variety of sources and ideas. In those, Sylvain Maréchal plays the role of the fixed point around which the story unfolds.

The book itself is organized in seven chapters. The first two chapters contextualize Maréchal within his own time and detail the creation of Maréchal's almanac in pre-Revolutionary time. The next three chapters discuss a series of events at first glance unrelated, such as the time lag between the ‘end of the old world’ in August 1792 and ‘the institution of new time’ in September 1792, and the execution of Marie-Antoinette and its relation to Maréchal's Le jugement dernier de rois and the festivals of reason, the first to employ the new calendar. Finally, the last two chapters focus on the calendar's slow and piecemeal decline and revisit the last years of Maréchal.

As is apparent, the book does not lack for sources or inspiration and musters an impressive collection of events and texts. At times, it rewards the reader with excellent analysis and insightful comments. Such examples are the chapter detailing the importance of Maréchal's almanac, the subsequent discussion of the volcano as a narrative archetype and the use of nature and history as the pillars of a new rationality. In other cases, however, one cannot but feel that the book overshoots its mark. Especially during the middle chapters, the reader gets the idea that the most gruesome and vivid episodes of the French Revolution were in reality just symbolisms gone rampant. Assertions such as ‘the Terror cannot be straightforwardly associated with blind, unthinking violence or with utopian flight from reality. Rather … [it] emerged as a response to the Revolution's failure to institute its promise of rupture’ (p. 149), or ‘[m]any perennial questions concerning the French Revolution – Do all revolutions slide inevitably into Terror? What is the relation between the social and the political? Are the principles of liberty incompatible with those of equality? – look different when reinterpreted through the perspective of conflicting conceptions of time’ (p. 239), make the reader feel like he has missed a significant part of the analysis that would justify such bold statements. There is also a feeling that many interesting lines of thought are not pursued fully, or that they are over- or underemphasized. After the initial discussion of almanacs, there is little further mention of them. The connection between the institution of the metric system and the Calendar is mentioned almost in passing. And Gilbert Romme, considered the main architect of the Calendar, is discussed only as a distant second to Maréchal.

In the end, Sanja Perovic's book is an interesting, vibrant but unequal collection of several themes. It is at its best when discussing Maréchal and his contributions, or when it analyses the fine details of literary and theatrical archetypes. It feels lacking when it overextends its analysis, and pursues too many topics. If it had confined its scope and its problematic, it would have perhaps better served its purpose.