In 1849, to serve as “an introduction to the abstract worship of Humanity,” Auguste Comte proposed a new calendar with 13 months of 28 days. A festival day commemorating the dead brought the total to 365 days, but the extra day fell outside the regular cycle of days of the week, so the first of each month always fell on a Monday. Months were named after great figures in the history of Western Europe:
- Moses
- Homer
- Aristotle
- Archimedes
- Caesar
- Saint Paul
- Charlemagne
- Dante
- Gutenberg
- Shakespeare
- Descartes
- Frederick
- Bichat
To keep things on track, leap years added a second festival day, commemorating holy women. The calendar “contains the names of 558 great men of all periods, classified according to their field of activity,” and villains of history, notably Napoleon, were held up to “perpetual execration.”
The scheme has a pleasing mathematical tidiness: Each year contains exactly 52 weeks falling into 13 months, and each month has exactly 28 days comprising four weeks. The whole thing remains consistent from year to year — if you were born on a Wednesday, your birthday would always fall on a Wednesday. And since all months contain the same number of business days and weekends, statistical comparisons by month are more accurate.
It never caught on, in part because of those month names. Science writer Duncan Steel notes that “it would seem strange to give the date as the third day of Homer, and with a month named for the bard a reference to ‘Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night’ would be ambiguous.”