French Republican Twitter

Twitter links in this post:
@Sansculotides
@JacobinCalendar
@DecimalTime

I have been following @JacobinCalendar on Twitter for a while. The Jacobins were a radical element of the French Revolution, who favored the French Republican Calendar. Unfortunately, they are known for the Reign of Terror, and were overthrown on 9 Thermidor Year II. Anyway, this feed generates two or three tweets a day giving the Republican Calendar date. For instance, today one says:

Today's date according to the French Revolutionary Calendar: Meadow/Cornflower/221

Meadow refers to the Republican month Prairial, which comes from the French word prairie, which means the same as in English, but it can be translated as "meadow", although then the month name should then be Meadowal... Cornflower refers to the so-called rural calendar, in which each day of the year was named for a plant, animal, agricultural tool or mineral, to replace the old saints' days. In French, today is called Barbeau, which is cornflower in English, although some sites translate it as barbel, because this is also the French word for this fish, but animal names are only used for quintidis, the fifth day of the 10-day décade, and today is Primidi, the first day of the third décade.

Of course, the usual way of giving the date is by day of the month, which would be 21 Prairial of Year CCXXI. I started tweeting dates like this, but I just discovered that someone was already doing so. Since the beginning of last Nivôse, the first month of winter, @Sansculotides has been tweeting the date every day like this:

Today is primidi 21 Prairial in the year of the Republic CCXXI, celebrating the cornflower. pic.twitter.com/I1O1FoWs62

This seems to be according to Paris time, however, since it's about 8 hours ahead for me.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 1 heure 84 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56453.177
@DecimalTime