Unrecorded ‘Shepherd’s Almanac’ incorporating the French Republican Calendar.
[Almanac] / [Revolutionary Calendar]. Almanach des Bergers Pour l’an XII. de la République & l’An 1804, du stile Grégorien. A Lille chez Dumortier Imprimeur-Libraire, rue des Manneliers, [1803]. 16mo [10.2 x 7.1 cm], [16] ff., with numerous woodcuts and typographical images in the text. Remnants of sewing, dustiness to title and final page suggest that booklet was never wrapped. Some separation to outer leaf at spine, minor internal toning and edge wear.
Unrecorded pocket-size “Shepherd’s Almanach”—printed in Lille by Dumortier—for the year 1804 but incorporating the style of Years XII-XIII of the French Republican Calendar. It is charmingly jarring to see the traditional, popular form of the Shepherd’s Almanach—here copiously illustrated with quite vernacular woodcut and typographical images—uneasily converted to (partially) accommodate the new Revolutionary manner of charting the year.
The calendar begins with January, but each month has 30 days, and the days are numbered according to the Republican style, with the calendar beginning on 10 Nivose Year XII and ending on 10 Nivose year XIII.
Each month is headed with a woodcut showing the traditional changes in seasons and occupations/pastimes associated with the month. Major feast days are illustrated with small woodcuts of the relevant saint, instrument of martyrdom, or other identifying symbols.
At the front of the booklet is a key to the several dozen typographical images/symbols one will encounter in the calendar. These include moon phases, propitious and inauspicious times for bloodletting, taking various forms of medicine, planting, harvesting, felling and trimming trees, cutting one’s hair and nails, weaning infants, etc. Also given are typographical signs of the zodiac and signs for various weather conditions.
On the title page of the booklet is a woodcut depicting a bloodletting. On the final page is a bizarrely menacing woodcut of a meeting between man and woman beneath the sun and moon. In the last pages of the book are a full-page woodcut of the Zodiac Man and a list of eclipses predicted for the year.
Almanacs of this sort were printed in large numbers, but they were used to pieces and became obsolete by the end of the year, and so today individual editions typically survive in no more than one or two copies, and many editions have disappeared entirely.
OCLC and KVK locate no examples of this 1804 Almanach des Bergers from the Lille press of Dumortier.