Word: french
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Having overturned the government, good revolutionists dearly love to overturn the calendar. In 1793 French Republicans, flushed with political success, changed the names of all the months from the prosaic January, February, March to the more descriptive Pluviōse (rainy) Ventōse (windy), Germinal (budding), etc. They divided each month into three "weeks" of ten days each, and dated everything from the First day of the Year 1 (Sept. 22, 1792), the date of the proclamation of the first French Republic. The French Republican calendar lasted nearly 15 years, died a natural death during the reign of Napoleon...
Last week, undeterred by the failure of the French revolutionists, Russian Communists announced a new Soviet "Eternal Calendar" to become effective at once. Drastic, the "Eternal Calendar" divides the year into 73 weeks of five days each. A week consists of four work days and one day of rest. Saturday, Sunday and all religious holidays are abolished but there are five national holidays: Jan. 9, anniversary of the massacre of Socialists in front of the Winter Palace in 1905; Jan. 21, anniversary of the death of Lenin; May 1, international Labor day; Oct. 26, anniversary of the October revolution...
Basically antireligious, as was the French calendar of 1793, Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin counted heavily on this economic aspect of his "Eternal Calendar" to fulfill his promise to increase Russia's industrial production 35% in the next twelve months (TIME, Sept...
Birthday. Georges Clemenceau, French War Prime Minister; at St. Vincent-sur-Jard. Age: 88. Said he: "My mother lived to be 83 years old, my father, 87. At 88, I am in the danger zone. I do not ask for death, neither do I fear it. I await it. I shall die this year...
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was born in 1907 to his father's first wife, Anna Beth Sully, daughter of a soapmaker. He went to various schools in Paris and London, learned to talk good French and heard enough Englishmen talk to fabricate with fair success the English accent he uses in The Careless Age. Partly because his father did not want him to be an actor, he studied sculpture and painting for a while and, like most expensively educated young men, wrote some poetry that was never published. He worked in a few pictures as an extra and showed...