Months of the Year in French

The 12 French months are easy — they're Latin, the same roots as English, and you can half-guess them. The interesting part is that France once decided these names weren't good enough. For twelve years, starting in 1793, the French Republic abolished this calendar entirely and replaced it with one of its own design — months named for mist, heat and flowers. Then Napoleon quietly handed the old one back.

First, the calendar France actually uses. The 12 months are janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre. Like English, they descend straight from the Roman calendar — mars is Mars, juillet is Julius Caesar, août is the emperor Augustus.

The two rules English speakers get wrong

French months are never capitalised. It's janvier, not Janvier — lowercase even mid-sentence, the opposite of the English habit. Capitalising them is the single clearest tell of an English speaker writing French.

And the pronunciation trap: août (August). It looks like it should have hard consonants. It doesn't. It's pronounced roughly "oot" — the most-mangled month in the French calendar. For "in [month]" French simply uses en: en janvier, en août. No declension, no contraction. Mercifully simple — which makes what comes next all the more dramatic.

The year France deleted the calendar

In late 1793, in the white heat of the Revolution, France decided the calendar itself was a relic of kings and the Church — and abolished it. The French Republican Calendar restarted history at Year I — and backdated it, fixing the start of Year I to 22 September 1792, the autumn equinox and the day the Republic had been proclaimed. The Revolution didn't just rename the months; it reset the year zero of France itself.

The new names, coined largely by the poet Fabre d'Églantine, didn't honour gods or emperors. They described the French weather and farming year. Flip the widget above to "Revolutionary (1793)" and you can hear them: Brumaire, the month of mist. Nivôse, the snowy month. Germinal, when seeds sprout. Thermidor, the height of summer heat. It was, genuinely, a beautiful calendar — a Polish-style nature calendar, invented from scratch by committee.

Why it died — and why you've heard the names anyway

The Republican calendar had one fatal flaw: the ten-day week. It meant a single rest day every ten days instead of one in seven — deeply unpopular — and it left France out of step with every trading partner on Earth, all of whom kept the seven-day week. It lasted about twelve years. Napoleon abolished it on 1 January 1806 and France went back to janvier and février as if nothing had happened.

But the names didn't vanish, because history happened inside them. Napoleon seized power in the Coup of 18 Brumaire. The fall of Robespierre is known to every historian as the Thermidorian Reaction. Émile Zola titled his most famous novel Germinal. And Lobster Thermidor — the French dish — is named for that vanished summer month. A calendar that officially lasted twelve years is still quietly embedded in our language, our history books, and our menus.

Sources

• Standard references on the French Republican Calendar (1793–1805): its 12 months of 30 days, the ten-day décade, and abolition by Napoleon effective 1 January 1806
• Fabre d'Églantine is credited with coining the Republican month names [VERIFY exact attribution — some names are also credited to others on the calendar commission]
• Latin etymologies of the standard months (Januarius, Martius, Julius, Augustus, etc.)
• The Coup of 18 Brumaire, the Thermidorian Reaction, and Zola's Germinal as cultural survivals of the Republican month names

Related

• Months in Polish — a real nature calendar that survived, where France's was invented and lost
• Months in Japanese — another calendar reformed away, in 1873
• Months in Russian — a calendar deliberately switched, by Peter the Great
• Numbers 1 to 10 in French
• Days of the Week in French
• Language & Culture Hub