M. Dimanche et Citoyen Décadi

One of the more popular humorous causeries of the Revolutionary period consisted of a dialogue between ‘Monsieur Dimanche and Citoyen Décadi’, two caricatures of the ideals of the Revolution and its antithesis. As Citizen Décadi noted, Sunday religious observance ‘date[d] from the Deluge’ and had, as M. Dimanche said, ‘arrived hale and hearty down to the 18th Century’. It was contrasted with the rational but ‘sterile’ or ‘ludicrous’ reforms introduced by the republic. As the historian Alphonse Aulard observed, the contrast between these two embodied feast days formed a powerful metaphor for ‘the quarrel between the Church and the state’. The clash between Messrs Sunday and Décadi has become a kind of shorthand for a complex dispute between the Revolutionary government and the Catholic authorities, one that was played out in the streets and churches of France, often in violent ways. The usefulness of this metaphorical conceit extended beyond France. For example, the émigré journalist Peltier republished the dialogue in his London-based Paris pendant l'année 1795, and the British Critic found it of ‘considerable humour’. Several London and provincial English papers published the exchange, as did continental papers, and the idea continued to be reworked in nineteenth-century periodicals such as the Edinburgh Magazine. Such personification powerfully distilled the conflict between the republic and religion, and the clash between Sundays and the tenth-day of the republican calendar is still found to be a useful motif for historians as a method of organising accounts of revolutionary religious policy.