In 1582, the French went to bed on December 9 and woke up on the 20th. Le Figaro returned to the clever reform of Pope Gregory XIII.
By decision of the Pope, the French went to bed one day on December 9 to wake up on December 20. Two months earlier, the Spanish and Portuguese had risen on October 15, the day after October 4. Witchcraft? Dystopia? Nay, simply the skillful reform of Pope Gregory XIII who, for the sake of liturgy, came to modify the planetary agenda. Le Figaro returns to this astonishing story.
This strange jump in dates dates back to 1582. But it all started well before. From the Renaissance, it was noted that the Julian calendar established by the astronomer Sosigenes made the year last 11 minutes and 14 seconds longer than the solar year. The difference increases over the years. Almost twelve minutes per year is twenty hours per century. From twenty hours per century, we quickly reached eight days per millennium. And eight days per millennium end up posing very thorny liturgical problems.
The spring equinox
Indeed, the spring equinox, the time when the earth’s equator passes through the center of the sun and when day and night are of equal length, is moving further and further away from March 21. In 1582, the equinox fell ten days before the calendar date. How should this agitate the very learned world of astronomers? This famous mid-March equinox fixes like clockwork the date of Easter, the pivot of the liturgical year. Here in the exact terms is what the first council of Nicaea established in 325: “ Easter is the Sunday following the 14th day of the Moon which reaches this age on or immediately after March 21.» The more time passes, the more difficult it is to fix the celebration and with it all the others.
How to get out of the spiral of increasing delay? Who will dare to disavow fourteen centuries governed by the Roman order? The prudent Gregory XIII, whose history has retained many of its follies and as the only merit of its calendar, uses astronomers, physicists and mathematicians to correct the errors of the Julian agenda. It simply removes ten days from the month of the year. Enough to destabilize more than one picky person. Especially since many countries will balk at this brutal step of a decade for a long time.
Catholics and Protestants
If from October it is on the agenda of the very Catholic Spain, Portugal, the Papal States, France is in fact taking more time. The passage takes place from December 9 to 20. The populations of Alsace, which for the moment do not belong to France like Artois or Franche Comté, will take the plunge a hundred years later. The end of the 16th century, let us remember, was the time of bloody divisions between Protestants and Catholics. Gregory XIII is also sadly known for having made the You gods in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres, still underestimating – it is said – their scale. Protestants see this change in the calendar as the work of the Antichrist. It would have been said, by Kepler or Voltaire, that Protestants preferred to disagree with the sun rather than agree with the pope!
Thus in Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we use the Julian or Gregorian calendars distinctly depending on whether we are Protestant or Catholic. Sweden and England did not adopt the new reform until the middle of the 18th century. Russia kept the old calendar until the…20th century! It is for this reason that the first Russian revolution of 1917, which took place in the Gregorian calendar at the beginning of March, is called the “February revolution”. Indeed, as the gap between the Roman and papal methods grew inexorably, the Julian calendar delayed by 13 days at the start of the 20th century.
The hole is thus filled. But how can we make the solar year match the calendar year again? It is thanks to leap years that we will be able to play with time. Not by instituting them, because the discovery is dated. But by making up for lost time every four hundred years. This is how Gregory XIII decided to now attribute 365 days, and not 366, to three out of four years of transition from one century to the next. So the years 2000 and 2400 are leap years. But not 1900, 2100, 2200 or 2300. Thus, in 2100, the new generations will be able to boast of experiencing an unusual event, and of carrying out Gregory XIII’s project. A “Gregorian” project whose author does not have the authorship of the “song” of the same name: we owe it to Saint Gregory the Great.
2024-01-01 08:43:27
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