Though calendar reform has fallen out of fashion in the early 21st century, the Gregorian Calendar is still a problematic timekeeping system that would benefit from adjustment or outright replacement. A number of reforms have been suggested since its implementation. Some of these, I argue, were too radical or not beneficial enough to warrant widespread adoption. I suggest instead a 12-month perennial calendar based on the French Republican Calendar (FRC), with 10-day weeks and three-week months. This, in my view, would bring enough benefit to warrant change, while also not shifting too many frames of reference at once. It would also be devoid of the social-political complexities which prematurely killed the FRC. In essence, it would be the as close to a metric calendar that could realistically be adopted in the near future. I term it the Tellus Calendar.

Sociological scholarship on political revolution has recently begun to embrace a process-based understanding of revolutions. Such a processual ontology opens up for understanding hitherto unaddressed processes of counterrevolution. Historians of the Spring of Nations, and The Second French Republic (1848–52) in particular, have failed to address the international aspects of the revolutions, and above all of counterrevolution in the period. This paper addresses this gap through a historical case study of the French Catholic clergy in the Second French Republic. The study applies an amalgamation of recent theoretical developments from revolution scholarship in order to dissect the empirical material and births a new framework in the process. The results demonstrate the important intersocial work of Catholic clergy on the triumph of the counterrevolution in France. The political concerns of the Papal States and Pope Pius IX spilled over into French politics and cemented the legitimacy of the counterrevolutionary turn and fuelled the rise of Louis Napoleon. From these results a new theoretical framework that addresses the intersocial nature of political agency and moves beyond a domestic understanding of political processes is developed. Further studies applying this approach across cases are encouraged in order to better understand how these processes unfold and how multiple intersocial influences can interplay.