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From the French Revolution to the Second World War, several attempts to redistribute social time emerged or were simply sketched out, not only in France but also in the Soviet Union and even the old Muslim empires in the process of modernization. This article traces the history of these attempts and explains their motivations but also the resistance encountered by these policies which upset social organization by trying to escape the religious frame of reference. It notes the ultimate failure of most of these experiments, which remained limited in time (a dozen years in France as in the USSR) and struggled to move from the political sphere to the realities of popular life.