Very unusual Roman numeral dates in books

I picked up some old French natural history books, published somewhere between the 1600s and 1800s, but they are dated with some weird Roman numerals, such as "AN XIV" Any idea what the "AN" means??

There are other very similar editions of these "Histoire Naturelle" books that have standard Roman numeral dates, many on eBay, but none of them are dated like mine. I have nine volumes.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

 

Short for the Latin for 'year': annum.

 

Never knew that!
So "AN XIV" would be in the year starting Sept 23, 1805, and OP's books are from around 1792-1805.
Interesting!

 

Thanks all.
"The French Republican Calendar, also commonly called the French Revolutionary calendar, was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805.

"Eventually, they settled on year 1 of the new calendar beginning on September 22, 1792, the establishment of the Republic."

 

Good question. I imagine there would be many over the past 222 years, such as the passenger pigeon. But I won't be able to make much use of these books, not being a reader of French. I haven't examined them very closely yet, but there are books here on fish, birds, mammals, and others. The illustrations are great.

 

The ocelot looks like it was drawn by someone who actually saw an ocelot. Some "exotic" animal drawings of the period are strange, to be kind.

 

I'm sorry to learn we did not go with 'ocelotl' for the name.

 

You also see this dating method on French coins from that period. I think it is interesting stuff!

Here some more info if anyone is interested:

https://www.pcgs.com/news/french-republican-coin-dating-system

 

They are! Thanks for sharing this. And I learned something from the thread, too.