Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (16 page)

In 1687, John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1711), a lesser “metaphysical” poet, Anglican clergyman, and Tory pamphleteer, published an extraordinary “Hymn to Darkness.”
¹
Written as England’s last Catholic monarch revived hopes and fears of Stuart absolutism, Norris’s poem stands out from other English “poetry of night” through its praise of darkness as an awe-inspiring ruler:

Thy
native
lot thou didst to
light resign
,

But still
half
of the Globe is
thine
.

Here with a
quiet
but yet
aweful
hand

Like the
best
Emperours thou dost command.
²

Norris wrote within an established genre, the poetic nocturne, describing darkness, to whom “the Stars above their brightness owe,” as a “most sacred Venerable thing” complementary to and inseparable from light.
³
But as a supporter of James II, Norris brought a new political message to the nocturne: he envisioned darkness as an essential aspect of divine and earthly majesty and authority:

Tho
Light
and
Glory
be th’Almighty’s
Throne
,

Darkness
is his
Pavilion
.

From that his radiant
Beauty
, but from thee

He has his
Terrour
and his
Majesty
.
⁴

Lauded as “unquestion’d Monarch” of the time before Creation, darkness was praised for fostering order, beauty, and piety: “Hail then thou Muse’s and Devotion’s Spring, / Tis just we should adore, ’tis just we should thee sing.”
⁵
Norris’s political appropriation of the poetic nocturne in praise of darkness and monarchy raises some valuable questions. Which early modern social, cultural, and political
developments allowed Norris to bring together divine light, nocturnal darkness, and absolute monarchy?

The virtues of the night and its darkness as attributes of God quickly generated parallel political expressions. Through these new symbolic associations of the night sovereigns and courtiers mapped the contrast between darkness and light – a fundamental distinction of daily life – onto the political culture of the seventeenth century. Sovereigns and their servants appropriated the ascetic, mystic, and epistemological night discussed in the previous chapter to represent royal power and authority. This nocturnalization of political symbolism and everyday life at court in the seventeenth century arose to strengthen and supplement established symbols of spiritual and political sovereignty undermined by the confessional fragmentation of Western Christendom. The royal courts of Europe had long functioned as nodes in a single network, linked by kinship, diplomacy, and a shared aristocratic culture. By the seventeenth century no one could deny that this network was strained by permanent confessional division. Any prince who sought to act politically outside his territories, or within a multiconfessional territory, needed to communicate persuasively about power and authority with adherents – and indeed leading members – of other churches. Violence was the
lingua franca
of the confessional age, spoken and understood by almost everyone. But alongside and after the confessional and civil wars of the period 1540–1660, a new idiom of political communication was deployed by sovereigns in principalities and city states.

This new idiom was of course the baroque, characterized by its “enthusiasm for spectacular means of irresistible persuasion.”
⁶
Rulers deployed it in spiritual and secular contests across the fault lines of Western Christendom. The baroque expression of ideas, values, and goals sought to transcend the crisis of authority of the confessional age by bringing new emotional and intellectual forces into play, “shadowed” though they were “by suspicions about the pervasiveness of illusion or secrecy.”
⁷
Darkness and the night were essential to baroque attempts to articulate and transcend confessional sources of authority: nocturnal darkness intensified the light that represented
the Divine or the prince.
⁸
The new uses of the night show rulers’ attempts to strengthen and supplement confessional sources of authority (“most Christian king”, “most Catholic king”, “defender of the faith”) with the “natural” authority of a “sun king.” Rulers had long presented themselves as light-givers and identified themselves with the sun, but in the baroque age princes deliberately used the chiaroscuro of light in the night to intensify these images, which began to supplement (though not supplant) traditional Christian symbols of power and authority.

Performing in his first court ballet on February 23, 1653, at age fourteen, Louis XIV of France (1643–1715) presented himself for the first time as “le roi soleil.” Louis danced several roles in the ballet, and in his final appearance, which concluded the play, he appeared in a radiant costume as the sun. (See
Figure 4.1
.) The first appearance of Louis as a sun king is striking, but its context is equally significant. The performance was the
Ballet de la Nuit
by Isaac de Benserade – and here, as in countless other spectacles of the era, a darkened background enhanced the appearance of a radiant monarch, evoking his power to dispel darkness and bedazzle his subjects.
⁹
The court ballet, performed in the Petit-Bourbon just outside the Louvre, was open to all, from the royal family to the commoners of Paris. And this
Ballet de la Nuit
was performed at night, using the latest staging techniques and lighting effects, designed and operated by Giacomo Torelli.
¹⁰
The Jesuit scholar of royal ceremony Claude-François Ménestrier singled it out as the finest example of the genre for the splendor of its costumes, stage décor, and lighting effects.
¹¹
Like Norris’s “Hymn to Darkness,” this episode in the “fabrication of Louis XIV” calls our attention to the use of the night (both symbolic and real) in the representation of a celestial ruler. Because it was performed at night, this ballet also reveals the nocturnalization of court theater, public spectacle, and elite sociability. The
Ballet de la Nuit
thus invites an examination of darkness and the night in court spectacles and in everyday activities at court.

Figure 4.1
Louis XIV costumed as the sun in the
Ballet de la Nuit
, 1653. Pen, wash, and gouache touched with gold. Workshop of Henry de Gissey, contemporary illustration. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

How did contemporaries view the court performances and royal spectacles of the baroque era?
¹²
These events were meant to be “allegories of the state of the times” (as Ménestrier explained) and drew their importance, as Karl Möseneder has argued, from two fundamental political principles of the seventeenth century regarding the display and perception of power and authority. Like God, temporal rulers had to display their greatness in material creation. And common subjects had to be shown their sovereign’s majesty as directly as possible because they could not otherwise comprehend the abstract authority of the prince.
¹³

The comments of Louis XIV on the political role of spectacles at court addressed both the display and the perception of majesty. In the
Mémoires
, advice to the Dauphin written from 1661 on, the king described in practical terms the value of festivals and entertainment to the ruler. According to Louis, the court should be a “society of pleasures, which gives the courtiers an honest [
honnête
] familiarity with us, and touches and charms them more than one could say.” He contrasted this familiarity with the distance of his lesser subjects: “the people, on the other hand, enjoy spectacles, at which we, in any event, endeavor always to please.” Together, spectacles and pleasures were essential tools of government. “All our subjects in general are delighted to see that we like what they like,” commented Louis: “By this we hold their minds and their hearts, sometimes more strongly than we do by rewards or kindnesses.”
¹⁴
Festivities, Louis XIV continued, directed the attention of the people away from deeper political issues, which they were in any case incapable of truly understanding, accustomed as they were to perceiving only the superficial.
¹⁵
Here Louis XIV echoed Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), the influential Flemish Neostoic philosopher whose
Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine
(
Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex
) first appeared in 1589 and went into thirty-one Latin editions (and as many vernacular translations) in the seventeenth century. Lipsius discussed “the nature of the common people, and by what means the same may be discreetly governed” in the fourth book of the
Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae
, arguing that princes need celebrations and ceremonies to communicate with the common people, who are “void of reason … not led to
judge of any thing by discretion or wisdom.” His analysis is founded on the assertion that “the common people are unstable, and nothing is more inconstant than the multitude.” There follows a selective concordance of classical authors intended to show “the chiefest passions of the people,” who are envious and suspicious, easily flattered and “slow of spirit.”
¹⁶
Critics of increasing royal power such as Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) also acknowledged the political role of spectacles and pleasures:

It is a sure and ancient maxim in politics that to allow the people to be lulled by festivals, spectacles, luxury, pomp, pleasures, vanity and effeminacy, to occupy their minds with worthless things, and to let them relish trifling frivolities, is efficiently preparing the way for a despotism.
¹⁷

As the time of both extraordinary spectacles and everyday pleasures at court, the night was, as we will see, fundamental to this political culture.

After 1650, political theorists described the distinct but complementary roles of “pleasures” and “spectacles” and began to examine these events more systematically. Michel de Pure’s
Principles of Spectacles Ancient and Modern
(
Ideé des spectacles anciens et nouveaux
, 1668) lists ten forms of modern spectacle: theater, balls, fireworks, jousts, “Courses de Bague,” carrousels, masquerades, military exercises, royal entries, and ballet. His contemporary Ménestrier offered a similar list.
¹⁸
The German school of
Zeremonialwissenschaft
(ceremonial studies), centered in Saxony and Brandenburg in the first half of the eighteenth century, discussed at length the relationships among spectacle, ceremony, and authority.
¹⁹
The crowning work of the
Zeremonialwissenschaftler
was Julius Bernhard von Rohr’s
Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers
(
Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Grossen Herren
, 1729; second edn., 1733), which offers a similar analysis of courtly entertainment.
²⁰
According to Rohr, “pleasures [and] diversions” have “certain political goals behind them. They are meant to gain the love of the better sort and the rabble, because people’s spirits are more easily guided through such festivities which caress the exterior senses.”
²¹
Rohr lists twelve types of diversions, including chivalric sports, opera, ballet and theater,
and processions.
²²
Old and new sit side by side in all these lists, but the nocturnalization of court entertainment and festivity is especially striking. Of the dozen listed by Rohr, six (carnival/masquerade, dances/balls/ballet, opera, costume feasts, illuminations, and fireworks) were necessarily or typically nocturnal. The remaining equestrian diversions could also be held at night inside purpose-built riding halls. Torchlit evening sleigh rides are described at the imperial court in Vienna from the early seventeenth century on.
²³

The nocturnalization of spectacle in the seventeenth century reshaped court architecture. The great spaces built for balls and celebrations at European courts (such as the Whitehall Banqueting House in London, the Herkules-Saal or the Kaiser-Saal at the Munich residence, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, or the Riesensaal of Dresden’s Royal Palace), lit by innumerable candles, made possible more exclusive evening gatherings, allowing court society to develop and emphasize the night as never before in European civilization.
²⁴
Richard Alewyn was the first to link innovative uses of daily time with the new secular spaces of the baroque (some of the largest constructed since antiquity) in his work on baroque festival culture.
²⁵
He noted that between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, princely celebrations show a slow shift from the street to the court and from day to night. This was “the sharpest break in the history of celebrations in the West,” marking a new era in the history of the night.
²⁶