Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (17 page)

The slow movement of European festivals and celebrations into the night, which had begun in the fifteenth century, quickened in the seventeenth.
²⁷
Lighting up the night had always been an elite privilege, but baroque celebrations used the night on an unprecedented scale as nocturnal entertainment began to take precedence over daytime festivities. In France a new era in the history of celebrations began on August 17, 1661, as the financier Nicolas Foucquet welcomed the young Louis XIV to Vaux-Le-Vicomte, Foucquet’s magnificent estate southeast of Paris.
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Vaux-Le-Vicomte, the first baroque chateau in France, is often described as the inspiration for Versailles. The king and his courtiers arrived at Vaux-Le-Vicomte in the late afternoon. After viewing the chateau, the royal party waited for sunset, when
Foucquet’s celebration was to begin.
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The former protégé of Mazarin presented to the king an imposing nocturnal barrage of culture and luxury intended to display the wealth, power, and taste of the second-most powerful man in the kingdom. Molière wrote and performed in the evening’s comedy-ballet,
The Impertinents
(
Les Fâcheux
), with music composed by Pierre Beauchamp. The set designs, lighting, and fireworks displays were the work of Charles Le Brun and Torelli. The comedy-ballet, which began after the
souper
, was followed by several fireworks displays. Accounts of the celebration carefully noted that all this took place after dark, with the king and courtiers retiring sometime after 2 a.m. The nocturnal
Gesamtkunstwerk
Foucquet had presented served as a model for the well-known baroque celebrations of Louis XIV, such as the
Plaisirs de l’île enchantée
of 1664 and the
Fête de Versailles
of 1668.
³⁰
Rich accounts of the celebrations communicated in word and image (see
Figure 4.2
) the nocturnal splendor to a wider audience.

Figure 4.2
Print by Israel Silvestre of firework display during “Les plaisirs de l’ile enchantée. Troisième journée,” 1664. © Trustees of the British Museum, 1889, 1218.139.

If we look back a century, we can see what was new about nocturnalization at court. On June 27, 1559, Henry II of France (1519–59)
opened a five-day tournament to celebrate the weddings of his daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain and his sister Marguerite to Emmanuel-Philibert, duke of Savoy. The daytime jousts were the focus of the celebration, especially on the fateful third day. According to the eyewitness account of Antoine Caraccioli, bishop of Troyes, by five o’clock in the afternoon “the hour [was] late, the weather extremely hot, and the tournament concluded.” Queen Catherine and the noble spectators begged to Henry to retire, but he insisted that “he would break his lance once more,” with fatal results.
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To be sure, the festivals and celebrations of Henry II included lavish banquets at night, but the most elaborate events unfolded during the day.

English court celebrations under Henry VII and Henry VIII, like the Burgundian court practices that inspired them, could involve complex allegorical figures dancing at banquets in the evening, as at the Feast of the Pheasant at Lille in 1454 or at the court pageant celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur and Catharine of Aragon in 1501.
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In these cases, however, the central message of the celebration was still articulated during the day. The evening entertainments “were appendages to the basic ingredients of any festive evening, feasting and dancing,” and they made no technical use of light and darkness.
³³
In this way they contrast sharply with the most important English court spectacles of the seventeenth century, the masques of James I and Charles I. The Burgundian and Tudor festivals would have been incomprehensible without their daytime elements; the Stuart court masques dropped the daytime events and communicated only at night with theatrical lighting and effects.
³⁴

The courts of Protestant Germany show a similar expansion of the nocturnal aspects of festivals in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1596, in celebration of the baptism of his eldest daughter, Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel held a chivalric tournament based on the myths of Jason and Perseus. Among the several days of jousting, racing, and knightly sport, only the climax of the entire celebration, marked by a spectacular fireworks display, was held at night.
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After 1650, German princes began to shift these celebrations into the evening and night as a sign of luxury and prestige. The month-long “Festival of the Planets” celebrated at the gathering of
the dukes of Saxony in Dresden in February 1678 exemplifies this development.

The “Festival of the Planets” organized by Elector John George II (1656–80) for his three brothers (dukes of the cadet lines of Saxony-Weißenfels, Saxony-Merseburg, and Saxony-Zeitz) also offered numerous jousts and other equestrian sport. But the emphasis had shifted to the evening activities. On at least thirteen evenings the festival included entertainment (opera, ballet, and theater) in Dresden’s court theater, the Komödienhaus, built in 1664. These performances, in particular the court “Ballet of the Planets,” were the centerpieces of the festival.
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The Dresden “Festival of the Planets,” which concluded with a massive fireworks display, was meant to demonstrate to the three younger brothers of John George II the culture and power concentrated at the Dresden court. For much of the festival, John George II and his court artists chose the night as the most effective background for this display; without these nocturnal performances the festival’s theme would have made no sense.

The nocturnal celebrations of the Dresden court reached their high point under Frederick Augustus I, from 1697 also King Augustus II of Poland (1694/97–1733).
³⁷
Through his election to the Polish throne in 1697 and his spectacular cultural politics, centered on his opulent courts at Dresden and Warsaw, Augustus sought to join the preeminent monarchs of his era.
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Also depicting himself as a sun king, his celebrations, such as the nocturnal festivities at the Holländisches Palais during the wedding of the electoral prince in 1719, turned night into day. Even equestrian events were held at night: the Dresden Reithaus, illuminated by thousands of candles, was the scene of riding displays during Carnival in 1695 (see
Figure 4.3
) and during the visit of the Danish king Frederick IV (1699–1730) to the Saxon court in 1709.

Figure 4.3
Illuminated tourney in the Dresden Reithaus, 1695. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett. Photo courtesy SLUB / Dept. Deutsche Fotothek, Herbert Ludwig.

Alongside these nocturnal festivities, a much older use of the night was the display of fireworks, taken to new heights at the courts of the baroque era.
³⁹
With unintended irony, fireworks lit up the heavens for an instant before falling to earth, marrying the spectacular display of nocturnal power to a sense of the instability and illusion behind this display.
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This period also expanded the visual
and political counterpoint to the fireworks display, the urban “illumination.” Instead of the single skyward focus of the fireworks display, the illumination placed multiple lights in the windows of a single building or across an entire city, a massive yet precise display of loyalty and obedience to the ruler who ordered the illumination or was celebrated by it. (See
Figure 4
.4, illumination of the Hôtel de Ville, Ghent for the entry of the Habsburg Charles VI in 1717.) A Viennese pamphlet of 1706 lauded “true-hearted vassals / who have illuminated your houses and palaces / with new fires of joy” – an offering of light and loyalty to the emperor.
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A Saxon author writing in 1736 emphasized the novelty of the practice: “It is difficult to say when the art of illumination arose in Germany. In my opinion it is unlikely one would have seen them before the end of the previous seventeenth century.”
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Figure 4.4
Illumination of the Hôtel de Ville, Ghent, 1717. Engraving, 1719. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv, Vienna, 462.224-A/B.

Two aspects of the political role of spectacles must be mentioned here. First, it is important to note that early modern polities not
dominated by courts, such as the Venetian Republic, the United Provinces, and the German Free Imperial Cities, also used fireworks, illuminations, and theater to display power and authority to domestic and foreign audiences.
Figure 4
.5 shows a magnificent fireworks display in Bremen celebrating the “Respublica Bremensis” from 1668.
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Second, the politics of spectacle and pleasure described here did not guarantee political success. The masques of Charles I of England presented to the king an ideal world of authority and virtue, but they had little meaning to important parts of the political nation. The last masque staged for Charles I, Sir William Davenant’s
Salmacida Spolia
of 1640, was viewed with trepidation by its audience; one courtier considered himself “being so wise as not to see it.”
⁴⁴
In similar terms, the spectacular court life of King-Elector Augustus II of Poland and Saxony did not attract the Saxon nobles who opposed his conversion to Catholicism and his absolutist policies. Throughout his long reign, these nobles had to be forced to attend some of his major celebrations. Of the 112 Saxon nobles personally invited to the Dresden wedding of the electoral prince and the Habsburg princess Maria Josephine
in 1719, only 52 were initially willing to attend. The other 60 offered a wide range of excuses from poverty to ill health; some later succumbed to pressure from Augustus and did appear.
⁴⁵
Court festivities demanded participation (often costly) on the terms set by the prince as host and affirmed the sovereign’s image as displayed – but subjects could and did refuse the pleasures and spectacles offered at court. The fact that nocturnal pleasures and spectacles were deployed by every prince of this age – successfully or not – is further evidence of the belief in their power.
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Figure 4.5
Firework display in Bremen, 1668, with the letters “VRPB” (Vivat Respublica Bremensis) at right. Colored engraving. Caspar Schultz, 1668. Staatsarchiv Marburg, Best. 4 f Bremen, Nr. 58.