Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (22 page)

On April 26, 1784 the
Journal de Paris
published a letter on daylight and darkness from an anonymous subscriber. The author of the letter described an evening spent at a salon “in grand company” discussing, among other things, the new Argand oil-lamp. After considering whether this lamp would burn more efficiently and reduce lighting costs, the author returned home and went to bed “three or four hours after midnight,” reflecting a daily schedule typical of persons of quality in the eighteenth century. With generous satire the author, who was accustomed to sleeping until noon every day, related his surprise upon discovering by accident the next day that the sun actually rises between six and eight in the morning (!) and that it “gives light as soon as it rises.” Titling his letter “An Economical Project,” the correspondent urgently sought to enlighten the journal’s readers, “who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon” that they could save vast sums on lighting simply by rising at dawn and having “much pure light of the sun for nothing.”
¹

The author of this “Economical Project” quickly revealed himself to be Benjamin Franklin, representative of the new American republic in France.
²
His comments, which developed into the idea of daylight savings time, call our attention to the importance of nocturnal sociability in the last years of the Old Regime. They were echoed in much more critical tones by his conservative contemporaries in Italy, who complained that even the common people “profane the night either at long theater shows or at continual debaucheries” and noted that “people stay up so much later and longer that they then have to restore themselves by resting until very late the next day.”
³

When had these late hours become fashionable? Two years after Franklin’s “Economical Project”, the German
Journal des Luxus und der Moden
(
Journal of Luxury and Fashion
; Weimar and Gotha) published an essay on “the uses and divisions of the day and the night in various ages, and among various peoples.”
⁴
Broadening Franklin’s observations, the author and editor of the
Journal
, Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822), described “an entirely new order of things” which had replaced the traditional rhythm of daytime for work and night for rest and sleep.
⁵
Bertuch regarded the change as self-evident and presented several examples drawn from the courts and cities of Northern Europe. “In the fourteenth century” the merchants’ stalls of Paris opened at four in the morning, “but now hardly at seven o’clock”; then, the French king retired at eight in the evening, but “now plays, visits and all social pleasures hardly even begin at that hour.” From the time of Henry VIII to Bertuch’s own day the English had shifted their mealtimes and sleeping times later by about seven (!) hours.
⁶
According to Bertuch “all these observations, which could easily be multiplied, prove clearly that the occupations of the day begin ever later, the more society is refined and luxury increases.”
⁷
“Overall,” Bertuch concluded, “the pleasures of the evening and night … are the ruling fashion in every large city, where luxury and the need for entertainment constantly increase.”
⁸

The references of Bertuch and his contemporaries to monarchs, merchants, and the theater among the “grand company” and “in every large city” call attention to a fundamental shift in the rhythms of daily life in early modern courts and cities over the previous century as the hours after sunset slowly entered the regular, respectable part of daily life. With overlapping and sometimes conflicting goals princes, courtiers, burghers, and bureaucrats embraced the night, sanctioning and promoting new levels of nocturnal business and pleasure. They developed new lighting technologies for the stage and the street, and they surrounded the traditional night of natural and supernatural danger with a new aura of pleasure and respectable sociability. The aristocratic associations of street lighting, as well as its sheer cost, led some city councils to resist its imposition, sharpening the contrast between the traditional night and the origins of modern urban night
life. This chapter and the next examine the opportunities and conflicts created by the nocturnalization of urban daily life.

Prescriptive and descriptive sources from European courts show mealtimes, the beginnings of theatrical performances and balls, and sleeping and rising hours moving ever later. Parallel to these developments at court, in large cities curfews and city gate closing times moved later or were given up altogether in the seventeenth century. As John Beattie observed for London, after 1660 “the idea behind the curfew – the 9pm closing down of the City – was not so much abolished as overwhelmed.” His reference to the transformation of London’s night life through the proliferation of “shops, taverns, and coffeehouses, theatres, the opera, pleasure gardens and other places of entertainment” could be applied, with variations of scale, to all major European cities, whether they were closely tied to court life like Paris and Vienna or independent city states such as Hamburg.
⁹

Of all these developments, the rise of public street lighting was fundamental to this revolution in the rhythms of urban daily life. Its appearance was swift: in 1660, no European city had permanently illuminated its streets, but by 1700 street lighting had been established in Amsterdam, Paris, Turin, London, and Copenhagen, in French provincial cities, and across the Holy Roman Empire from Hamburg to Vienna. (See
Map 5.1
.) This early European street lighting – oil lamps (or, in the French case, candles) in glass-paned lanterns – was an innovation of the seventeenth century, both reflecting and promoting new attitudes toward the night and urban space.
¹⁰

Map 5.1
Street lighting in Europe to 1700

Europe’s first street lighting has been studied exclusively in local and practical terms.
¹¹
Based on evidence from the French conquest of Flanders (1667–77) under Louis XIV, and from the Electorate of Saxony during the reign of Elector Frederick Augustus I (1694–1733, as Augustus II King of Poland, 1697–1733), this chapter examines street lighting in a broader history of the night. In Lille, capital of the new French province of Flanders, the city council set up street lighting immediately after the French occupied the city in 1667. In Saxony the absolutist ruler Augustus II established public street lighting in Leipzig, the leading city of his principality, in 1701. Placing street lighting in Lille and Leipzig in a broader European context illustrates
a surprising set of relationships between security, the city, and court culture at night in seventeenth-century Europe.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, parallel to the new uses of the night at court, the rulers of the leading cities of Northern Europe also began to sanction broader uses of the night. Nocturnal illumination in general was expanding from the spectacular to the quotidian, and street lighting is the most visible example of this development.
¹²
The first cities to enjoy public street lighting were Paris (1667), Lille (1667), and Amsterdam (1669), followed by Hamburg (1673), Turin (1675), Berlin (1682), Copenhagen (1683), and London (1684–94).
¹³
In the 1670s and 1680s several other cities in the Netherlands followed Amsterdam in establishing street lighting (see
Map 5.2
), and by the end of the century Vienna (1688), Hanover (1690–96), Dublin
(1697), and Leipzig (1701) had illuminated their streets.
¹⁴
Several common factors appear in the emergence of street lighting in the seventeenth century. Everywhere the oil-lantern (or in the French case, the large candle-lantern) maintained at public expense, replaced the earlier candle-lanterns which city-dwellers were often required to hang outside their houses.
¹⁵
In each city, the lighting demarcated a large and consistent space which was accessible to a general public well after sunset.

Map 5.2
Street lighting in the Low Countries to 1700

Before the institution of public street lighting, the sources of light one would have seen at night on the streets of even the largest cities were few and irregular. The contrast between the few bobbing
lanterns carried by individuals, the torches held by link-boys or the lights hung out in front of taverns and the more regular, uniform public lighting made a clear impression on contemporaries. The earliest published report (1690) on the “New Lights” of London noted that “There is one of these lights before the front of every tenth House on each side of the way, if the street be broad; by the regular position whereof, there is such a mutual reflection, that they all seem to be but one great Solar-Light.”
¹⁶
Describing Vienna’s streets in 1721, Johannes Neiner saw the affinity of street lighting with theatrical illumination: “these beautiful night lights are laid out so prettily that if one looks down a straight lane … it is like seeing a splendid theater or a most gracefully illuminated stage.”
¹⁷

The function of lighting at night had also evolved. Prior to the seventeenth century, the regulation of lighting at night was
solely
an aspect of the night watch and policing. Anyone about after dark was required to carry a torch or lantern: not to see, but to be seen.
¹⁸
This requirement appears in countless early modern ordinances. Failure to illuminate oneself was considered evidence of shadowy intentions.
¹⁹
The very limited city lighting established since medieval times (candle-lanterns or “fire-pans”) was intended to deter crime and aid in fire-fighting; after the curfew ordinary citizens were to be off the streets.
²⁰
Of course, the curfew was unenforceable in great cities like London and Paris, whose streets teemed with activity late into the night. City authorities tolerated and policed this night life, but they did not sanction it. They knew that some nocturnal activities were necessary, such as the work of midwives, doctors, or latrine-cleaners, and others unavoidable, but all nocturnal sociability could fall under the ubiquitous early modern prohibitions of “nightwalking.”
²¹

The new street lighting of the seventeenth century certainly was intended to promote law and order, but it also beautified a city and provided convenience and social amenity by encouraging respectable traffic on city streets after dark. Public street lighting reflected a new willingness to use the night and to reorder daily time by relaxing curfews.
²²
This lighting represents both an unprecedented concession to
the growing use of city streets after dark, and a renewed attempt to regulate and secure this nocturnal sociability. The meticulous street lighting schedules (see
Figure 5.3
) and lamplighter instructions sought to create legitimate, regular, and uniformly lighted places and times.

Surprisingly, some of the early modern roots of uniform public street lighting lie in the culture of nocturnal piety, devotion, and mysticism examined in
chapter 3
. The 1619 utopia of the Lutheran churchman Johann Valentin Andreä (1586–1654) reveals the cultural link between the nocturnalization of piety and devotion and the illumination of Europe’s streets in the seventeenth century. The
Reipublicae christianopolitanae descriptio
, Andreä’s
1619
account of an ideal Christian city, stands squarely in the tradition of utopian writing.
²³
The author refers directly to More’s
Utopia
and the
Civitas Solis
of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), and Andreä’s work – usually referred to as
Christianopolis
from its German translation – has been seen as derivative of More and Campanella. But chapter 25 of
Christianopolis
presents a novel aspect of his utopia. The citizens of Christianopolis