Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (24 page)

In September 1667 the
Magistrat
established street lighting following the Paris model of lanterns suspended by cords over the middle of street.
⁴⁰
The traditional neighborhood authorities, the
maîtres des places
, were charged by the ruling council with the placement of the lanterns and their maintenance, while the responsibility for hanging out and lighting the lanterns was given to individual householders. As an update of the ordinance explained in January 1668: “wishing
to obviate the insolence and disorders which occur in the evening in the said town,” the
Magistrat
ordered “all those who occupy corners and the entries of streets, and other locations designated by the
maîtres des places
” to put out candle-lanterns lit “from one hour after the evening bell until after midnight.”
⁴¹
The ordinance is similar to that of Paris, though it is not clear who provided the 600–700 lanterns. The 1667 lighting was limited, but it went beyond the traditional requirement that residents hang out a lantern in two ways: the local
maîtres des places
were authorized to enforce compliance, and the placement of the lanterns on special ropes “hanging above the middle of the street”
⁴²
followed the new Paris model, lighting a street centrally from above rather than from lanterns in front of individual houses.

This street lighting arose alongside other measures intended to secure the night in Lille. In the fall of 1667 innkeepers were ordered to submit a list of their lodgers every evening, and the
Magistrat
again regulated the closing times for “Tavernes & Cabarets.”
⁴³
In the period from 1667 to 1715, the Lille
Magistrat
addressed nocturnal security in about sixty separate ordinances and resolutions; the requirement that one carry a light if out on the streets at night was repeated eleven times in this period.
⁴⁴

But whom were the authorities policing? Lillois journals and chronicles all describe violence between French officers and citizens of Lille, duels at dusk between French officers, nocturnal robberies by common soldiers, and attacks on French troops in the first months and years after the French capture of the city.
⁴⁵
For French military and civil authorities, the actions of their own soldiers were of great concern, and they had to tread carefully. Following the annexation of Walloon Flanders by the French, all eyes were on the fate of Lille, “accounted the third Place of Traffic in the Low-Countries next
Amsterdam
and
Antwerp
,” under French rule.
⁴⁶
Louis XIV had personally accepted the city’s surrender in August 1667 and confirmed the authority and privileges of the ruling
Magistrat
. Lille, described as the “capital of the conquests of his majesty,”
⁴⁷
stood as a “test case” for the possible annexation of other cities of the Low Countries by France, hence the sharp concern to maintain order in the city, and especially to prevent crimes by the occupying French soldiers.

In September 1668, a few months after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle confirmed the annexation of Lille and Walloon Flanders by France, Michel Le Peletier de Souzy, intendant of the new French province of Flanders, wrote to the Marquis de Louvois, secretary of state, to report on nocturnal crime in Lille: “Yesterday I handed down a judgment very stern but also very necessary – people were beginning to thieve at night in the streets of Lille as in Paris; and a citizen had been despoiled down to the shirt by four Liège horsemen from the company of Berlost.”
⁴⁸
Three of the four were apprehended and Le Peletier reported that he condemned two of them to be hanged, despite their rank.
⁴⁹
In reply, Louvois affirmed these concerns: “Public safety during the night is so important that one would have thought they might have to be condemned to [be broken on] the wheel.”
⁵⁰
He considered this public spectacle of slow death, then continued, “I do not understand how in a place where the watch must do its duty as carefully as in Lille, one still dares to attempt to rob at night.”
⁵¹
In this case, disciplining the night was vital to reducing the impact of the French troops on the occupied city.
⁵²

Turning the conquered Lillois into loyal subjects of the French king would take some time, however. In December 1669 the intendant Le Peletier complained that the
Magistrat
was disloyal and difficult to govern.
⁵³
In 1670 the visiting Spanish ambassador (the representative of their former Habsburg rulers) was cheered in the streets, and some of the city’s clergy preached against the alleged decline of public morals brought by the French.
⁵⁴
We can also see the resentment of the French occupation from the street, so to speak, in the journal of the Lillois master silk weaver Pierre Ignace Chavatte (1633–93). Chavatte, like Le Peletier and Louvois, saw the night as a significant site in the negotiations between the Lillois and their new masters. Chavatte recorded numerous crimes and misdeeds by the French and observed that French attempts to police the night could themselves trigger new conflicts: in 1672 his journal notes that “on 23 July between 10 and 11 o’clock at night a French sentinel who was at the corner of the market fired his musket at a man who passed with a lit wick [of his candle or lamp] in his hand … and three to four days after he died; he was a tailor by trade and of the Flemish nation.”
⁵⁵
Chavatte emphasized that the unfortunate tailor was killed even though he was carrying a light as required.

Despite the French affirmation of the governance of the Lille
Magistrat
, Chavatte observed that authority over the city streets at night belonged to the French. He recorded the declaration of war between France and the United Provinces on October 16, 1673, adding resentfully “that same day in the evening servants of the
Magistrat
of the city of Lille were arrested and taken to the watch because it was forbidden to walk without a lantern.”
⁵⁶
Chavatte reflected a broad distrust of the French occupiers of the city, and of their policing of the night. Conflicts between French soldiers and residents of Lille often flared up at night, as on February 7, 1675, when “in the evening in the tavern
La Bourse d’Or
there was a great dispute by the citizens with the French officers in which three to four bourgeois were wounded, and a French surgeon wounded in the head; and the citizens were apprehended and taken to prison.”
⁵⁷
In the same year the intendant Le Peletier acknowledged the circulation of libels “prejudicial to the service of the king.”
⁵⁸

In the 1680s street lighting factored into the slow détente between Lille’s ruling patricians, the administrators of Louis XIV, and the common people. In 1682, the
Magistrat
established paid lamp-lighters for the city’s street lighting, and the provision of street lighting gradually became more centralized and professional.
⁵⁹
In 1689 the
échevins
(high judges) of the ruling council, “having noted that the establishment of lanterns to illuminate the city during the darkness of the night served not a little to prevent quarrels, thefts and other disorders that are commonly committed under cover of the night,” praised the service.
⁶⁰
The
Magistrat
also seems to have become more attentive to damage to the lanterns, referring in 1692 to the need to prevent people from “cutting the cords of the public lanterns.”
⁶¹
In March 1697 the
Magistrat
ordered four young men “from good bourgeois homes” to pay heavy fines for destroying thirty-three lanterns in the streets of Lille during the night of November 26–27, 1696.
⁶²

Early modern street lighting was thought to provide both prestige and security, but in Lille, the emphasis was entirely on the latter. None of the publicity that accompanied the establishment of street lighting in Paris or Leipzig (see below) appeared in Lille; conversely, none of the Lille ordinances regarding street lighting refer to the splendor,
prestige, or beauty brought by the new amenity. In the occupied city, street lighting was seen as a response to the tensions and disorder brought by the French, rather than as an urban improvement. Only after two decades did Lille’s ruling council begin to refer to “the public lanterns” as a service of “the public trust.”
⁶³

The French conquest and integration of Lille and Walloon Flanders shows how much authorities’ attempts to police the night had in common with larger projects of territorial conquest and control. This comparison will be explored further in the discussion of policing, resistance, and the colonization of the night in
chapters 6
and
7
. In Lille, the establishment of street lighting slowly brought the French intendant and military authorities together with the city’s ruling council in a common project to light and secure the city’s streets.

In the Leipzig case, the official initiative to light the streets came from Warsaw. While in residence there on September 19, 1701 King-Elector Augustus II decreed that in Leipzig “as is common in other prominent cities, to prevent all sorts of nightly inconveniences and for beautification, lanterns shall be set up and lighted by night.”
⁶⁴
Interest in lighting Leipzig’s streets goes back to 1695, when the Leipzig merchants’ guild (the
Kaufmannschaft
), citing incessant nocturnal crime, proposed to the city council that “constantly-burning night lanterns should be maintained and the streets illuminated with them, as is established in Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and other places.”
⁶⁵

The guild’s concerns were well founded, as the 1699 attack on the traveling Strasbourg merchant Johan Eberhard Zetzner shows. The twenty-two-year-old Zetzner was bringing a letter to the post late on the evening of March 28, 1699 when he encountered a group of drunken students who challenged him “with rude and insulting words.” Years later, he described what followed in his memoir:

Because I saw myself outnumbered, and had neither a knife nor a walking-stick with me, I responded with polite words and tried as much as possible to avoid them. But one drew his dagger; then I shouted for the night watch.
⁶⁶

As he called out, Zetzner felt (but did not see) a blow to his left arm. He blocked a second thrust but was badly injured; the students escaped easily. His reflections on the attack express no real surprise that the streets could be so unsafe, just anger at Leipzig’s wastrel students (“these privileged hangman’s knaves,” as he called them).
⁶⁷
Despite these dangerous conditions and the example of other leading cities, however, the fiscally conservative Leipzig city council did not take the initiative to set up street lighting.

Less than three years after the unlucky Zetzner’s visit, Leipzig’s streets were illuminated for the first time. A series of oil lanterns established and maintained at public expense were lit on Christmas Eve, 1701: “so it was also resolved here in Leipzig to transform the dismal night and darkness into light and bright radiance,” as a Leipzig newsletter reported.
⁶⁸
The decision of the absolutist King-Elector Augustus II to create “The Leipzig that Shines Forth by Night” illustrates the initiative of the court in the nocturnalization of Leipzig’s daily life.
⁶⁹

Elected king of Poland in 1697, the Saxon elector Augustus II made full use of the politics of spectacle at his opulent courts at Dresden and Warsaw, and his reign illustrates both the promises and the limitations of the politics of spectacle in this era. Like his contemporary Louis XIV, Augustus styled himself a “sun king,” and his celebrations sought to turn night into day. Even equestrian events could be 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 in 1709. The nocturnal celebrations and spectacles of the Saxon court reached their high point under Augustus.
⁷⁰
But the Polish election and Augustus’ lavish court swallowed immense sums of Saxon money, straining relations with the tax-weary citizens of Leipzig, the wealthiest city of the electorate.
⁷¹

By initiating street lighting in Leipzig, Augustus followed the general pattern of royal provision of street lighting seen in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
⁷²
But the actual establishment of street lighting in Leipzig was directly connected with the swift rise to power of Augustus’ courtier, the appointed mayor Franz Conrad Romanus (1671–1746).
Romanus came from an established Leipzig family and studied law before entering into the service of the king-elector. Romanus is perhaps best known for the urban palace built for him at the corner of the Brühl and the Katherinenstraße: this great mansion, completed in 1704, is the most important work of Leipzig’s baroque architecture.
⁷³

Franz Conrad Romanus was unique among the mayors of Leipzig during the Old Regime. He was not freely elected, nor had he served on the Leipzig city council (as was required) before his term as mayor began in 1701. Instead Romanus, a court official (“Appellation-Rath”) of the king-elector, took office on the express command of Augustus, who overrode the resistance of the city council.
⁷⁴
This was an unprecedented exercise of territorial authority over the city, intended to give the king-elector more control over the taxation of Leipzig, the single largest source of revenue in the electorate. Augustus and his privy cabinet suspected that the Leipzig city council could be more forthcoming with loans and contributions, and placed Romanus at the head of the city government to increase the flow of revenue for the unceasing expenditures of Augustus and the court. The written protests and financial counter-offers of the Leipzig city council were futile and on August 22, 1701 the council concluded that it had no choice and elected Romanus to its ranks. On August 29 Romanus took office as mayor, promising his fellow councilmen that their failed opposition to him would be “cast into the sea of oblivion.”
⁷⁵