Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (25 page)

The Leipzig councilmen, on the other hand, could hardly forget the unique circumstances that brought Romanus to the office of mayor. The average age of the councilmen was well over fifty; Romanus, all of thirty years old, with no prior experience in the city council, now led its meetings. Hated and feared by his peers, he served the interests of the king-elector alone, and his task was extraordinarily difficult: to bring money into the coffers of Augustus without further alienating the citizenry or the council. With the support of Augustus, Romanus quickly sought to gain the goodwill of the citizens. A few weeks after he took office, the council received the electoral decree from Warsaw calling for the establishment of public street lighting. The decree, no doubt planned by the king-elector and Romanus, also ordered the establishment of a city drain system, the regulation of coffeehouses,
and several other measures for this city of about 20,000. As mayor Romanus would oversee a range of improvements to the city which had been in discussion for some time. Of all the projects, the street lighting moved most quickly.

The city council, led by Romanus, contracted with the entire Leipzig tinsmiths’ guild (7 masters), who delivered 478 lanterns: 2 van der Heyden lanterns from Amsterdam served as the models.
⁷⁶
Another 222 lanterns came from Dresden, sold to the city by the banking firm of Brinck and Bodisch, Romanus’ own bankers.
⁷⁷
By December 24 the 700 lanterns were in place across the city: 4 lantern masters and 18 lantern keepers maintained them.
⁷⁸
When the lanterns were all lit for the first time on that evening, one verse pamphlet enthusiastically reported: “away with the darkness in a brighter light … LEIPZIG’S prosperity resounds in all lands: it shines day and night.”
⁷⁹

The decree of the elector had proposed that the street lighting be funded by a new common tax or property tax. This had been the case in Vienna, for example, which led citizens to complain that those who paid the least for the lighted streets benefited the most. “The high ministers and cavaliers, who with their people frequent the imperial court at the illuminated times, are free from all contributions,” as the Vienna city council protested in 1689.
⁸⁰
Similar objections from Berlin underscore the initial association of street lighting and “night life” with court society. Mindful of his popularity, Romanus instead funded the Leipzig lanterns at no direct cost to the townspeople by reclaiming for the city the fees collected to enter the city after dark at the Grimma gate, the location of the main watch. These fees were under the direct authority of the king-elector, and their importance also illustrates the level of Leipzig’s night life (specifically traffic between the city and its suburbs) at the turn of the century.
⁸¹
The entry fees covered the annual maintenance costs of about 3500 florins; all but 400 florins of the start-up costs of 4500 florins were paid by the king-elector directly, making the street lighting his Christmas gift to the city.
⁸²

Leipzig’s newly illuminated streets were promptly illustrated in the clandestine news journal
Captured Letters, Exchanged between Curious Persons Regarding the Current … Political and Learned World
(
Aufgefangene Brieffe, welche Zwischen etzlichen curieusen Personen über den ietzigen Zustand der Staats und gelehrten Welt gewechselt worden
) published in Leipzig in 1702.
⁸³
The journal introduces the innovation in terms of baroque spectacle:

Among other amusements … at royal and princely solemnities and public festivals … many thousand lights are lit – and with them often an entire city is illuminated.
⁸⁴

Calling this use of the night “the waste and great abuse of illumination” the Leipzig author presents a typical critique of the extravagance of court life.
⁸⁵
But he then reveals a new bourgeois appreciation for the night by arguing that “A far better use of night-lanterns … in cities on public lanes and streets is to replace the waning sun- and moonlight in the evening and darkness and so well and truly ward off the dangers of the night.”
⁸⁶
The journal included a print (
Figure 5.4
) which offers a visual résumé of the presumed benefits of street lighting.

Figure 5.3
Leipzig street-lighting schedule, December 1702. Stadtarchiv Leipzig.

Figure 5.4
Leipzig street-lighting scene, 1702, print from
Aufgefangene Brieffe, welche Zwischen etzlichen curieusen Personen über den ietzigen Zustand der Staats und gelehrten Welt gewechselt worden
(Wahrenberg [actually Leipzig], 1701).

The engraving is not a realistic representation of Leipzig’s street lighting: instead, it brings together security, elite sociability, and the night in a single compact scene. In the foreground, left, a man reads by lantern light; couples stroll and admire the city’s new baroque mansions, while two men, able to recognize each other despite the darkness, doff their hats. In the background a nightwatchman stands guard. The accompanying text emphasizes the convenience and security provided by the lanterns:

not only are we spared the private lanterns and torches, which everyone must otherwise use when going out at night, but also many sins against the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Commandments [i.e., prohibitions of murder, adultery, and theft] are better prevented and avoided.
⁸⁷

A medal minted in 1702 to commemorate the introduction of street lighting repeats two of these scenes, showing a city watchman and a figure reading. The emphasis on reading in the print and in the medal should not be taken too literally: as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has pointed out, the
symbolic
value of lighting always supplements its visible effects.
⁸⁸
Reading by the light of the lanterns was hardly practical, but this exaggeration of their power suggests that the sphere
of the literate was expanded by street lighting. The better sort were to benefit from it: the well-dressed men in the illustration, perhaps students, carry swords to indicate that they are not apprentices or servants. Leipzig’s prosperity and prestige depended on attracting merchants and students, and this illustration promised a safer and more genteel city.

Under Romanus the Leipzig city council issued several ordinances regulating night life. During his first year in office the council forbade the fashion of “walking about the streets at night in night-shirts, masks, night-caps and other unusual clothing.”
⁸⁹
Repeating a 1697 ordinance, the council warned citizens and residents to “keep their own [family] at home in the evening,” and the ordinance reported that “late in the evening many apprentices, boys, maids and such unmarried folk are found idly in the streets, where they practice many improper things with shouts, running about and all such mischief.”
⁹⁰
Another ordinance denounced the coffeehouses of the city as sites of “sexual vice … luxurious ostentation and mischief from the early hours until late into the night.”
⁹¹
The street lanterns and city ordinances were meant to civilize the city’s streets and reduce this sort of “night life.”
⁹²
The verse pamphlet
The Leipzig that Shines Forth by Night
, printed to celebrate the new lanterns, also emphasizes security and order. Prostitutes “would have to shun the light”; thieves lurking would instead “go off to bed.”
⁹³
The pamphlet’s author went on to praise the benefits that the visitors to Leipzig’s great trade fairs would enjoy. “In security,” he commented, “they can recognize friend and foe / and can go up and down the street doing business,” making clear the value of street lighting for commercial uses of the night.
⁹⁴

Despite the general praise of street lighting echoed here, in some cities local authorities resisted the establishment of street lighting. The innovation was associated with luxury and the aristocracy, and citizens faced with new taxes to maintain the street lighting complained that those who paid the least for the lighted streets benefited the most.
⁹⁵
As a Vienna petition explained, “the citizens and artisans mostly stay
at home and seldom go out after 7 o’clock in the evening, and do not benefit from the illumination as much” as the courtiers and officials.
⁹⁶
These complaints underscore the association of street lighting and “night life” with court society, although the image of restrained, early-to-bed burghers is certainly qualified by many other sources.
⁹⁷

In Paris, debate arose over the schedule of the new lighting. As was common with the earliest public street lighting, all agreed that the lighting would not be used during the short nights of the summer months. The question, then, focused on when to start and end the “lighting season” in the fall and spring. The citizens of Paris, while favoring the new street lighting, sought to limit its use to about five months of the year, from October to mid March, to reduce costs. When Parisians proposed this monthly schedule for street lighting in 1671, their argument was countered by the police commissioner La Reynie, who noted that it was important for the streets to be lit through the month of March, because “during March, the season and business fill the city and the court is in Paris.”
⁹⁸
A Venetian traveler passing through Berlin in 1708 described the extension of the city’s street lighting out to the Charlottenburg palace:

On the sides of the street stand wooden posts with glass lanterns on top; they stand along the entire four-mile-long street and burn through the entire night when the king is in Charlottenburg. That is for all who are constantly at court very commodious.
⁹⁹

The Leeds antiquarian Ralph Thoresby described a very similar sight when he visited London in 1712. He “could not but observe that all the way, quite through Hyde Park to the Queen’s palace at Kensington, has lanterns for illuminating the road in the dark nights, for the coaches.”
¹⁰⁰

When threatened with the expense of the street lighting, townspeople could resist its imposition and the increased nocturnalization it entailed. As we saw above, the oligarchs of self-governed or semi-autonomous cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, Dublin, or London took the initiative to establish and pay for street lighting. But one could see these cities as exceptions in light of the many (generally smaller) cities in which street lighting failed to draw sufficient public
support. In Brussels, for example, public lighting was set up in 1675 but abandoned by 1680 as result of the expense.
¹⁰¹
Private citizens in Bremen set up street lighting on one section of a single street, the Langenstraße, in 1698; even this drew protest from one resident who did not want a lantern attached to his house. The entire city was not regularly illuminated until 1757.
¹⁰²
Across France, street lighting was established in thirty cities by royal edict in 1697, but city councils resisted the imposition of the lighting and the attendant costs. Dijon, for example, was illuminated with 600 candle-lanterns in 1698, but only after the city council unsuccessfully sought to buy an exemption from the royal edict requiring the street lighting.
¹⁰³
In Amiens, the city council delayed buying the lanterns from the royal supplier until 1701. Once purchased, the lanterns were placed carefully in the attic of the city hall. No further steps were taken to install them; several years later the council auctioned them off. Only in 1718 did the Amiens city council actually illuminate the city’s streets – on its own initiative.
¹⁰⁴