by Paul Bogard
During the years 1786 to 1793, Bretonne walked these streets of central Paris, and published his experiences in Les Nuits de Paris. That’s only half the title, though. The full title—Les Nuits de Paris, or, The Nocturnal Spectator, by Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne—points to some of the pomp with which Bretonne carried himself. In a drawing on the opening pages of his book, he sports big-buckled shoes and stockings, a cape wrapped around himself, his hair falling to his shoulders, and upon his large wide-brimmed hat an owl (and this owl, with rabbitlike ears and wings spread, has a look of surprise, as though Bretonne has glued the bird’s feet to his hat). Bretonne looks like a character—serious, thoughtful, and slightly ridiculous. And, in fact, that is how he reads. He came from Burgundy, which, at that time, was a totally dark place, and he couldn’t get over the bright lights of the big city—in the 1780s, Paris suddenly had oil lamps, and more and more of them. “He was a mad walker,” Downie explains. “He was completely bowled over by this idea that he could go out at night and walk around… and see.”
This ability to go out at night and see, one we now so take for granted, had its origins in a decree by the French King Louis XIV in 1667 that lanterns be hung on Paris streets. As admirers proclaimed that “the night will be lit up as bright as day, in every street,” the king commemorated his brilliant move by having coins minted featuring his profile on one side and, on the other, a statue of a robed figure holding a lantern and, in that lantern, a candle. And that—candles hanging over the streets of Paris—formed the first official system of public lighting in the world. By the end of the century, dozens of northern European cities had public lighting in their streets, some fueled with candles, others with oil. Paris alone lit more than five thousand candle lanterns, though only from October through March—the rest of the year relying on summer’s lingering sunlight and the monthly advance of the moon.
Street lighting marked a dramatic change in human interaction with the night. Before this time, the coming of night’s darkness signaled the end of working and socializing hours, the sign to come in from outside. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch explains in Disenchanted Night, “the medieval community prepared itself for dark like a ship’s crew preparing to face a gathering storm. At sunset, people began a retreat indoors, locking and bolting everything behind them.” To go out at night was to risk one’s life, whether by a criminal’s hand or a misplaced step—cables strung across the Seine caught the floating corpses of those who had fallen off the quais or bridges and drowned in the dark. The new public lighting facilitated and acknowledged a changing culture. Coffeehouses were spreading through northern Europe and cafés were staying open later and later, marked by a lantern hanging over the door. Along with stronger state security, these increased opportunities for socialization and commerce joined with the new lights to open the darkness to more and more people. Eating, drinking, working—this opening of nighttime hours radically altered life for northern European city dwellers. By 1800, for example, mealtimes had shifted back by as many as seven hours from those of the Middle Ages. “Nocturnalization,” historian Craig Koslofsky calls these changes, the “ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night,” was an expansion for which street lighting served as infrastructure.
By midcentury the candle lanterns in Paris had been replaced by a new type of oil lantern, the reflector, or réverbère, which used multiple wicks and two reflectors to produce dramatically increased amounts of light. In fact, réverbères were enthusiastically hailed as artificial suns that “turned night into day.” A report prepared for the Paris police chief in 1770 suggested, “The amount of light they cast makes it difficult to imagine that anything brighter could exist.” But for eighteenth-century Parisians it didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. “These lights cast nothing but darkness made visible,” wrote one Frenchman. “From a distance they hurt the eyes, from close up they give hardly any light, and standing directly underneath one, one might as well be in the dark.” Indeed, a century after the Sun King’s decree, an Englishman visiting Paris declared, “This town is large, stinking, and ill lighted.”
For any noctambule, Paris held plenty of challenges. The narrow streets had no sidewalks, and death by stagecoach was not an infrequent event. “There are nights when all the disadvantages of a crowded quarter are apparent at the same time,” Bretonne wrote. “As I was coming off rue du Foarre, a large marrow bone fell at my feet. Its sharp force and the force with which it was hurled would have made a lethal weapon of it, had it struck me.” As his walk continued, he faced a “sheet of soapy water” thrown from a window, then a bucket of ashes. Still, things could have been worse. The city’s dirt and pebble streets were lined with sewage and waste, the air filled with a rank stench that we could only imagine by standing in a town dump. Writes historian Roger Ekirch, “The Duchess of Orleans expressed amazement in 1720 that Paris did not have ‘entire rivers of piss’ from the men who urinated in streets already littered with dung from horses and livestock. Ditches, a foot or more deep, grew clogged with ashes, oyster shells, and animal carcasses,” and “most notorious were the showers of urine and excrement that bombarded streets at night from open windows and doors.” William Hogarth’s painting of London in Night, from The Four Times of the Day (1736), might just as well have been a city street scene from Paris: A woman pours a bucket of human waste out an open window onto the back of an unfortunate man who staggers along with his wife. He holds a stick and she a lantern and sword. Oh, and a bonfire burns in the middle of the narrow street behind them.
Amid this dimly lit craziness it might be difficult to believe that street lighting could be a source of bitterness and anger. But in the years before the French Revolution, street lighting was often a thorn in the public’s side. From its start, public street lighting had been significantly motivated by the state’s desire to gain control over the streets at night, and for many Parisians the oil lamp simply stood for tyranny. When lanterns were at first hung low, they made for easy targets, destroyed with walking sticks. But when the lanterns were then hung out of reach, a new technique emerged, that of cutting the lantern’s ropes and letting the lantern smash into the street. At times, like the modern-day smashing of Halloween pumpkins, smashing lanterns was simply a form of entertainment. As Schivelbusch writes, “Whatever the details and methods, smashing lanterns was obviously an extremely enjoyable activity.”
While the candle lanterns and réverbères are long gone, and electric lighting makes Paris today as bright overall as any city its size, the echoes of such history remain. Though some complain that old Paris has become a museum or even that it’s dead, I think it anything but, and I think that especially at night. What’s kept alive is the opportunity to add your story to those countless stories before, even to add to your own story if you have been here in the past. Because so much of the old city has been preserved, you can come back to Paris and the night you walked years ago will still be here.
The year after high school, while backpacking nine months through Europe, I remember especially a week in Paris, in the winter, alone. I had lucked out and discovered a small hotel on the Île de la Cité, the Henry IV on the Place Dauphine. I would set out each night and walk for hours through old Paris, the gray-black Seine there to guide the way, the long, gray ministry buildings with rooftops black and windows dark, the French tricolor spotlit in front. I would stand on the Pont Neuf and wonder where this life would lead.
As Downie and I continue our stroll, I tell him that the night I reached the city this year, I took the métro from the Gare du Nord to the Champs-Élysées, near the Arc de Triomphe. A wet snowfall weighed on tree branches and café awnings, crystals sparkling. The snow snarled rush-hour traffic and slowed walkers with its slushy challenge, casting a hush over the sounds of wet tires and boots. The leafless smooth-barked plane trees along the avenue were filled with small white lights, bright with a tinge of sky blue, each with two or three long bulbs like fluorescent ceiling lamps
dark except for a periodic slide of light down their length, the movement like one of melting snow sliding down a rock face or roof. At the end of the wide Champs-Élysées boulevard, I wandered past the bright blue-white Ferris wheel (La Grande Roue) set up for the season in the enormous Place de la Concorde, the famous city square where King Louis XVI lost his head to the guillotine and where the spotlit Obelisk—a 3,300-year-old Egyptian column—stands seventy-five feet tall. From the Place I skirted around the locked and deserted Tuileries gardens, which, during the day, fills with couples and families and solo strollers, and found myself among the stone buildings of the Louvre Palace, where black lampposts ring the courtyard with bright light. Then, along the Seine to the Île de la Cité, past the large Christmas tree filled with navy-blue lights in front of Notre-Dame, around the cathedral onto Île St.-Louis, and through the amber-lit Marais neighborhood to my hotel. All told, a walk of nearly two hours, but in that time I saw much of the old city. No museums or galleries or music or events, not even a glass of vin rouge or a quick stop at a créperie. But the City of Light on a dark winter’s eve and nearly for free, the priceless sensation of having returned to something once mine.
“Everything belongs to me in the night,” wrote Bretonne. In Paris more than two hundred years later, that truth remains: Everything is accessible, at least to your eyes—monuments, famous buildings, ancient streets. Little is closed off as you walk this city at night. Even—as the lights come on in apartments you pass—other people’s lives.
Downie nods. “My wife says it reminds her of an Advent calendar, the way the windows suddenly come to life.” We’ve reached the Place des Vosges, built in the early 1600s, the oldest planned square in the city, lined with grand two-story apartments. “That’s a seventeenth-century painted ceiling,” he says, pointing. “This city is full of unbelievable interiors, and you only see them at night.”
In a neighboring apartment are long maroon drapes pulled back from French doors, the lifted slant top of a grand piano, and in the corner on the wall a stag’s head. “Now, speaking of expensive,” Downie says, “this is a double pavilion owned by one man, one very rich family. They’ve owned it for a hundred seventy years. And if you look, see that tapestry? It’s a sixteenth-century tapestry. If other lights were on, you would see amazing things because he’s one of the most successful auctioneers in the country.”
These are rooms into which, during the day, I would never be allowed. But at night, walking Paris, invited into room after room, life after life, I feel welcomed to enjoy the beauty this city offers. And I want to know more.
François Jousse emerges into the Parisian evening as though from out of the shadows, ambling toward me from behind the enormous Christmas tree in front of Notre-Dame. With his bushy beard, red plaid coat, and camel-colored hiking boots, he looks like a lumberjack. It turns out that those boots are key—Jousse likes to walk Paris, day and night, and that’s what we have agreed to do: a tour of central Paris so he can tell me about his work. He is immediately jovial, friendly and cheerful, clearly delighted to be talking about lighting the city he loves, albeit slowly in English with a heavy French accent. He begins many of his sentences with “Alors…,” meaning “So…,” before explaining something new. There is much to explain, because there has been so much thought put into the lighting of Paris. And the man who has done much of that thinking, the man who has done so much to create the atmosphere of Paris at night, is François Jousse.
We start at Notre-Dame, where in 2002 Jousse oversaw the completion of a ten-year, multi-million-dollar upgrade to the cathedral’s exterior lighting. For several decades after World War II the cathedral was simply spotlit, and then only its façade. Before the war, it had spent centuries in darkness—a Brassaï photograph from the early 1930s, shot from Île St.-Louis, shows the cathedral from behind, lit only by surrounding streetlights, a dark hulking shape as though carved from coal. Not until recently—not until Jousse—did the city take seriously a relighting of one of its most enduring landmarks. “For the lighting of the cathedral we made a competition, a jury with clergy, cultural minister, city of Paris—many people,” he says with a slight grin, “and it was very, very difficult.” Jousse tells me one idea was to have the cathedral’s famous stained-glass rose window lit from within, a proposal of which the clergy disapproved. “They said,” Jousee laughs, “we were the devil.”
For Jousse, the project of lighting the famous cathedral didn’t stop with just the church. When he says “the cathedral,” he explains, he means not only its face but everything around the building, the lights of the bridge adjacent to it, the plaza in front of the cathedral. “The concept was to put the cathedral in the center of the island. And to tell a story.” For example, Jousse points out how the lighting grows gradually brighter as it reaches the cathedral’s top, intentionally drawing the viewer’s gaze skyward—toward heaven. And though pleased with the project, Jousse says he didn’t get everything he wanted. “I have made also a design for this garden,” he explains as we pass the dark courtyard behind the cathedral, “but no money.” He then offers a “what-can-you-do” laugh, lowers his gaze, and we’re off again, walking to the next stop, stretches of silence but for the crunch and splash of our boots in the snow-crust and melt-slop of the Paris sidewalks.
Speaking of money, the city now spends some 150,000 euros each night for the electricity, maintenance, and renovation of its lighting, a quantifiable reflection of its commitment. But this wasn’t always the case. When Jousse took his position in 1981, Paris at night looked little like it does now. As with Notre-Dame, the city’s famous monuments and buildings were mostly spotlit, and many others were not lit at all. Over the course of thirty years, Jousse and his associates relit Paris almost entirely—more than three hundred buildings, thirty-six bridges, the streets and boulevards—all with the goal of integrating them into the city, being as economical as possible, and creating beauty. Before his retirement in 2011 as chief engineer for doctrine, expertise, and technical control, Jousse was the man in charge. His car even held a special permit that allowed him to park wherever he wanted in order to better troubleshoot, direct, or otherwise consider how Paris would be lit.
Most visitors to Paris probably notice the beauty of the lighting, but they probably don’t notice how carefully that beauty is created—where and how the floodlights are placed, the challenges the lighting designers faced, the amount of energy used. That’s just fine for Jousse. In fact, he delights in showing me how he hid many of the projectors so that the lights become part of the building, and the building part of the city. He doesn’t want to draw attention to the lighting, nor does he want the lighted building to stand out from the neighborhood. On the sidewalk across the Seine from Notre-Dame, at the end of a long row of green metal stalls—those of the famous bouquinistes, the booksellers whose presence here began in the 1600s—Jousse shows me how the first two stalls actually house no books, hiding two spotlights instead. Anyone walking past the bookstalls would never guess the light on the cathedral came from within them.
“Whose idea was this?” I ask.
“This was mine.” He laughs.
Jousse sees himself as a historian of technique, and a storyteller using light as his language. As we walk past the Hôtel de Ville he says, “Now I show to you my last design in Paris.” He leads me toward the Tour St.-Jacques, the 170-foot Gothic tower that is all that remains of the wonderfully named sixteenth-century Church of St.-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie (St. James of the Butchery). Jousse used the story of Blaise Pascal’s experiments with atmospheric pressure as inspiration to develop this lighting design. “I want to make homage to Pascal. The light falls from the top, and when it reaches the ground it makes a splash.” And indeed, the light starts brighter at the top, fades as it falls, then brightens and spreads at the tower’s base. This blend of artistic thinking with technical solutions essentially describes Jousse’s work in Paris—to think about the philosophy behind the light, and then to make it happen.
“I want that the building says something with the light,” he explains. “But the speaking can be different. Maybe it’s an architectural speech, maybe it’s a historical speech, maybe it’s humorous. Sometimes the speech can be spiritual. Sometimes people say to me, But nobody will understand what the building says. And I say, It’s not a problem, the building says something and it’s beautiful because the building says something.”
At St.-Eustache I see what he means. From a block away the cathedral seems to rise from darkness, its bottom half left unlighted, its top half glowing subtle amber-gold. Jousse smiles. “For the church I want to be sure the light says something. I give the speaking to one designer, and the technique to another. And the first one must say, ‘I see the church like that during the night because na, na, na, na,’ ” he laughs. “It was the first realization with this way of thinking, maybe in the world. And his speech was something like, the church is like a battery of God-energy. During the day the church takes in the energy of God, at night the energy of God comes from inside to go outside.”
As we walk closer to the church the bottom half emerges from the shadows, its stone arches lit by ambient rather than direct light. “When you’re far away you ask why isn’t it lit, but when you’re up close you don’t ask anymore,” he says, clearly satisfied. “There’s comfort, and there’s ambience. Everything doesn’t necessarily have to be lit. On the contrary, it’s when you leave things in shadows that you see the light better.”