Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  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.

  5.1 Lighting the streets of early modern 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

  do not allow the night to be completely dark, but light it up wit
h lamps burning at intervals, the purpose of which is both to take care of the safety of the community and to prevent useless wandering about; they also make the night watches less worrisome.

  As we will see below, the first European street lighting, established in the 1660s, marked an extraordinary turning point in the history of the night. There was no actual street lighting that could serve as a model for Andreä in 1619, and none of his predecessors imagined street lighting in their utopias. The traditional association of the night with sin and the Devil are clear, but Andreä innovates by acknowledging legitimate night work:

  In this way they also set themselves against the dark kingdom and murky games of Satan, and wish to be reminded of the Eternal Light … Let us not draw back from that arrangement [i.e., street lighting] which calms the fears of people working in the darkness [my emphasis], and which makes it easier to see through the veil which our own flesh is glad to draw over licentiousness and dissolute behavior.

  Quite presciently, Andreä notes that street lighting will be an expensive proposition, but he imagines a night freed from moral and physical darkness:

  Also there is no reason to discuss the expense here in Christianopolis, since they are extremely frugal in other respects – whereas in other places there is the greatest extravagance in almost everything. If only more were spent on light there would not be so much opportunity at night for all kinds of evil, nor such a great number of shady dealings!24

  This account of street lighting stands out because the rich utopian tradition from which Andreä drew, in particular More’s Utopia and Campanella’s “city of the sun,” made no provision for such legitimate nocturnal activities.

  Like his contemporary Böhme, Andreä understood the everyday world as a Christian allegory without abandoning its intrinsic significance. Each detail of Christianopolis represents an aspect of the life of the individual Christian, but Andreä also sought to realize an actual community like Christianopolis among his peers. On both levels – as allegory and as daily life – the imagined street lighting of Christianopolis documents a new relationship with darkness and the night emerging in the first half of the seventeenth century.

  The street lighting imagined by Andreä in 1619 anticipated the actual establishment of public street lighting in European cities by a half-century. To create and maintain this sort of street lighting both technical and political problems had to be solved. The spread of street lighting across Northern Europe was based in part on the refinement of lamp and lantern design. The decisive steps were taken in Amsterdam, where the painter and inventor Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712) experimented during the 1660s with oil-lamps in glass-paned lanterns. Lamp-lanterns of his sophisticated design, which used the current of air drawn into the lantern by combustion to keep soot from collecting on the glass, made Amsterdam the first European city to install truly effective street lighting. Admiring the city, the German student Friedrich Lucae commented that “in the evening the entire city is illuminated with lanterns, so that one can pass through the crowds of people just as in broad daylight.”25 The superiority of van der Heyden’s design is suggested by its rapid adoption across the United Provinces and Hamburg (under the supervision of van der Heyden), and by its unauthorized use in Berlin, Dublin, Leipzig, and elsewhere.26 Figure 5.1 shows an overview of the van der Heyden lantern design: note the air intake hole in the lantern post.

  Figure 5.1 Oil-lamp, lantern, and post designed by Jan van der Heyden, 1660s. Archives municipales de Lille, Affaires Générales 1256, dossier 9, fo. 122 (c. 1700).

  When we see early modern street lighting as an international development, the political initiative to establish the lighting becomes especially significant. Despite its presumed benefits, city councils were not eager to incur the new expense of public lighting. Patricians in self-governing cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg chose to set up and pay for street lighting themselves, but they were the exception. In most cases territorial rulers established the lighting in their capital cities and forced their subjects to pay for it.27 In cities including Paris, Turin, Berlin, and Vienna, the initiative came from the monarch. In London and Westminster, private street-lighting companies contracted with the city to light specific streets and collect the corresponding fees; in Dublin (1697) and Lübeck (1704) individual entrepreneurs tried (with less success) to provide the service.28

  The introduction of street lighting in Paris in 1667 by the “council for the reform of the policing of the city” of Louis XIV was the first of many cases of royal initiative to provide public lighting. Jean Baptiste Colbert proposed the street lighting to the council in a discussion of the night watch in December 1666, and he and his uncle Henri Pussort carried out the lighting project in 1667. The lighting and improved street cleaning were financed by a new “tax of mud and lanterns” (taxe des boues et lanternes), which became the only significant direct tax on householders in Paris under the Old Regime.29 By 1702 there were 5,400 public candle-lanterns in place across the city, lit from October to March.30 Unlike the Amsterdam lanterns mounted on posts, in Paris the lanterns held candles and were suspended about fifteen feet above the middle of the street by ropes, raised and lowered with a pulley. Figure 5.2 shows two lanterns above the rue Quinquempoix in 1720.

  Figure 5.2 Print showing the rue Quinquempoix, Paris, 1720, with candle-lanterns suspended above the street. From the broadsheet “Abbildung des auf der Strasse Qvincampoix in Paris enstandenen so berühmten Actien-Handels” (Nuremberg: Christoph Weigel, 1720). © Trustees of the British Museum, 1882,0812.461.

  Compared with Paris, Berlin was a modest provincial town in the second half of the seventeenth century, but it was the residence of Frederick William I, the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg-Prussia (1640–88), who ordered in 1679 that the residents of Berlin should hang a lantern light outside every third house at dusk each evening from September to May. The Berliners failed to comply and on September 23, 1680 the citizenry petitioned the elector to eliminate the lighting requirement, arguing that they could not afford it.31 The elector responded by establishing public street lighting on the Amsterdam model, using van der Heyden’s lantern design and maintenance plan. About 1,600 lanterns went up in the three districts of the city (Berlin, Cölln, and Werder) – all at the citizens’ expense.32

  As Vienna recovered from the siege of 1683, imperial authorities began to police the city more effectively. In 1685 an imperial patent reinforced the city law requiring anyone out after the curfew bell to carry a lantern. In 1687 the imperial administrator of Lower Austria, Count Johann Quintin Jörger, began the establishment of public street lighting in Vienna. Several obstacles to the plan quickly emerged: there were not enough tinsmiths in Vienna to manufacture the lanterns, the start-up and maintenance costs were higher than expected, and the city council resisted the lighting measure because of its expense. With the support of Emperor Leopold I, Jörger was able to set up the lighting by the following spring: the streets were lit for the first time on Pentecost eve (June 5), 1688. The lighting was financed by a tax on imported wine, arranged through an intricate compromise with the city council. In 1698 the city council, which was already supplying twenty-six night-lanterns for the inner courtyard of the imperial palace (the Hofburg) itself, was asked “by the spoken request of the imperial court” to also illuminate the imperial palace of Ebersdorf, just outside the city walls, with fourteen lanterns.33 The court made ready use of the municipal lighting system to illuminate its own representative buildings.

  5.2 Policing the night: street lighting in Lille

  In 1697 the leading provincial cities of France were required by a royal edict to “immediately proceed to establish lanterns, conforming to those of our fine city of Paris.”34 This seemingly “enlightened” command from Louis XIV to set up street lighting was immediately recognized by all commentators as another revenue scheme: the thirty cities involved (see Map 5.1) would pay royal suppliers dearly for the installation and maintenance of the lanterns, with the profits go
ing to the king.35 As we will see below in section 5.4, local authorities in Dijon, Amiens, and other provincial cities resisted the edict; some sought to buy an exemption from it. Among the cities’ protests against the edict requiring street lighting, the response of the ruling council or Magistrat of the city of Lille stood out: they explained that they had already established street lighting thirty years earlier and did not need the royal suppliers’ assistance.36 This was true: in 1667 Lille, capital of the French province of Flanders, became only the third city in Europe in which the complex and costly project of street lighting was realized, alongside Paris and Amsterdam. Why did Lille precede all other French provincial cities in the establishment of street lighting?

  The streets of Lille were illuminated in the fall of 1667, two months after the French captured the city in the War of Devolution (1667–68). Louis XIV left Lille’s ruling council in place, but the city of 50,000 was now uneasy host to a garrison of 5,000 to 10,000 French troops. Protected by a citadel built by Vauban in 1668–70, Lille became a key French stronghold on the border with the Spanish Netherlands and near the Dutch Republic. The French occupation of Lille necessitated complex negotiations among French civil and military authorities, the governing patricians of Lille, a restive populace, and a large military presence. The policing of the night and the establishment of street lighting were an important part of this balance of overlapping authorities.37 The Lille case reveals a close relationship between attempts to police the urban night and attempts to rule the newly conquered territories of Walloon Flanders and integrate them into the French kingdom.