Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

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Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) Page 18

by Craig Koslofsky


  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

  5.4 Resistance by local authorities

  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

  These local authorities apparently preferred a traditional urban night illuminated sporadically by hand-held torches or lanterns to the cost of the street lighting. In several other cases local authorities actually removed the street lighting imposed upon them by their princes. The residence cities of Düsseldorf and Stuttgart illustrate this response to the costs and benefits of public street lighting.

  Düsseldorf became the residence of John William of Pfalz-Neuberg, duke of Jülich and Berg (called “Jan Willem”; from 1690 also elector of the Palatinate) in 1679. Jan Willem transformed the modest city into a center of court culture, building a baroque theater and a new riding school while renovating the ducal palace. In 1699 he ordered the establishment of street lighting in the city. By 1701 a modest 383 lanterns were in place; 50 of these, used to light the area around the ducal palace and the court buildings, were gold-plated. The elector initially paid for the street lighting from the state budget, but in 1704 “the burden and maintenance of the aforementioned lanterns was forced upon the city.”105 In numerous petitions and at the territorial parliament representatives of the city sought to shift the cost back to the duke, or abandon the lighting altogether. After the death of the elector in 1716 the court left Düsseldorf and the city’s eco
nomy collapsed. In 1718 the representatives of the city argued that the “very costly” lighting served no purpose and that the citizens did not want it at all. In the winter of 1720 the city officials finally got their wish: the street lanterns were taken down and stored in a warehouse. A few were put back in use in the 1730s but city-wide lighting did not return until decades later.106

  In Stuttgart, traditional residence of the rulers of Württemberg, Duke Eberhard Ludwig (1693–1733) began to pressure the city magistrates to set up public lighting in 1714. The city officials demurred, arguing that the costs of the lighting far outweighed its benefits. The street lighting was finally set up in time for Carnival in 1716 at the behest of the duke. But city officials continued to argue against the lighting, claiming in July 1716 that it was even more expensive than first estimated, and that some of the lanterns had been vandalized or destroyed. Further, the city magistrates claimed that Stuttgarters were happy to carry their lanterns and torches with them, or rely on moonlight, to get around that city at night. Duke Eberhard continued to insist on public street lighting, paid for by the city. In response, in September 1717 city officials again argued that “the larger part of the residents of high and low estate recognize that the installed lanterns have little or no value to public, but they have incurred great expenses.”107 Even after the court moved to Ludwigsburg, the street lighting and its expense remained, provoking anger and anonymous placards. The city magistrates finally won out in 1732, arguing that the funds for the street lighting could instead be used to purchase a new school building. Here the state administrators sided with the Stuttgart officials, and the Duke relented: the lighting was taken down on October 29, 1732.108

  The last word on local resistance to street lighting comes from Strasbourg, where citizens were forced after decades of struggle to support street lighting in 1779. In response, these verses were posted anonymously on the city hall:

  As our city stood in prosperity,

  It was dark out on the street,

  But as our misery has begun,

  Lanterns on the street are hung,

  So that the citizen – poor man!

  Can see at night to beg.

  We do not need the lanterns bright,

  We can see our poverty without their light.109

  Public street lighting threatened the traditional night life and political order of these middling European cities.110 The expansion of elite social life into the urban night described here, resisted in some cases by local authorities, was also challenged by the traditional inhabitants of the night: servants, apprentices, and students, as well as tavern visitors, prostitutes, and those who occasionally sought to escape the social legibility of early modern daily life. On city streets at night the work, leisure, and social representation patterns of courtiers, burghers, and youth could collide violently, as we see in the next chapter.

  5.5 Spectacle, security, and sociability

  In 1710 Richard Steele described the nocturnalization of London’s daily life in a Tatler essay: “we have thus thrown Business and Pleasure into the Hours of Rest, and by that Means made the natural Night but half as long as it should be.” The result was a shift to later rising in the morning, and Steele asserted that “near Two thirds of the Nation lie fast asleep for several hours in broad Day-light.”111 Despite some exaggeration of the numbers of leisurely late sleepers, it is clear that the pleasures of the night were emerging as a significant part of urban daily life. Princes and burghers sanctioned and promoted new levels of nocturnal “Business and Pleasure” in European courts and cities, seeking prestige or profit by lengthening the day. The hours from dusk until dawn were no longer seen only as a threatening time of semi-licit activity or supernatural danger. The old views remained, of course, but courtiers and citizens began to use the night for respectable leisure and sociability. The inclusion of street lighting in Andreä’s 1619 Christianopolis reveals the trajectory of new relationships with the night from the sacred to the political and the practical.

  The shift of respectable daily activities into the evening and night went beyond the elites who initiated it: bourgeois gentlemen imitated noble fashions, and household servants had to adjust to new cycles of daily time. Court and city authorities used street lighting to sharpen a distinction between their own growing nocturnal sociability and the night life of the “apprentices, boys, maids and such unmarried folk found idly in the streets.” Their attempts to police the urban night through street lighting evoked the resistance of this indigenous nocturnal youth culture. New uses of the night by “persons of quality” thus reshaped daily life for servants, apprentices, and common people in European courts and cities.

  In Lille, street lighting was intended to protect the townspeople against the nocturnal crimes associated with the thousands of troops suddenly stationed there. French administrators and Lille patricians found a common goal in the policing of the city’s streets at night. The Leipzig case shows how street lighting could bring the courtly night of nocturnal spectacles together with burghers’ interest in increased security and sociability. In Leipzig in 1701 (as in Paris in 1667 and Vienna in 1688) the initiative to illuminate the city came from the court, not from the city council, and the courtier-mayor Franz Conrad Romanus – the direct representative of absolutist government in Leipzig – implemented the street lighting. The Leipzig lanterns were made in imitation of the lanterns of Amsterdam, the most technically advanced of the time. But the political symbolism of the baroque court is evident in their use: the power of illumination, which bedazzled at the Dresden court, now served to secure and beautify Leipzig, at the same time muting resistance to absolutist control over the city council. The night and its illumination thus link the representational needs of baroque monarchs with the practical goals of policing urban public space and time.

  Chapter Six Colonizing the urban night: resistance, gender, and the public sphere

  By 1700 life at court meant late hours, and permanent public street lighting was reshaping everyday life in dozens of cities across Northern Europe. Dutch city councilors, London merchants, and the police administrators of the Sun King all sought to expand respectable daily activity into the night in the second half of the seventeenth century. This unique alignment of interests across political and economic formations attests to the powerful forces behind nocturnalization. Sovereigns and self-governing cities celebrated at night and established street lighting with the same stated goals: to reflect their own glory and to protect their subjects.

  Regular public street lighting, together with an improved and expanded night-watch, was the infrastructure of urban nocturnalization.1 It was also the most visible and expensive aspect of the project. According to its heralds, the lighting responded to “the great number of vagabonds and thieves at night … and the amount of robberies and murders that are committed in the evening and at night” (Paris), and marked a concerted effort to “detect burglaries and prevent foul play” (Amsterdam), “for the reduction and prevention of all the recently increasing nocturnal and frightening murder and theft, and for the introduction of general security” (Vienna).2 One London enthusiast singled out the social groups that would be driven away by the lighting:

  The scatt’ring Light gilt all the Gaudy way,

  Some people rose and thought it day.

  The plying Punks crept into Holes,

  Who walk’d the streets before by sholes;

  The Night could now no longer skreen

  The Tavern-sots from being seen.3

  The proclamations all refer to disorder and danger on city streets at night. “Plying Punks” and “Tavern-sots” were nothing new in this period, but the steps taken to control their nocturnal activities were.

  In several ways, these efforts to impose a new order on city streets after dark resemble a “colonization of the night.”4 What benefits do we obtain by using this analogy to describe the nocturnalization of daily life in the cities of early modern Europe? An awareness of nocturnalization in t
he cities as uneven, contested, and multi-sided would be the first benefit. Any critical definition of colonization recognizes the violence necessary to colonize. Both logically and historically, the colonization of inhabited spaces means the exercise of power or authority, or both, over the people already there. Of course, many myths of colonization posit a physically “empty space” devoid of indigenous people, or natives so culturally “empty” that they embrace the cultural authority of the colonizer. Myths aside, however, the colonial exercise of power and authority is never far from violence or the threat of violence. The analogy with colonization can enhance our understanding of the urban night by taking us beyond the dire warnings and celebratory verses provided by the proponents of street lighting.

  By focusing on nocturnal crime – and by defining the traditional night life of young people as criminal – early modern princes, courtiers, city councils, and merchants expanded their activities, privileges, and authority into the hours after sunset. In the deliberations and proclamations establishing the street lighting, they described the urban night as overrun with violent crime. Considering the dangerous, seemingly untamable city evoked by proponents of street lighting, it is especially significant that when commentators looked back on the process of nocturnalization, they described it as natural or inexorable. After surveying the course of nocturnalization over the previous century, Friedrich Justin Bertuch concluded that “all these observations [of nocturnalization], which could easily be multiplied, prove clearly the occupations of the day begin ever later, the more society is refined and luxury increases.”5 Bertuch does not consider the inhabitants of the space that is being colonized by a society ever more refined and “policed”. This discourse of colonization depicted the night as a dangerous frontier, or, conversely, as a “natural” site of expansion for polite “society.” Neither depiction of the night – as filled with violence or as an empty space – takes into account the traditional cultures of the urban night and their resistance to nocturnalization.6 The metaphor of colonization widens our view to include those who resisted nocturnalization, shaped its boundaries, or found their daily lives caught up in it.

 

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