Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  This is especially important in the urban context. Nocturnalization at court encountered little resistance. Rulers modified the structures of daily time in the delimited space of the court (in the narrowest sense, the royal household) without much opposition. There were few institutions within the court which could (or would seek to) resist new habits and schedules. In cities, the forces promoting and resisting nocturnalization were much more complex, aligned across class, gender, and age. As we saw in the previous chapter, some local authorities saw street lighting as an expensive luxury and resisted its establishment. In middling cities like Bremen, Amiens, Düsseldorf, and Strasbourg the most visible aspect of nocturnalization was delayed for decades, and the colonization of the night seemed far less inevitable. The traditional order of the night did not go quietly.

  6.1 Hand grenades, horsewhips, and the civilizing process

  Focusing on the traditional order of the night leads us to a more active level of resistance to the colonization of the night. Court and city authorities used street lighting to sharpen the distinction between their own expanding “respectable” nocturnal sociability and the night life of young people. These authorities admonished heads of households to prevent “their children, namely sons and daughters, as well as male and female servants, from roaming around during night time. Also, their beds ought to be in locked and sheltered chambers, and [household heads must] check frequently in this case too.”7 These young people and servants were the natural masters of the urban night, and by all accounts had been for centuries.8 But we must consider nocturnalization as more than a “top-down” process. When early modern elites, from princes and courtiers to town councils and wealthy merchants, expanded their activities, privileges, and authority into the hours after sunset, they sought to secure and regulate this part of the day. But this meant regulating the young people of their own classes along with the youth of the common people. The colonization of the night took place within as well as across classes. In 1700 the lieutenant-général de police of Paris, Marc-René d’Argenson, reported that he was forced to intervene in the family affairs of “several bourgeois and even a few of the most distinguished merchants,” who “neglect so much the education of their children that they leave them among the rascals and night-walkers.” As we will see below, restraining “the debauchery and licentiousness … of these young people” at night was a major project, led by d’Argenson, in the Paris of Louis XIV.9

  This regulation of behavior “in the leading groups of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie – in the direction of greater foresight and a stricter regulation of libidinal impulses,”10 which forbade “the nocturnal, beastly roaming about, shouting, yelling, and screaming in lanes and houses,”11 has of course been described as a civilizing process. But from a nocturnal perspective the process looks quite different. A 1682 report from Justus Eberhard Passer, ambassador of Hesse-Darmstadt at the imperial court, gives us a glimpse of the violent side of the civilizing process on the streets of Vienna in the middle of the night. On February 12, 1682, Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm I of Baden celebrated Carnival and his recent promotion to imperial “Feldmarschall-Leutnant” at a “special ball and luxurious meal [Merenda]” at his residence in Vienna.12 Reflecting the nocturnalization of court life, the festivities continued late into the night. Passer reported that at 3 a.m. the “lackeys” outside (“many hundreds who waited on their masters”) grew restless (and cold, no doubt) and started to brawl with one another and some soldiers.13 When the brawl on the street got the attention of the margrave and his guests inside, many “Cavalliers” came down to stop the fray by riding into it, but this only made matters worse. The fighting did not stop, Passer explained, until “Prince Louis made peace with several hand grenades, which he threw among the rioting people.” As a result, Passer continued, “horses and people were damaged, and some have since died.”14

  The ambassador’s laconic words – horses and people “damaged,” noting that “some [humans or horses?] have since died” – show no particular shock or censure. The margrave’s hand grenades sent a double message about the night: the brawling lackeys, soldiers, and other servants should accustom themselves to the late hours of their superiors. They would have to wait on their masters during a time which they had previously considered their own. To the rash cavaliers the margrave demonstrated a cooler, more civilized approach to the brutal exercise of violence. Hand grenades were more effective than directly engaging the brawlers in the dark.

  The hand grenades used by the margrave themselves reflect the nocturnalization of warfare in this period. They were a relatively new weapon, developed during the Thirty Years War for siege combat. On the walls and in the trenches around besieged cities, attackers and defenders alike used the grenades when the enemy was nearby but could not be seen – as was often the case in the violent night skirmishes that accompanied a siege. The development of the hand grenade reflects the central importance of siege warfare, and of the night in siege warfare, in this period.15 In a sense, Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm was using the grenades in a siege on the night of the February 12, 1682. He and his fellow aristocrats were occupying a new site in urban space and time by celebrating very late into the night. The lackeys who waited on them responded to this encroachment on a time of their own relative freedom with an outburst of violence. Perhaps for a moment, looking down at the fighting in the street, the margrave felt besieged in his urban palace. He responded with a siege weapon, the hand grenade.

  Lackeys, pages, and other servants resisted nocturnalization in many ways, but when they disturbed the new night life of the well-born, they could face brutal violence or its threat. In London’s theaters in the early eighteenth century, footmen were customarily allowed free entrance to the upper gallery, with the assumption that they were waiting on their masters. Their behavior during the plays, however, led to complaints in the periodical press, including a mock advertisement in the Female Tatler of December 9, 1709. In jarringly violent terms, the notice described a “lost item,”

  Dropt near the Play house, in the Haymarket, a bundle of Horsewhips, designed to belabour the Footmen in the Upper Gallery, who almost every Night this Winter, have made such an intolerable Disturbance, that the Players could not be heard, and their Masters were obliged to hiss them into silence. Whoever has taken up the said Whips, is desired to leave ’em with my Lord Rake’s Porter, several Noblemen resolving to exercise ’em on their Backs, the next Frosty Morning.16

  The violence which here protects the nocturnal sociability of the masters and mistresses is only a threat – in contrast with the hand grenades of Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm – but it springs from a fantasy of brutal nocturnal discipline that erases the line between human and beast.

  The Vienna incident and the London advertisement underscore the fact that, like all colonized sites, the night was contested territory. This chapter explores the violence involved in these contests and argues that urban nocturnalization is better understood as an analogue to colonization rather than as a civilizing process. Courtiers and citizens sought to control a realm already inhabited by youths (including students and other elite young men), lackeys, vagrants, prostitutes, tavern visitors, and – cutting across social distinctions – all those who sought anonymity. This colonization created spaces and times of modernity in the city, shaping access to public life in decisive new ways.

  6.2 Resistance

  The colonization of the night met with sustained resistance from the urban night’s traditional inhabitants: patrons of public houses, young people (servants, apprentices, and students), and lackeys, prostitutes, and criminals. In the struggle for the urban night estate, age, and gender were deployed to mark the shifting lines between respectable and prohibited night life.

  With the introduction of public lighting and the improvement of the night watch, the streets of Paris, London, and other European cities seemed safer and more convenient to use, while the evening became a more important part of the respectable social day. The a
bility to free the night from its darkness testified to the power and authority of the sovereign: “so much do great spirits please themselves in striving with nature and seeming to give a law to it,” as an English officer noted in his description of the projects of Louis XIV in Paris and Versailles.17 The lighting evoked both security and sovereignty.

  But did lighting the night truly provide security or glory? Whatever the benefits of street lighting in the early evening, they faded as one ventured deeper into the night. After enthusing about the superiority of Parisian street lighting over that of London, the English author of A View of Paris (1701) contrasted the policing of the night in the two cities:

  The Streets [of Paris] are secured by Night, not by a Watch with a Lantern, as in London; but by a Guard of Soldiers, called le Guet, both Horse and Foot; the first sit … ready to start upon the least Squabble that happens; the Foot Soldiers are Distributed about … and Walk their Rounds every Hour of the Night.

  Paris comes off favorably in this account, but the author immediately adds:

  Yet for all this, ’tis not safe being in the Streets at Paris, after Eleven of the Clock, for ne’re a Day passes, but we have an account of some Body or other being either stripped or Murdered the Night before.18

  The popular Paris guide of Joachim Christoph Nemeitz (first edition, 1718) warned the traveler:

  [I]f he wants to go out in the evening, it should not be too late and he should avoid finding himself alone on the streets. If, despite his intentions, he has lingered somewhere, let him send for a hackney coach or a sedan chair; if he can’t get one, let him be preceded on the street by a valet holding a torch. In the evening he should avoid crossing the Pont-Neuf, the Pont-Royal, the narrow perpendicular streets, cemeteries, and the church and convent squares: these places are at night extremely dangerous.19

  The limitations of the lighting were clear to all.

  Nor did the lighting protect the image of the sovereign who established it: in the hungry winter of 1709, Saint-Simon noted that “at night” the two statues of Louis XIV in Paris (at the place des Victoires and the place de Vendôme) were “defiled in various ways which were discovered in the morning” despite the unique measure of lighting the statues themselves at night.20 The night remained a preferred time to undermine established authority. Anthony Wood chronicled its use by supporters of William of Orange in May 1686, noting that “divers scandalous papers were on Sunday night last dropt about Whitehall and St. James,” and by supporters of James II, who used the night in the same way after the Revolution of 1688:

  [1693] May 23, Tuesd., at night, some of the Fl. [i.e., Fr.(ench)] king’s declarations dispersed in Oxford streets … On Saturday night (20 May) a great number of King James II’s declarations were scattered about the street in all parts of London, as also in Whitehall; many were also laid on shopkeepers’ stalls wrapped in brown paper; some at gentlemen’s doors.21

  Wood found the anonymity and impunity of these addresses to the political nation especially disturbing, but the urban night resisted all attempts to make it a silent, passive backdrop for political display. Despite the new lighting, the night still offered boundless opportunities to challenge authority and commit crimes. Resistance to nocturnalization was everywhere.

  We can categorize this resistance as traditional, criminal, or political. The traditional “nocturnal disturbances” issuing primarily from young people, including serenading and charivaris, and their de facto access to the night reflect long-standing uses of the night that all had some popular sanction. Nocturnalization sought to reduce violent crime as well – the endless succession of assaults and robberies with no public sanction. Finally, in some cases, city authorities themselves slowed nocturnalization by resisting the establishment of street lighting itself, underscoring the political stakes of illuminating the urban night.22 While keeping in mind the inherently unbounded, ambiguous nature of night life, we can use these three categories to understand the struggle over nocturnalization in the period from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the Old Regime.

  All three forms of resistance intersect in the ubiquitous problem of lantern-smashing, the most salient aspect of the conflict over the urban night. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has noted, the Foucauldian irony is clear: a measure intended to reduce nocturnal crime immediately created a new offense.23 A 1669 ordinance in Paris sought to protect the lanterns against “pages, lackeys and all other persons of bad life and disturbers of public peace and security who would maliciously break any lanterns.”24 In Berlin a 1702 edict, repeated five times in the next thirty years, referred to numerous attacks on lanterns and forbade all such vandalism; similar edicts were issued in Lille (1692, 1698, 1710), Frankfurt am Main (1711), and Dublin (1716).25 In Vienna in 1688, authorities threatened to cut off the right hand of anyone caught damaging a street lantern.26 Martin Lister, an English visitor to Paris in 1698, was impressed by the severe punishment of lantern-smashers there:

  As to these Lights, if any Man break them, he is forthwith sent to the Galleys; and there were three young Gentlemen of good families, who were in Prison for having done it in a Frolic, and could not be released thence in some Months; and that not without the diligent Application of good Friends at Court.27

  In Leipzig in 1701, the city council feared that the street lanterns “might very easily be damaged through the depravity of wicked persons.”28 The council suspected that students would be among these “wicked persons,” and arranged – even before the lanterns had been put up – for the university to issue a special warning to its “academic citizens, students and their families.” The mandate promised severe – some said excessive – punishment for those who damaged lanterns, and set off a minor dispute between the Saxon privy council (on the city’s behalf) and the Leipzig consistory (in support of the university’s privileges). Ultimately the mandate was issued as requested by the city council.29 Beyond their practical benefits, the lanterns were, no less than spectacular fireworks or radiant opera halls, a display of power and authority in themselves.30 “The first and foremost law regarding the night lanterns,” according to Paul Jacob Marperger’s 1722 treatise on street lighting, “is their inviolability.”31 Marperger even reported that Louis XIV had had a page beheaded for smashing a lantern.32

  Of course, the threats of draconian punishment for those who damaged street lights were not easily enforced, especially when crowds acted. On January 17, 1706 students in Vienna rioted in the streets against the Jews of the city and the court which protected them. Beginning at about 5 in the evening, they destroyed more than 300 lanterns near the Imperial Residence (the Hofburg) as other Viennese joined in, targeting the street lighting established by and for the court to show their displeasure. As evening turned to night, the mob gathered in front of the house of the court Jew Samuel Oppenheimer (the site of a similar riot in 1700). The riot ended only when soldiers and the city watch opened fire on the crowd, killing seven people and wounding many more.33

  6.2.1 Resistance from traditional youth cultures

  The association of students with the destruction of street lighting in Leipzig and Vienna calls to our attention the resistance of young people to nocturnalization. Unruly and often violent, university students stood at the intersection of noble privilege and male youth culture, which gave them an especially uninhibited relationship to the night. The custom of serenading was less objectionable (see Figure 6.1), but student drinking, gambling, brawling, and sexual license created nocturnal disorder in every city that housed them. While traveling in 1611, the English Catholic Charles Somerset commented on the nocturnal violence in Liège: “there is never a night lightly, but some one or other is killed; the town is a very ill town to live in, especially in respect of the unruliness of the students.”34

  Figure 6.1 German students serenading, 1727, from Christian Friedrich Henrici, Picanders Ernst-schertzhaffte und satyrische Gedichte (Leipzig, 1727), vol. I, p. 498. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Rare Books and Manuscrip
ts Library.

  The students of Padua enjoyed the worst reputation in Europe, at least with travelers. John Evelyn complained in 1645 that “the students themselves take a barbarous liberty in the Evenings, when they go to their strumpets, to stop all that go by the house, where any of their Companions in folly, are with them … so as the streets are very dangerous, when the Evenings grow dark.”35 The situation was apparently no better when Andrew Balfour visited in the late 1670s – again, the “Privileges” of Padua’s students allowed a relationship to the night increasingly criminalized by nocturnalization:

  the Scholars here have large Privileges, and many times abuse them, and become very insolent, insomuch that they have been sometimes known to threaten the Podesta himself or Governour of the Town; they have likewise a beastly custom of carrying Arms in the Night, insomuch that it is never safe to be abroad after it begins to be Dark, for many are this way unhappily Murdered without any Offence given or taken, but only by wantonness, or rather Wickedness of the Scholars.36