Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  When Peter Tolstoi visited the city in 1697, he warned that “the traveling foreigner who happens to be in Padua must live cautiously, and must not walk alone late at night from house to house, because the traveler will be injured and at times even killed by a student; however, those who must walk late should do so with weapons.”37 Ultramontane visitors criticized the “barbarous liberty” students held to consider themselves masters of the night, focusing on a specific relationship to the night challenged by nocturnalization.

  Padua was an eminent international university, the second oldest in Italy, but even at German Reformed universities of modest size, such as those in Herborn and Bremen, students appear as would-be masters of the urban night in a series of court records and city ordinances. All of the twenty-four students expelled from the tiny University of Herborn between 1585 and 1712 were involved in some sort of mischief at night; university records refer to specific acts of traditional student nocturnal disorder, such as fighting with the night watch and disturbing the peace at night, in seven cases.38 In 1681 the Bremen city council singled out “the youth studying here,” who numbered about 400, as the source of “wild, dissolute life and ways … in the evening, as soon as it grows dark” in an ordinance.39 In statute of 1607 the parlement of Toulouse forbade students to walk the streets of the city after nine at night, and to carry arms at any time; both prohibitions were oft-repeated but with little effect. The same was true in Strasbourg, where the “student-youths” and lackeys were forbidden to carry weapons in 1650.40 Peter Heylyn complained in 1625 that the students of Paris had “regulated their villainous practices into a Common-wealth; and have their captains and other officers who command them in their night-walks.”41 Students could read about their traditional privileges in the night in Latin and dog-Latin plays and verses, such as Albert Wichgrev’s comedy Cornelius Expelled (1600), in which a nightwatchman complains:

  My lord rector, they were three

  Who in the market place did scream,

  As the watchmen three o’clock did keep,

  And the good people would rather sleep.42

  In late medieval and early modern Vienna students’ nightly excesses were a part of daily life despite all prohibitions.43 The immediate association of students with lantern-smashing in Leipzig anticipates their resistance to the policing of a time and place in which they had been traditionally enjoyed “large Privileges.” As the evidence on student life shows, there was plenty of nocturnal activity and night life before nocturnalization (going back at least to the time of François Villon), but this youthful night of transgression was colonized to transform it into a more orderly, safe, and respectable place and time.

  “And when night / Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.”44 Milton captured concisely the relationship to the night displayed by the young sons of wealthy or noble families, and by youthful apprentices, pages, footmen, and lackeys. The night watch of Paris clashed regularly with “cliques of sons of the upper class who passed through the city at night, usually armed – in the sources they are simply referred to as jeunes gens.”45 In October 1697 a patrol encountered a group of well-born young men as they emerged from a tavern with weapons drawn, drunk, with prostitutes in tow. The sergeant of the watch, one Le Guay, asked them politely to put away their weapons. The young men – members of the elite royal guards and a few from the most esteemed families of Paris – refused, and the watch patrol withdrew cautiously. Despite this show of deference, the jeunes gens attacked the watch. In the ensuing struggle the son of a high-ranking official was killed by the watch, and another arrested (only to be released the next morning). In the end, the patrol was rebuked for overstepping its authority by challenging the elite young men – policing the night had its social limits.46

  The Paris police director d’Argenson included in his disciplinary ambit young men just below the status of the jeunes gens described above. In 1700 d’Argenson commented on the youth of “some of the bourgeois, and even a few merchants among the most distinguished.” He explained:

  Recently I encountered a well-born son, aged eighteen, who for more than fifteen months lodged in a house with women of public prostitution and among villains without a single effort by his father to remove him from such disorder. This discovery obliged me to issue a general ordinance urging fathers to report to the magistrate their libertine and vagabond children, under the penalty of being responsible in civil court for all the misdeeds that they may commit, and with a fine proportional to their negligence.47

  In the colonization of the urban night, the threat to punish fathers for the crimes of their dissolute sons created a new point of leverage.48

  6.2.2 Crime as resistance / resistance as crime

  Beyond the license of apprentices, students, and servants, violent crime in general set clear limits on urban nocturnalization. In the earliest accounts of public street lighting, fantasies of controlling nocturnal crime were shadowed by persistent violence. Street lighting gave some sense of security, but violent crime at night continued to undermine the project of nocturnalization until at least the mid eighteenth century.49

  Early modern street crime at night can serve as an index of traditional urban night life, as scholars have observed that cities faced more nocturnal crime than rural communities. In his study of crime in Cologne, one of the largest cities in the Empire, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Gerd Schwerhoff established a clear connection between the time of day and violent crime. Only about a quarter of all violent crimes took place before 5 p.m.; over half occurred between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., with the remaining 20 percent in the night hours after 10 p.m.50 The Cologne evidence is corroborated by studies of Douai (Flanders), Paris, Siegen, and Frankfurt: in these cities active traditional night life led to significant proportions of interpersonal violent crime at night.51 Studies of crime in early modern rural regions, on the other hand, record more violent crime during the day and less in the evening or at night.52 As Schwerhoff concludes, the social life of the early modern city continued well past sundown.

  Nocturnalization meant making this part of the urban day safer for respectable people. The nocturnalization of the seventeenth century sought to pacify the urban night, but the watchmen who formed the first line of defense against nocturnal crime were often its victims. A study of homicide in Vienna reveals dozens of violent deaths by night, including about a dozen nightwatchmen killed while on duty in the period 1649–1720.53 The street lighting established in 1687 does not seem to have had any immediate effect on the risks for watchmen in Vienna. A case from London’s Old Bailey gives us a sense of the social dynamics of violence against nightwatchmen in the colonization of the night. On January 14, 1687 “after a long hearing on both sides,” two accused men identified only as “J. W—.” and “J. P—.” were found guilty of manslaughter “for Killing one Peter Penrose Bell-man in the Parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields, on the 30th. day of November last.” The removal of the names of the defendants from the published record of the trial indicated their elevated status. The incident began as the nightwatchman Penrose was “ringing his Bell, and saying his Verses, on St. Andrews day, above one or two a Clock in the Morning,” when he met the two accused “in the street.” The two accused men “bid him not keep such a Noise, and gave him ill Language” – one imagines them “flown with insolence and wine.” At this point “two other Bellmen, that came accidentally into the deceased’s company, being upon the Watch not far off,” tried to assist Penrose but the two accused “making up towards them with their Swords Drawn” killed him.

  In their defense the accused argued that “they were abused by the Bell men and the Watch, and that they were very highly provoked to do what was done; and that the Bell man set his Dog upon them, and Knocked one of them down.” They insisted that “they were set upon by the Bell men and others in the Night, and taken for Thieves, and very much abused.” The accused men called well-born character witn
esses who claimed that “J. W—.” and “J. P—.” were respectable and peaceable: “The Prisoners … called several persons of very great Quality to Evidence on their sides, that they had never been wont to quarrel, nor to keep any unseasonable hours.” As the recorder of the Sessions Papers emphasized, they paid lip service to the norms of the respectable urban night, keeping no “unseasonable hours” (except on the night in question, it seems). The jury ruled the death accidental. Despite their conviction for manslaughter, no punishment is recorded.54 The low status of the watchmen contrasts here with the “persons of very great Quality” who testified for the accused. In the very different system of law and policing in Paris, the low status of the archers of the night watch meant that the jeunes gens they apprehended were usually set free unpunished. In both cities, privileges of birth and estate protected the night life of these young men.55

  In Paris, Vienna, London, and other large cities across Northern Europe, the traditional night watch was augmented or reformed in the period from the end of the seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, but its principal dimensions would remain unchanged until the end of the Old Regime: a decentralized force of low-status semi-professional watchmen, often unarmed, began their rounds at sundown or at the curfew hour.56 The most decisive expansion of policing at night occurred in Paris, where in 1701 d’Argenson created a new brigade of the watch that began their rounds at midnight and patrolled until dawn. At the end of the year he reported, “I myself cannot praise enough this new order; everyday the people testify to their satisfaction with it.” The patrols lifted the cover of darkness from all manner of actions: “few nights go by without it [the midnight patrol] capturing or surprising some tenant who is moving out to cheat his landlord.”57 By December 1701 several watchmen of this patrol had been wounded on duty (considered a sign of their effectiveness); d’Argenson concluded that “the brigade that rises only at midnight and goes off duty at daybreak does more by itself than any of the others.”58 By early modern standards the midnight patrols were a major step in the colonization of the night.

  As scholarship on the history of crime has shown, early modern commentators assessed the dangers of the urban night in lurid terms.59 They saw urban illumination as holding back dangers ready to spring forth the moment lighting failed. This was the case in London, where street lighting first appeared in 1684. The “Great Frost” of 1683–84 froze the Thames solid, so that booths and stalls were set up and regular traffic in coaches and sleds passed between the banks. One newsletter described “a perfect street quite Cross the Thames at Temple stairs.” The frozen Thames became a public way, but one without any street lighting. As a result “Several persons going over the Ice in the night from Westminster market were set upon and robbed near Lambeth,” as another newsletter reported, eager to show that the equation of “street and night” with crime still held true.60 The entirely decentralized lighting of early modern cities was not susceptible to the power failures or blackouts first seen in the twentieth century, but early modern street lighting too could be suddenly and disturbingly absent. John Evelyn described a heavy fog that settled on London on November 8, 1699:

  There happened this Week so thick a Mist & fog; that people lost their way in the streets, it being so exceedingly intense, as no light of Candle, Torches or Lanterns, yielded any or very little direction … At the Thames they beat drums, to direct the Watermen to shore, no lights being bright enough to penetrate the fog.61

  The fog appeared around sunset and lasted until 8 p.m. By obscuring the street lighting the fog revealed, in Evelyn’s account, the lurking dangers of the urban night:

  I was myself in it, and in extraordinary danger, robberies were committed between the very lights which were fixed between Lond[on] & K[e]nsington on both sides, and whilst Coaches & passengers were traveling.

  This sense of “extraordinary danger” evokes a night whose threats are only barely contained by the street lighting and reappear the moment it is unexpectedly extinguished. These accounts acknowledged setbacks in the struggle to colonize the urban night while reminding readers of the dangers of an uncolonized night.

  To expand the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night in early modern cities, urban elites had to actively claim the dark hours of the day and make it their own. But for whom was the urban night colonized? And how would the new terrain be used? These questions lead us to examine age, estate, gender, and sexuality in the formation of a new nocturnal “public.”

  6.3 Gender and the public sphere

  Nocturnalization redefined what was “public” in the cities of early modern Europe. The streets seemed safer and more convenient to use, while the evening became a more important and more respectable part of the social day. The night watch and “night lanterns” helped bring together a public of individuals acting privately: street lighting was never described as facilitating either religious observance or daily manual labor.

  How does the colonization of the urban night described here relate to the development of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century? Defined by Habermas as a public of private individuals who join in debate on questions of politics and letters,62 the concept of the public sphere has proven especially stimulating because Habermas discussed it in historically specific terms, linking its development to the relations between the household, capitalism, and the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.63 His argument contrasts the bourgeois public sphere with “representative publicness” (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit), the display of power or majesty to a public constituted as an audience, which he considers characteristic of the princely courts of medieval and early modern Europe.64 Habermas’s analysis of the formation of the public sphere is certainly more suggestive than historical, and he has revised his conclusions over the years,65 but the concept of “publicness” (Öffentlichkeit) continues to stimulate useful research on early modern Europe.66 In chapter 4 we saw how important the night was to early modern “representative publicness”; here I will explore the connections between the night, bourgeois publicness, and daily life in Northern Europe.

  6.3.1 The rise of the coffeehouse

  A sphere exists in space. From the first introduction of the concept by Habermas, the abstract space of the bourgeois public sphere has been associated with specific places like the salon, coffeehouse, or tavern. But when in everyday life did the discussions, debates, and exchanges of the bourgeois public sphere occur? In general, nocturnalization facilitated the evening gatherings in private homes, public houses, or clubs that Habermas thought fundamental to the formation of a public sphere composed of “private people engaged in productive work.”67 Among these meeting spaces, recent scholarship has made the coffeehouse emblematic of the public sphere.68 This intense emphasis on the coffeehouse has been balanced by studies of the public role of taverns and other traditional public houses,69 but the focus on public space seems to have pre-empted any thorough examination of the changing uses of daily time. Coffeehouses emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century as distinctly nocturnal spaces in urban daily life.

  Commentators frequently emphasized the night in their accounts of the coffeehouse or café. As a Viennese jurist noted with concern in 1718: “The authorities should not allow the court-licensed coffee-, lemonade-, and such shops to stay open past 10 p.m. But as … such shops do stay open, many suspicious conventicles are held in them, with highly disturbing discourses and every sort of dangerous conversation, late into the night, frequented by all sorts of suspect Nations.”70 One of the first coffeehouses associated with private citizens “grown states-men” was the Turk’s Head at New Palace Yard in Westminster.71 It was here that James Harrington’s Rota Club met nightly in 1659–60 to discuss the future of the Commonwealth in England. Participants included William Petty and John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys and Sir William Poulteney. These discussions took place only in the evening: as Markman Ellis has noted, “meeting in the evening, it was reckoned, allowed those in employm
ent or charged with affairs of state to attend.”72 This was exactly the case with Pepys, for example, who came to the Rota Club after work on the evenings of January 10 and 17, 1660.73 Coffeehouses were open all day, of course, but their late hours attracted special attention. One of the first English publications on the new institution, the 1661 pamphlet on the Character of Coffee and Coffee-Houses, claimed that “the day sufficeth not some Persons to drink 3 or 4 dishes of Coffee in. They borrow of the night, though they are sure, that this drink taken so late, will not let them close their Eyes all night.” Coffeehouse patrons were marked by a sort of late-night hyper-sociability (“these men are either afraid to be alone with themselves, or they to excess love Company, so that they never set apart any time to converse with themselves”) which threatened Christian introspection at night.74

  In Paris public order at night was the main concern. By the 1690s many of the city’s cafés stayed open all night, marked by a lighted lantern at the door.75 These establishments, licensed through the guild of limonadiers, were singled out in an ordinance of February 16, 1695 as “places of assembly and refuge for thieves, rogues, and malicious and dissolute people; this happens all the more easily because they are designated and distinguished from other houses by their private lanterns, out on the street, that are lit every evening and serve as signals.”76 Lieutenant-general of police La Reynie ordered that henceforth all limonadiers shops must close at 5 p.m. from November 1 to March 31 and at 9 p.m. from April 1 to October 31. After these hours it was “forbidden to admit any person of one or the other sex, whatever age or profession they might be.” In the case of the cafés of Paris, the colonization of the night meant the elimination of private lighting at night: the 1695 ordinance required all café proprietors “who have placed private lanterns on the street in front of their homes and shops to remove them within twenty-four hours.”77 The sharp restriction of the cafés’ evening hours was quickly relaxed: less than a month later the closing hours were extended to 6 p.m. (December and January), 7 p.m. (November and February–March), and 10 p.m. from April to November. In October 1695 they were extended again to 7 p.m. in the winter and 10 p.m. in the summer.78