Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)
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By the end of the seventeenth century, coffeehouses were an established part of urban life for the well-born. The finer establishments resembled the private parlors of aristocrats’ homes, transplanting an aristocratic space into bourgeois life.79 It was in coffeehouses that many burghers first encountered billiards, for example, as well as chocolate, tea, and fine porcelain. But coffeehouses taught the aristocratic consumption of time as well, leading respectable men into late hours. A letter of Mary Jepp Clarke (1656?–1705), wife of the Whig MP Edward Clarke and lifelong friend and correspondent of John Locke, describes evening leisure for “young gentlemen” in London. Writing to her sister-in-law Ursula Clarke Venner in March 1691, Mary agreed that her young male cousin Venner “should lodge as near us as he can” because the young man is “a perfect stranger here and to the tricks of the town which many times young gentlemen fall into at first.” The risk, Clarke notes, lies in the typical use of the night by young men in London:
for want of a friend to go to when the evening draws on, [they] … so get to a coffee [“coughfy”!] house or tavern or worse to spend their time, but to prevent that necessity in my cousin while I am here at least, I will get a lodging for him in the same house where we are.80
Clarke considered socializing in the evening a “necessity” for young gentlemen but sought a more domestic, feminine setting for her cousin’s evenings in London. Writing for young gentlemen visiting Paris in 1718, Joachim Christoph Nemeitz noted that “I approve that a young traveler goes from time to time to coffeehouses, in the late afternoon or around evening time, to listen to the conversation of the news-bearers.”81 In his Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Private Persons (Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen, 1728), Julius Bernhard von Rohr advised his readers that “among the ways of passing the time that one finds in large cities, especially in the winter and in the long evenings, it might happen that a young person visits the coffeehouses.”82 The key, Rohr cautioned, was in the choice of coffeehouse, as not all were respectable.
In texts and images coffeehouses are always represented at night, suggesting that evening gatherings were the most salient part of this new institution. One of the best-known images from London, probably from the 1690s, shows numerous candles on the tables and a man illuminating a picture or notice on the wall (Figure 6.2). The cafés of Paris, with their distinctive décor and clientele, are recorded by the frontispiece of the Chevalier de Mailly’s Les entretiens des cafés de Paris et les diferens qui y surviennent of 1702, which shows well-dressed men and women enjoying conversation and games by candlelight while served by a boy in Armenian garb (Figure 6.3).83 An engraving by Casper Luyken (1699) published widely in the early eighteenth century shows a candlelit scene with a maid bringing a dish of coffee (Figure 6.4).84 These two images and the Dutch illustration of ’t Koffyhuis (Figure 6.5) are each centered on the candles that illuminate the dark space of the coffeehouse. The earliest representations of the coffeehouse on stage were also nocturnal. In London a play called Knavery in all trades, or, The coffeehouse a comedy, performed and printed in 1664, presented a scene of “The Coffeehouse discovered; three or four Tables set forth, on which are placed small Wax-Lights, Pipes, and Diurnals.”85 In his play Le Caffé (1694), Jean-Baptiste Rousseau sets much of the action at night in the Paris café of Madame Jérosme, who at midnight asks her male customers to leave because “it is the hour when women replace men in the cafés.” As we will see below, this claim that women arrive at midnight includes some dramatic license, but the association of café life with the night is clear. When Madame Jérosme is asked “Do you agree with this nocturnal recreation?” She replies “Oh, certainly – if one had no other income than the expenditures made here by day, without the fortuitous income of the night, it would be foolish to aim very high.”86 The frontispiece of the play ’t Koffyhuis, published in Amsterdam in 1712, presents a similar scene illuminated by candlesticks and a chandelier.87
Figure 6.2 A London coffeehouse with a woman behind the counter, left; mid or late 1690s (the inscription “A.S. 1668” is false). © Trustees of the British Museum, 1931,0613.2.
Figure 6.3 Paris café scene with well-dressed women patrons; frontispiece of Chevalier de Mailly, Les entretiens des cafés de Paris (Trevoux, 1702). Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Figure 6.4 Dutch / German coffeehouse scene with a maid serving a dish of coffee. Engraving by Casper Luyken, 1699. Amsterdams Historisch Museum.
Figure 6.5 Dutch coffeehouse scene from the frontispiece of Willem Van Der Hoeven, ’t Koffyhuis: kluchtspel (Amsterdam, 1712). Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Across Europe, authorities were concerned about late hours and political conversations at coffeehouses. The attempt by Charles II to close “the Multitude of Coffee-houses” in England in 1675 is well known. His proclamation described them as “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons” which “have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many Tradesmen and others, do therein misspend much of their time,” although there is no mention of the night or late hours in the proclamation or any of the official discussions leading up to their suppression.88 As mentioned above, La Reynie imposed closing hours on the cafés of Paris in 1695; a decade earlier, a minister of Louis XIV wrote to La Reynie, explaining “The king has been informed that, in several places where coffee is served, there are assemblies of all sorts of people, and especially foreigners. Upon which His Majesty ordered me to ask whether you do not think it would be appropriate to prevent them from assembling in the future.”89 No action was taken – apparently it was not considered opportune to close these cafés in Paris.
Vienna authorities imposed a 10 p.m. closing time on coffeehouses in summer and winter in 1703; in 1706 several coffeehouses were cited for violations, and in 1707 the closing time in winter was moved to 9 p.m.90 In his guide to the imperial court and Vienna the French Benedictine Casimir Freschot also remarked on the city’s night life and on the discussion of “the conduct of generals, ministers, and even the Emperor himself” in the cafés of Vienna.91 In Leipzig the city council was concerned to regulate coffeehouses from their first establishment in 1694. A flurry of regulation began in 1697, when the council noted that “especially in the new and unauthorized tea- and coffee-rooms … guests are kept after the hour set in the Electoral Saxon ordinance.” Gambling, luxury, and “the company of suspicious women” are mentioned. Later that year and in 1701 the council issued further ordinances regulating young people on the streets at night.92 The council’s regulation of coffeehouses escalated in 1704, when it threatened to reduce number of coffeehouses in the city or forbid them entirely.93
The fate of the coffeehouses of Frankfurt am Main in 1703–05 reveals just how much anxiety their late hours and political associations could cause. In 1702 the Frankfurt Rechenmeister “ordered the owners of the coffee houses … that they … should not keep their guests longer than 9 o’clock in the evening in the winter, and in the summer only until 10 o’clock” – as we have seen, a typical regulation of the hours of coffeehouses and other public houses. There were in fact only three coffeehouses in Frankfurt at this time, but they greatly concerned the city council. The following year the council’s regulation of the coffeehouses went much further. On November 20, 1703 the Frankfurt city council, citing “disturbing and dangerous times,” ordered that “we shall three months from today entirely abolish the coffeehouses.” In the meantime, the coffeehouse proprietors were threatened with “immediate prohibition” of their trade if they failed to close their establishments promptly at the curfew bell and further ordered “not to re-open for anyone, whomever it might be” after closing time. In the three months they would be allowed to remain open, the proprietors of the coffeehouses were warned to “set aside no special rooms for any guests other than the ordinary main room, eliminate all gaming, and serve nothing other than coffee, tea, and chocolate.”94
Three months later, on February 21, 1704, the council
reported that:
the deadline for closing the coffeehouses has passed … so today the coffeehouse keepers shall be sent to the office of the Rechneiamt and informed that they must immediately take in their coffee signs and serve no guests coffee or other drinks, on pain of severe punishment. And the honorable Rechneiamt shall be reminded to take care that none of the taverns serve any coffee or other warm drinks.95
The office that enforced the abolition, the Rechneiamt, reported on the same day that “the coffee-men have been informed by a servant of this office that the coffeehouses shall now be abolished and cease; nor shall they serve tea or chocolate any more.” The coffeehouse owners were ordered “today to take down the coffee signs from their premises and be coffee-men no longer.”96 The coffeehouses remained closed for over a year. On March 24, 1705 two former coffeehouse owners were allowed to reopen under several conditions, including new closing hours of 9 p.m., summer and winter.
The city council’s decision to close Frankfurt’s coffeehouses in 1703 was political. Among dozens of taverns, inns, and other public houses, the city’s three coffeehouses stood out as gathering places for wealthy merchants, military officers, and diplomats involved with the War of the Spanish Succession. The city’s troops had just shared in the defeat of imperial forces at the Battle of Speyerbach on November 15 when the plan to close the coffeehouses was announced. Long-standing tensions between the patrician oligarchy ruling Frankfurt and the merchants and craftsmen who formed its economic base threatened to boil over, and the council saw the coffeehouses as a threat to their rule.97 Despite scholars’ concerns about an overemphasis on coffeehouses in the history of early modern public life, in the Frankfurt case the coffeehouses were singled out for closure because of the political connections of their customers.98 In 1705 thirty-six established merchants petitioned the Frankfurt council for approval of a private club they had established. It met only in the evenings and served as a replacement for the prohibited coffeehouses, underscoring the importance of nocturnal sociability in bourgeois and coffeehouse culture.99 In larger cities across Northern Europe these private clubs, described by Joseph Addison matter-of-factly as “nocturnal assemblies,” flourished in the eighteenth century.100
The evidence here shows that the hours after sunset were fundamental to the sites and practices of the public sphere at the end of the seventeenth century. In a valuable intervention in the discussion of the formation of a public sphere in early modern Europe, Brian Cowan contrasted a public focused on “the magisterial realm of state power and high politics” with “the world of commercialized leisure that developed independently of the state.”101 Together, ministers of state and consumers of leisure colonized the night and created the time and space in which the bourgeois public sphere formed.102 The process was anything but linear, of course: young people resisted the discipline that was the cutting edge of the colonization of the night, and political authorities struggled to control the “highly disturbing discourses and every sort of dangerous conversation, late into the night” that seemed an unavoidable corollary of nocturnalization.
This back-and-forth process of nocturnalization is the analogue in daily life to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere itself. The ambiguous relationship between the urban night and the state seen here mirrors a key aspect of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere:
Bourgeois publicness may be grasped first as the sphere of private people come together as a public; these [people] quickly claimed the public sphere regulated by the authorities against the public authorities themselves.103
Private persons used the night which the authorities had helped secure as a time to test the limits of these same authorities, and city authorities found themselves policing and restricting the very nocturnal sociability they facilitated through their colonization of the night. Seeing the bourgeois public sphere as an aspect of nocturnalization (both in its sites and practices, as discussed here, and in its intellectual predilections, as will be discussed in chapter 8) further historicizes Habermas’s arguments. At present, the most trenchant historical analysis of the rise of a public sphere has come from scholars of gender in early modern culture.104 How does using the night as a category of analysis shape our understanding of gender and the public sphere in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries?
6.3.2 Gender, the night, and the public sphere
Looking back, Friedrich Justin Bertuch sought to explain the nocturnalization of early modern daily life in his 1786 essay on “the uses and divisions of the day and the night in various ages, and among various peoples.” After noting that “the pleasures of the evening and night … are the ruling fashion in France and England, and in every large city, where luxury and the need for entertainment are always on the rise,”105 he began his analysis with the observation that “the day invites movement and the night rest.” The entertainments of the daylight hours, such as tourneys, the hunt, horse-racing, and the like, he then contrasts with the pleasures of the night, such as the theater, cards, and conversation. The predominance of the nocturnal pursuits reflects, in Bertuch’s understanding, the feminization of European culture: “In the past, when most nations of Europe were somewhat rawer, but also stronger and more manly, they more loved strenuous bodily exercises; now as they become more polite and refined, the calmer and more thoughtful pastimes replace the physical ones.”106
Bertuch’s connection of night life and feminization was first voiced in England and France in the second half of the seventeenth century. An early English broadside on the coffeehouse, the News from the Coffe-House of 1674, claimed that the culture of the coffeehouses confused gender roles:
Here Men do talk of every Thing,
With large and Liberal lungs,
Like women at a Gossiping,
With a double tyre of Tongues.107
Fears of feminization shaped elite culture in France and England at the end of the seventeenth century: concerns about the emasculating effects of absolute monarchy in France ran parallel to worries about politeness, commerce, and luxury in England.108 But these concerns about feminization should not obscure a broader question: how did nocturnalization affect women’s place in public and daily life? To go beyond generalizations and assess how early modern women used and experienced the urban night requires precise attention to a range of sites, from the court and the theater to the coffeehouse, salon, and street.
At court, we saw women and men together extending the day into the evening and night. Neither the favorable nor the critical descriptions of night life at court examined in chapter 4 of this book make any distinction between women and men – both are the new denizens of the night, for better or for worse (recall Faramond’s “Clorinde and Cleomenes”). The aristocratic use of daily time could be seen “in the lives of the courtiers of both sexes, who make night into day and day into night.”109 No sources on the night at court suggest that there is any time for men to be active when women should not be, or vice versa.
How did the gender order of daily time at court look in the light of the street lamps? In urban spaces that served as extensions of the court, for example in Vienna or Paris, aristocratic women used the night freely to socialize and maintain social networks. Not long after street lighting was introduced in Paris, Madame de Sévigné described an evening spent chatting with her friends until midnight “chez Mme De Coulanges” – the date was December 4, 1673. Madame de Sévigné decided to escort one of their number home, although it meant a trip across Paris: “We found it pleasant to be able to go, after midnight, to the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain.” The new street lighting made this possible: “We returned merrily, thanks to the lanterns and safe from thieves.”110 One detects no sense of danger to her safety or reputation in this account. This relationship to the night was summarized by the writer Gregorio Leti in a letter to the marquise de Courcelles of 1679. Leti observed that the domestic occupations of women “constitute a state of servitude, as we have observed in all lands of the earth
, in times ancient and modern.” But recently the aristocratic relationship to the night had changed all this: “However, one can say that French ladies have put this state of things into good order, since three parts of the night out of four, and two out of the four parts of the day are spent in strolls, visits, late evenings, balls, and games.”111 Leti’s slightly critical tone underscores the novelty of this night life.
A contemporary of Madame de Sévigné, the Austrian countess Johanna Theresia Harrach (1639–1716), made and received countless evening social visits in Vienna and spent time at the imperial court and its theater on long winter nights from about 1665 on. As the wife of the imperial ambassador to Spain, she maintained a wide social network and presence at court, especially during her husband’s absences in Spain. Her detailed daily letters show that she usually returned home between nine and ten at night: when the court was in Vienna from November through April, this schedule meant regularly traveling through the city by carriage long after dark.112 In similar terms, in a letter written from London on February 13, 1710 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu considered herself to be “the only young woman in town … in my own house at ten o’clock to-night.” It was “the night of Count Turrucca’s ball,” a “Splendid … entertainment” hosted by the Portuguese ambassador. Lady Mary’s narrow conception of “the town” gives us a clear indication of which women were out after 10 p.m. with their reputations intact.113 John Vanbrugh’s unfinished play A Journey to London (written in the early 1720s) satirized the night life of aristocratic women in a lively exchange between “Lord Loverule” and his wife, Lady Arabella: