Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  LORD LOVERULE: But, madam, can you think it a reasonable thing to be abroad till two o’clock in the morning, when you know I go to bed at eleven?

  LADY ARABELLA: And can you think it a wise thing (to talk your own way now) to go to bed at eleven, when you know I am likely to disturb you by coming there at three?

  LORD LOVERULE: Well, the manner of women’s living of late is insupportable, and some way or other –

  LADY ARABELLA: It’s to be mended, I suppose. – Pray, my lord, one word of fair argument. You complain of my late hours; I of your early ones; so far we are even, you’ll allow. But which gives us the best figure in the eye of the polite world? My two o’clock speaks life, activity, spirit, and vigour; your eleven has a dull, drowsy, stupid, good-for-nothing sound with it. It savours much of a mechanic, who must get to bed betimes that he may rise early to open his shop, faugh!

  LORD LOVERULE: I thought to go to bed early and rise so, was ever esteemed a right practice for all people.

  LADY ARABELLA: Beasts do it.

  After comparing her husband to a low “mechanic,” Lady Arabella responds to her husband’s concerns about her late-night companions: “I’ll have you to know I keep company with the politest people in the town, and the assemblies I frequent are full of such.”114

  The daily rhythms of a well-born couple in London emerge from the diary of James Brydges (1674–1744; made first duke of Chandos, 1719). Brydges and his wife Mary maintained a busy social life in London, recorded in Brydges’s diary for the years 1697 to 1702. Coffeehouses were fundamental to James Brydges’s daily life; he records visiting them during the day and at night, traveling across London with his wife by coach. As Brian Cowan has noted, Mary Brydges never accompanied her husband into any of the coffeehouses. Her evenings were spent in domestic visits, which were no less important for the socially aspiring couple. They make similar use of the evening and night for socializing and leisure, but the public houses visited by the husband contrast with the domestic socializing of the wife.115

  The purported freedom of “French ladies” over “three parts of the night out of four” carried over into the first cafés of Paris as well. As historians of coffee have established, the cafés of Paris presented a distinctly aristocratic décor which contrasted with the more utilitarian furnishings of English coffeehouses. The first truly successful café in Paris, the Procope, opened in a former Turkish bath in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain in 1686. The proprietor kept the mirrors, chandeliers, and marble table-tops of the bathhouse, and these “well-furnished rooms” quickly attracted a well-to-do clientele.116 As noted above, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s play Le Caffé (1694) revolves around the presence of women as customers at night in the café of Madame Jérosme.117 An ephemeral style journal, Le porte-feuille galant, explained in 1700 that “cafes are places frequented by honest people of both sexes.” The social variety mentioned so often in accounts of coffeehouses and cafés appears here as well. “You can see all sorts of characters,” including

  gallant men, coquettish women, polite abbots and others who are not, soldiers, news-mongers, officers, provincials, foreigners, lawyers, drinkers and professional gamblers, parasites, adventurers, knights of industry, wealthy young men, amorous old women, Gascons, and sham heroes, demi-beaux esprits, and many other figures whose varied portraits could be multiplied infinitely.118

  The variety reflects a distinct Parisian gender order, as women are clearly part of the clientele. The frontispiece of the Chevalier de Mailly’s Les entretiens des cafés de Paris et les diferens qui y surviennent of 1702 (see Figure 6.3.) emphasizes (like Rousseau’s play of a few years earlier) women in cafés at night. The interlocutors in the Entretiens visit the cafes between the evening and the late night and mention the dangers of the streets at night, suggesting the cafés were oases of relative safety. The last conversation in Mailly’s collection is narrated by a woman, suggesting their active place in elite café culture. The author explains that “It may be said that it is improper to introduce a woman in a café; however, I have seen there … women who were quite pretty and spiritual.”119 In France, where the social life of the nobility was most integrated by gender, nocturnalization brought well-born women access to urban sites such as balls, theater and opera, and cafés (which were themselves more closely aligned with aristocratic culture than in Britain).120 In Figure 6.6 we see the new association of a “woman of quality” with the evening and night.

  Figure 6.6 Pierre-Jean Mariette, “Le Soir: Dame de Qualité jouant aux Cartes” (Paris: chez J. Mariette, rue St Jacques aux Colonnes d’Hercules, c. 1690). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  But Paris and London, as well as Vienna and Leipzig, were also shaped by citizens and their values. The bourgeois gender order of the night contrasted sharply with the freedoms of elite women to use the night as they wished. Non-noble women active at night in the city, for work or leisure, were suspect – and increasingly so – in the seventeenth century. For England, the development has been examined by Paul Griffiths in his work on the prosecution of nightwalking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.121 In seventeenth-century London arrests and prosecutions for nightwalking began to focus almost exclusively on women: a crime overwhelmingly associated with men in the late Middle Ages had become feminized and sexualized. Griffiths’s work underscores the intricate relationships between estate and gender that shaped access to the urban night. As the trials recorded in the Sessions Papers of the Old Bailey show, the reputation of being “a common nightwalker” had lost none of its force in the second half of the seventeenth century: in 1687, for example, Dorothy Hall was charged with theft: her claims of innocence notwithstanding, “being known to be a common Night-walker, she was found Guilty.”122 The career of one Jane King is instructive. She was described as “a notorious Night-walker” when charged with the robbery of Hilkiah Osmonton in May 1688. Acquitted on that charge, she was tried again at the same session along with Mary Batters for the robbery of Richard Beale, who testified that “as he was going over Holborn Bridge about Eleven a Clock at Night, as he was making Water against the Wall, the Prisoners with some other Women Assaulted him, and took away the above said Moneys.” Beale cried out for help and the watch appeared and arrested some of the women, including King and Batters. The sessions recorder explained that “The Prisoners made a very slight Defence for themselves; and being known in Court to be old and Notorious Night-walkers and Debauched Livers, they were found Guilty.” King was tried again in December 1688 for picking the pocket of “one Mr. Church.” According to the sessions account:

  the Proof against the Prisoner was, That being one that practiced the Trade of Night walking, she invited him to a Tavern in St. Martins le Grand, in order to partake of a Bottle of Wine, But they had scarcely begun to grow familiar, before she had dived into his Pocket, and getting his Purse of Gold, she gave him the slip.

  She was caught soon afterwards. At trial she claimed never to have seen Mr. Church and alleged that “some Common Women that had been abroad that Night described him to her, saying, That a whole Cluster of them had been with him in an Alley” and had robbed him. Church was “positive she was the very Woman, the Jury found her guilty of the Felony.”123

  The trends uncovered by Griffiths were fully developed by the first half of the eighteenth century, as seen for example in the comments of Bernard Mandeville on crime and its prevention. Mandeville and his contemporaries assumed that the victims of nocturnal crime were men; Mandeville was happy to blame them for their carelessness, describing them as “unthinking” because they “never mind what companies they thrust themselves into.” Such men included “such as will be drunk, [or] go home late in the dark unattended.” In Mandeville’s accounts, women were either perpetrators of, or accomplices to, nocturnal crime. Foolish victims “scruple not to talk and converse with lewd women, as they meet them; or that are careless of themselves as well as of the securing and fastening of their houses.”124 Safest from urban crime, Mande
ville explained, was a man “temperate in his liquor; [who] avoids, as much as is possible, unseasonable hours; never gives ear to night-walkers; a man that abroad is always watchful over himself, and every thing about him.”125 Mandeville makes no reference to women as victims of nocturnal crime in this pamphlet.

  Operating with a subtle set of indicators of age, marital status, dress, and familiarity, the bourgeois order of the night cast renewed suspicion on women outside the home at night. This suspicion had an important function: given the emphasis on respectable nocturnal sociability in coffeehouses, one might assume that women could participate in coffeehouse culture, thereby benefiting from better access to respectable night life that nocturnalization provided. Indeed, several scholars have argued that women did share in English coffeehouse life.126 But the work of scholars such as Brian Cowan and Markman Ellis indicates otherwise – women were excluded from coffeehouse sociability in London and, as we will see below, in German-speaking Europe as well.127 Suspicion helped create new times and spaces for men to gather from which women of their own class were excluded. The aristocratic women of Paris were a significant exception that warrants further research.

  The bourgeois and moralizing approach to nocturnalization should not, however, obscure the women who were part of coffeehouse culture: not as customers and interlocutors, but as coffeehouse-keepers, servants, prostitutes, and pamphlet-hawkers. In London, women coffeehouse keepers were relatively common but subject to satire and accusations of prostitution.128 Gallant pamphlet-writers were happy to maintain the association of prostitution with coffeehouses, claiming for example that “There being scarce a Coffee-Hut but affords a Tawdry Woman, a wanton Daughter, or a Buxom Maid, to accommodate Customers.”129 Visitors to London tended to confirm this association.130

  Female pamphlet-hawkers supported the circulation of news and rumor vital to coffeehouse culture, and they sold their wares day and night on the streets and in coffeehouses: in 1684 Judith Jones was described as “a hawker that serves the Amsterdam coffee-house.”131 When John Roberts walked along Bow Lane at about 10 p.m. on October 2, 1722, he encountered two women crying pamphlets. The first announced “a full and true Account of a horrid barbarous and bloody Plot, against the King and Government”; the second, Sarah Turbat, was selling a different pamphlet and responded “Damn ye there’s no Plot, who should be the Author of it, George? Damn him, who made him King? The Devil: For he’s his Uncle.” Another witness confirmed this outburst and added that Turbat “used several other vile and scandalous Expressions against His Majesty not fit to be repeated.”132 These “mercury-women” or pamphlet- hawkers, among the poorest of London’s poor, supported the public sphere – and were, as Paula McDowell has shown, “anything but the passive purveyors of others’ ideas,” as Sarah Turbat’s words above show. Still, as Cowan has noted, one cannot characterize these women as participants in the respectable public sphere of their city.

  Attitudes toward women and coffeehouses in the Empire follow the associations and exclusions seen in Britain and can serve as an index of the place of women in urban nocturnalization. The unknown author of the Caffée- und Thée-Logia (Hamburg, 1691) praised the coffeehouses of Germany and claimed that “in England, Holland, and Italy I have seen … women dressed in men’s clothing in the coffeehouses; in some the owner keeps a gallant lady for the amorous pleasures of his guests.”133 A critic wrote in 1701 that the coffeehouses led young men astray and that “in the winter during the long nights, many poor whores wait in these houses in such quantity, as if they displayed themselves in a formal procession.”134 In his Useful, Fashionable, and Novel Ladies’ Lexicon of 1715, Gottlieb Siegmund Corvinus discussed coffee in the domestic sphere in a dozen entries but provided no entry for “coffeehouse.” The reason becomes clear under the entry for “Caffe-Menscher,” defined as “those suspicious and disorderly painted women who wait upon the men present in coffeehouses and render them all services willingly.”135 Corvinus informed his female audience in no uncertain terms that all women in coffeehouses were morally suspect. The Leipzig city council in 1704 ordered that “all visits to and work in coffeehouses by female persons, whether preparing beverages, waiting tables, or under any other pretext … are forbidden.” Women were simply banned from coffeehouses, as customers and as servants.136 Enforcement of this was another matter, but the Leipzig ordinance reflects an extreme expression of Cowan’s conclusion that it is “difficult to conceive of a role for women in the ideal coffeehouse society that did not fit into the existing stereotypes of either the virtuous servant or the vicious prostitute.”137

  How does attention to daily time deepen our understanding of the gendering of the public sphere in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? The evidence examined here reveals a changing gender order at night in Europe’s cities, but nocturnalization did not affect all women in the same way. On the one hand, unattached women out on the streets at night were seen at the looser end of the scale of sexual morality by authorities and by men seeking sex. Women in coffeehouses and taverns might face the same assumptions, depending on their age, dress, and company: evidence of respectable women entering coffeehouses alone and at night is very rare.138 On the other hand, elite women passed freely through the urban night on their way to or from domestic sociability, including the rarified world of the salons. Estate or social rank were fundamental to access to nocturnal spaces: when Madame de Sévigné and her friends rode across Paris from the home of Madame Coulanges to the home of Madame LaFayette after midnight in December 1673, their transport, lighting, servants, and destination made it clear that they were honorable women of the highest rank. Elite women participated in the nocturnalization radiating out from the court and the haute bourgeoisie, but for middling women, respectable access to the “public night” did not expand with nocturnalization.

  Writing in 1988, Joan Landes was the first to consider the history of the modern public sphere in terms of gender. She concluded that “the bourgeois public is essentially, not just contingently, masculinist.” In his Introduction to the 1990 edition of Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit [The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere], Habermas agreed. He asked if women were excluded from bourgeois publicness “in the same way as workers, peasants, and the ‘crowd,’ i.e., the ‘dependent’ men.”139 Citing Carol Pateman and Landes, Habermas concluded that the exclusion of women from the political public sphere “has also been constitutive” because their relegation to the “private core of the nuclear family’s interior space” (“privaten Kernbereich des kleinfamilialen Binnenraumes”) is fundamental to the private subjectivity that constitutes the public sphere.140 Their exclusion differs from that of men excluded by class because their exclusion creates a specific form of family and private sphere which is the essential, suppressed counterpart of the public sphere.

  How, historically speaking, did this exclusion occur? This is the question Landes sets out to answer in Women and the Public Sphere. The line of inquiry is all the more intriguing because in the French case, which is Landes’s focus, aristocratic women played crucial (though sometimes exaggerated) roles in the culture and politics of the Old Regime, for example in the conversational gatherings known then as “le monde,” i.e., the salon. Landes sees the salon as the most traditional of the new practices and institutions that arose between civil society and the state, such as the coffeehouse, the literary club, and the periodical press; it was certainly the most domestic of these. Significantly, contemporaries emphasized the “pronounced feminine character” of salon culture in contrast with the other public sites, suggesting to Landes “an implicit gender dynamic within the institutional and cultural geography of the oppositional bourgeois public sphere.”141 Landes then pursues this gender dynamic on the level of the symbolic politics of the emerging bourgeois public sphere – a rich line of inquiry, to be sure, but not the only way to trace the exclusion of women from the public sphere in the last century of the Old Regime. Given the importance of the family and p
rivate life in the formation of the bourgeois public, daily life would be a logical approach. By using daily life as a category of analysis, we can see how nocturnalization served to exclude women from the times and places fundamental to the formation of the bourgeois public – especially those outside the home.

  The rise of the coffeehouse can serve as an index of bourgeois publicness and nocturnalization. The varying place of women in coffeehouse or café culture, ranging from aristocratic inclusion in Paris to legal and de facto exclusion in Leipzig, reveals the importance of the night in the formation of a bourgeois public sphere that was regularly nocturnal.

  The night was the setting for many of the institutions and practices that formed bourgeois publicness. Indeed, the night appears as a visible analogue to bourgeois or polite publicness on the level of daily life. The new urban nights of respectable sociability after dark were, to quote historians of the public sphere, “the contingent products of a process of exclusion and containment in which members of alternate ‘impolite’ publics were shut out from the reconstructed ‘public sphere as a polite zone’.”142 The colonization of the night described here redefined the long-standing youth cultures of the night as “impolite” and often criminal, revealing, to paraphrase Paula McDowell, “a whole host of overlapping relationships to the night, some of which had to be shut down to create the established order” of the polite urban night.143 All means, from the most violent to the most subtle, were used to carve out a night that would serve “as a polite zone” for some men while eliminating the traditional relationship with the night exemplified by apprentices, servants, and students. This colonization of the urban night reshaped youth, gender, and the public sphere in the last century of the Old Regime.144 The successes and limitations of this colonization of the urban night leads us consider similar attempts to colonize the rural night (chapter 7), and the cultural and intellectual implications of a new urban night for the early Enlightenment (chapter 8).