Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  In France this devotion, though “established and developed by the church, gained a popular character.”123 But the very popularity of the practice with clergy and lay people led to a nocturnal collision between the devotional and the disciplinary imperatives of Catholic reform. Clergy often scheduled the Forty Hours’ Devotion to counter the start of Carnival or on Mardi Gras, seeking to draw revelers away from the traditional masquerades and nocturnal revelry and into the churches for continual prayer before the consecrated host. But by the mid seventeenth century some churches chose to interrupt the devotion at night, arguing that it was better “to avoid unpleasant encounters … in the evening on the streets and to close the church and avoid the disorder that might be committed there later.”124 These concerns grew, and in 1686 the Capuchin order of France received official permission from Rome to interrupt the Forty Hours’ Devotion at night. Instead, the forty hours of prayer and preaching would occur only during daylight hours. But interrupting the “around-the-clock” veneration of the Eucharist robbed the practice of its unique theme and intensity, and surrendered the night back to the spinning bees, Carnival revelry, and tavern visits described above.125 By the end of the seventeenth century the Forty Hours’ Devotion was in decline.

  Despite the popularity of the Forty Hours’ Devotion and the willingness of lay people to gather in churches for prayer and veneration of the Eucharist at night, the French clergy of the age of Louis XIV were convinced that no good could come from a gathering of common people at night, no matter how pious the context. By the end of the seventeenth century, numerous episcopal ordinances and statutes prohibited all lay prayer in churches at night, as the synodal statutes of the diocese of Amiens of 1697 indicate: “we urge all parish priests in the countryside to make public in their churches an evening prayer (at least on holidays and Sundays) at the sound of the bell, at the time they deem most convenient, and always before dark.”126 The interruption of the Forty Hours’ Devotion at night and the statutes prohibiting public prayer in churches after dark reflect the deep suspicion of French clergy of the late seventeenth century toward popular nocturnal gatherings of any kind.

  In the Catholic territories of the Holy Roman Empire the same pattern emerges. Forays into the night by the clergy and pious laypeople, reflecting the baroque piety of Catholic reform, were followed by a retreat from popular nocturnal piety at the end of the seventeenth century. In the Empire nocturnal penitential processions were the most salient aspect of this attempt to sanctify the rural night. The Jesuits introduced these processions in cities such as Augsburg and Würzburg, but confraternities and lay brotherhoods soon followed suit in small towns and villages in Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Austria, and Tirol.127

  The drama of these nocturnal processions, with costumed participants and illuminated images of the Passion, put baroque devotion in motion. The Good Friday procession of the confraternity of the Holy Rosary in the town of St. Johann in Tirol is especially well documented. Between 1645 and 1756 the confraternity held seventy-nine processions. All seventeen processions held between 1667 and 1686 took place “in the evening,” but the practice was then moved permanently to the daytime.128 In the Bavarian city of Traunstein, the processions of the Corpus Christi confraternity were viewed with wonder by local peasants, but they showed “poor reverence and respect” for the evening spectacle (1667). In 1676, in hopes of a “more attractive” procession, the confraternity considered moving its start from 7 p.m. to “the daytime, soon after matins … because people could see everything better, and it would be easier to maintain order than at night, and would also save on lights, and avoid the danger of fire.”129 The brotherhood decided to keep the spectacle at night, but in 1680 tried processing in the afternoon before returning again to nocturnal processions. In Mindelheim the Good Friday procession of the Corpus Christi brotherhood, documented as nocturnal in 1686, was moved to the early afternoon sometime in the early eighteenth century.130 The nocturnal processions of confraternities in France, usually held on the night of Holy Thursday, suffered the same relocation.131

  The confident, Tridentine attempt to sanctify popular nocturnal customs and initiate new nocturnal rituals was overshadowed in the course of the seventeenth century by the defensive action described as an “obsessive denial of the night.”132 As a result, the Catholic church, like its Protestant relations, had little relationship with the rural night by the early eighteenth century. A 1671 ordinance of Antoine Godeau, bishop of Vence, sums up the Catholic withdrawal from the rural night:

  Being advised that in our diocese every year many irreverences are committed on the night of Holy Thursday in the churches where the people linger under the pretext that the Blessed Sacrament is exposed, we have ordered as a remedy, first, that … the Blessed Sacrament will no longer be exposed after the Mass of Holy Thursday but … will be deposited in the chalice which will be covered by a white veil and placed upon the altar.

  [Second,] We prohibit any sort of person from sleeping in the church under pain of excommunication, [and] order that it will close at ten o’clock precisely. The penitent brothers who are accustomed to come in procession to the church will have to come before nine o’clock to sing the litany of the Passion as they are accustomed and will then return to their chapels with modesty and without noise.133

  By the end of the seventeenth century the church’s colonization of the night was in full retreat. The very practices curtailed by this bishop – prayer vigils before the Eucharist at night and nocturnal processions by confraternities – had been promoted by pious laymen and missionary clergy during the previous century.

  The colonization of the rural night was less ambitious than that in the city. It was also less successful, even in its limited terms. By and large, attempts to rid the rural night of its courting couples and drunken tavern-goers failed. Attempts to sanctify certain rural nights during Holy Week or at Christmas also had little effect on rural youth and village culture.134 Most of the ordinances, statutes, and decrees aimed at clearing the rural night of its disorder were in place by the early seventeenth century; most of the goals described in these regulations, such as the elimination of women’s spinning bees or “alley-catting” by young men, were unmet at the end of the eighteenth century, with the ordinances and prohibitions repeated and reprinted through the end of the Old Regime.

  The sources of this failure to colonize the rural night are easy to see. The colonization of the urban night was driven by the settlement of urban elites in the night, reflecting powerful forces of conspicuous consumption of goods and time, supported by the disciplinary efforts of the state. In the countryside, settlement was not a priority and village elites often winked at the nocturnal customs of their youth. The disciplinary reach of the state was notoriously limited.135 As a result, country life moved in traditional rhythms, creating a new contrast with the nocturnalized pulse of the better-policed and illuminated streets of the great cities of the eighteenth century.

  7.3 Country folk, city nights: daily time diverges in the eighteenth century

  By 1700 a new literary formula was emerging. Authors embellished the age-old comparison between urban and rural life with a new contrast between the nights of the city and those of the countryside. In 1714 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) penned an “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation.” Addressing “some fond Virgin, whom her mother’s care / Draggs from the town to wholesome country air,” Pope describes the fate of Miss Blount in the country:

  She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks,

  Old-fashion’d halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks:

  She went from Op’ra, park, assembly, play,

  To morning walks, and pray’r three hours a day:

  To part her time ’twixt reading and bohea,

  To muse, and spill her solitary tea,

  Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,

  Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon:

  Divert her eyes with p
ictures in the fire,

  Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire;

  Up to her godly garret after sev’n,

  There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heav’n.136

  The daily rhythms of country life seem especially deadening here, with dinner at noon and bedtime not long after seven.

  Were the urban and rural nights truly drifting apart? Pope’s comments clearly reflect the divergence of city and country time as a literary theme, but also reveal a real shift in patterns of daily time. In the Tatler of December 12, 1710, Richard Steele mentioned “an old friend … being lately come to town” from the countryside. “I went to see him on Tuesday last about eight o’clock in the evening,” continued the author, “with a design to sit with him an hour or two and talk over old stories”:

  but upon inquiring after him, his servant told me he was just gone up to bed. The next morning, as soon as I was up and dressed, and had dispatched a little business, I came again to my friend’s house about eleven o’clock, with a design to renew my visit; but upon asking for him, his servant told me he was just sat down to dinner.

  Clearly, London and the country are out of step in this case. Steele continued:

  In short, I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest.137

  When the Newcastle curate Henry Bourne published his thoughts on Antiquitates vulgares; or, the antiquities of the common people (Newcastle, 1725) he sought to give “an account of several of their opinions and ceremonies.” The common people are in his understanding country folk (and there is nothing new in this assumption), but Bourne’s comments suggest that he sees a different daily rhythm in the countryside. Discussing the belief that the evil spirits of the night are banished by cockcrow, he notes

  that in Country-Places, where the Way of Life requires more early Labour, they always go cheerfully to Work at that time [i.e. cockcrow]; whereas if they are called abroad sooner, they are apt to imagine every Thing they see or hear, to be a wandering Ghost.138

  Rural folk also spend their long winter evenings differently, as Bourne notes in his tenth chapter, “Of the Country Conversation in a Winter’s Evening: Their Opinions of Spirits and Apparitions.” Bourne claims that “Nothing is commoner in Country Places, than for a whole family in a Winter’s Evening, to sit round the Fire, and tell stories of Apparitions and Ghosts.”139 Physician and poet Mark Aikenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) presents a similar scene:

  Hence finally, by night

  The village-matron, round the blazing hearth,

  Suspends the infant-audience with her tales,

  Breathing astonishment! of witching rhymes,

  And evil spirits …

  of shapes that walk

  At dead of night, and clank their chains, and wave

  The torch of hell around the murderer’s bed.140

  The connection these authors make between the absence of nocturnalization and the belief in ghosts and witches plays a key role in the disenchantment of the night discussed in the next chapter. By creating the stereotype of rustic superstition at night, these commentators reflected a new divergence of daily schedules between city and village. In the cities, nocturnalization was promoted by the state on one hand, and by a deepening public consumer culture on the other – a powerful combination of discipline and distinction.141 Both forces were attenuated in the countryside.

  The spread of street lighting and festive illuminations in cities also created a new contrast with the night in the countryside. In a 1745 pamphlet celebrating the birth of a Habsburg prince, two “peasants from the highlands” view the illumination of Vienna (see Figure 7.6). The first is astounded: “wherever I look, wherever I go, lights shine without end / and the houses all around are like the heavens.” The other adds “in our village there’s never been a church fair (‘kermes’) like this!”142

  Figure 7.6 Two peasants marvel at an illumination in Vienna. Curioses Gespräch: zwischen Hänsel und Lippel zweyen oberländischen Bauern bey der den 14.Märzen in … Wien … gehalten Illumination (Vienna, 1745), fo. 2.

  Ekirch has shown that the age-old pattern of segmented sleep was disrupted by artificial light beginning in the late seventeenth century (coincident with the rise of street lighting, better domestic lighting, and coffeehouses). “Divided sleep,” he argued, “would grow less common with the passage of time, first among the propertied classes in the better-lit urban neighborhoods, then slowly among other social strata.”143 References to segmented sleep are absent from the diaries of elite men because their daily life was extended well past sunset by artificial lighting, indoors and out. The nights of townspeople, compressed by artificial light into a single sleep of seven or eight hours, began to diverge from the age-old pattern of segmented sleep found everywhere else.

  By the middle of the century, the well-born might encounter early rising and rural daily time as something “new.” In 1740 Anne Donnellan (c. 1700–62), daughter of a chief baron of the Exchequer, discovered rising with the sun during a visit to Spa. Writing to Elizabeth Robinson Montagu, Donnellan explained:

  I like Spa exceedingly; ’tis a mere country village, with a very romantic country about it. I like the way of living, which is new to me; we are all out by six in the morning in our chaises, and go three miles to the Geronstere waters; we come home at nine, and take a cup of chocolate, dine between twelve and one, go to the assembly at four, where there are all countries, and all languages, half a dozen card tables, and no crowd; from the assembly we take a walk in the Capuchin’s garden; all are in before eight to supper, and to bed at ten.144

  In her reply Elizabeth Robinson imagines herself at Spa and seems quite touched by the “new” country schedule of rising by 6 a.m.:

  I like the manner of living, it is quite new, and the place so romantic! I cannot say I am fond of such early rising, or that I delight in cards, but custom would, in a week’s time, make the first easy, and I suppose for the other it is not worse than Bath.145

  In the summer 6 a.m. would be just after sunrise, which would have scarcely seemed early to the sixteenth-century ancestors of these women.

  Summing up these developments in 1786 the fashion writer Friedrich Justin Bertuch explained that “an entirely new order of things” had supplanted the traditional rhythm of daytime for work and night for rest and sleep.146 As discussed in chapter 5, Bertuch regarded the change as self-evident and presented numerous examples drawn from the courts and cities of Northern Europe, noting that people of quality in England had shifted their mealtimes and sleeping times later by about seven (!) hours over the past two centuries.147 This nocturnalization was inevitable: “the occupations of the day begin ever later, the more society is refined and luxury increases.”148 This refinement was perceived and presented as urban and European: “the king of Yemen, ruler of Arabia Felix, dines early at nine for a midday meal, at five for the evening [meal], and goes to sleep around eleven,” whereas “the pleasures of the evening and night are the ruling fashion in France and England, and indeed in every great city.”149 The shift to later hours does not include the rural population.150

  By the eighteenth century the temporal markers of daily life – the traditional times for labor, meals, and sleep – in the two sites were slipping out of step as townspeople used artificial lighting, indoors and out, to shift their daily schedule into the night. The nightward shift of daily times for dinner (i.e., the main, “midday” meal), supper, and sleep by social class is underscored by the view from Napoleon’s Paris:

  Two hundred years ago the Parisians had their dinner at noon: today the craftsman dines at two o’clock, the great merchant at three, the clerks at four, the parvenu, the businessman, and the exchange agent at five o’clock; the minister, the legislator, the rich bachelor, at six, and the last usually leave the dinner table at the time when our fathers sat down for their last meal of the day
.

  Emphasizing the late hours of the city’s well-to-do, the author continued, “those who do have supper sit down at the table at eleven o’clock, and in the summer they go to bed when the worker rises.”151 In the Tatler essay quoted above, Steele elaborated on the development by creating a contrast with rural life:

  For this reason I desired a friend of mine in the country to let me know, whether the lark rises as early as he did formerly? and whether the cock begins to crow at his usual hour? My friend has answered me, that his poultry are as regular as ever, and that all the birds and beasts of his neighborhood keep the same hours that they have observed in the memory of man.”152

  Steele recognized that waking, dining, and sleeping hours were now dictated by location and class as they had not been a generation earlier. Moral commentators like Steele may have criticized the nocturnalization of urban daily life, but they were too invested in social discipline and social distinction to actually challenge the process. The resulting tensions between urban and rural time persist to this day, as rural resistance to daylight savings time suggests.

  In 1658 the peasant Michl Bruckhay sued the Jewish livestock dealer Hudel Hitzig before the Imperial Aulic Court (Hofgericht) in Rottweil. Both men lived in the village of Kriegshaber, near Augsburg, and as the dispute moved through the imperial legal system, Bruckhay’s son and his son’s friends lashed out against their Jewish neighbor. On the night before Easter 1659 they threw a pig in Hitzig’s well and broke his windows. The local authorities did not condone this nocturnal assault, levying a 45-gulden fine on Michl Bruckhay for his son’s actions.153 Little had changed between the invasion of Barthel Dorfheilige’s inn at Wanfried in 1603 and this incident in 1659, and young men would continue to serve as the “guardians of disorder” in villages through the end of the Old Regime.