89. So for example the evening ball attended by John George IV on Tuesday, January 10, 1693: “Hat Abends Herr Ober-Jägermeister von Erdtmannsdorff in seinem Hause den Ball gegeben, wobey Ihr Churfürstl. Durchl. zu Sachsen unser gnädigster Herr auch erschienen.” Sächsisches Haupstaatsarchiv Dresden, OHMA, O IV, Nr. 69, Hofdiarium, 1693.
90. Two aspects of court life relatively unaffected by nocturnalization were the hunt and the schedule of Christian worship services.
91. Matthaeus Daniel Pöppelmann, Vorstellung und beschreibung des … Zwinger Gartens Gebdäuden oder Der königl. Orangerie zu Dresden (Dresden: Pöppelmann, 1729), cited in Peter Lahnstein, Das Leben im Barock: Zeugnisse und Berichte 1640–1740 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1974), p. 110.
92. Freschot, Relation von dem Kayserlichen Hofe zu Wien, p. 51.
93. Klingensmith, Utility of Splendor, p. 171.
94. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency, by the Duke of Saint-Simon, trans. Bayle St. John (Washington, D.C.: M.W. Dunne, 1901), I: 34, and Mémoires de M. le duc de Saint-Simon, 42 vols., ed. A. de Boislisle and Léon Lecestre (Paris: [Montpensier], 1975–; reprint of the 1879–1930 Hachette edn.): I: 70–71. For a similar description of the appartements from Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine and duchess of Orléans, see her letter to Wilhemine Ernestine of the Palatinate, sent from Versailles, December 6, 1682, as reproduced in Letters from Liselotte, ed. and trans. Maria Kroll (New York: McCall, 1971), p. 40.
95. Maria Fürstenwald, “Liselotte von der Pfalz und der französische Hof,” in Europäische Hofkultur im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, ed. August Buck et al., Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 8–10 (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981), III: 468.
96. See Boucher, “La cour des derniers Valois,” and Émile Magne, La Vie quotidienne au temps de Louis XIII (Paris: Hachette, 1942), pp. 50–90.
97. Renaudot, ed., Quatriesme centurie des questions, p. 413.
98. Klingensmith, Utility of Splendor, pp. 155–59, 171. On appartements at the court of Charles XII (1697–1718) of Sweden, see Fabian Persson, Servants of Fortune: The Swedish Court between 1598 and 1721 (Lund: Wallin & Dalholm, 1999), p. 53.
99. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–67), I: 288, to Lady Rich, December 1, 1716. On cosmetics see Melissa Hyde, “The Make-Up of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at her Toilette” Art Bulletin 82, 3 (2000): 453–75, and the literature cited there. See also Piero Camporesi on “the revenge of the night,” in Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12–19.
100. Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit, p. 179.
101. Night clocks were first designed in Rome, reportedly at the request of Pope Alexander VII (Chigi, 1655–67). On an early eighteenth-century Florentine night clock (case and mosaics by Giovanni Battista Foggini; woodwork by Leonard van der Vinne) in the Getty Museum collection, see Peter Fusco, “Curator’s Report: Proposed Purchase, Night Clock,” May 6, 1997, J. Paul Getty Museum, Permanent Collection, Object File, Acc. No. 97.DB.37, pp. 1–5. See also Alessandra Mazzonis, “Un orologio del XVII secolo al Museo Correale di Sorrento: il notturno di Pietro T. Campani,” Kermes 14, 44 (2001): 17–26, 69, for a survey of European night clocks from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
102. Rohr, Grossen Herren, pp. 18–19.
103. Julius Bernhard von Rohr, Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat Personen, ed. with a commentary by Gotthart Frühsorge (Berlin, 1728; repr. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1990), pp. 467–68.
104. Ibid., p. 468.
105. William Byrd, The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 76.
106. Sinold, Die Wissenschaft zu leben, p. 337.
107. Ibid., pp. 337–38.
108. Loen, Kleine Schriften, §3, pp. 62–66. On Loen, see Christiane Buchel, “Johann Michael von Loen im Wandel der Zeiten: Eine kleine Forschungsgeschichte,” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts 16, 1 (1992): 13–37.
109. Loen, Kleine Schriften, §3, p. 66.
110. Karl Ludwig Freiherr von Pöllnitz, Nouveaux Mémoires du Baron de Pollnitz, contenant l’histoire de sa vie, new edn. (Frankfurt: “Aux Dépens de la Compagnie,” 1738), II: 151–52.
111. Samuel Pordage, “A Panegyrick on his Majesties Entrance Into London,” in Poems upon several occasions by S.P. (London: Printed by W.G. for Henry Marsh, and Peter Dring, 1660).
112. Thomas Pecke, To the Most High and Mighty Monarch, Charles the II, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, defender of the faith (London: Printed by James Cottrel, 1660), p. 2.
113. Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Herbert’s Poems to the Queen of Bohemia: A Rediscovered Text and a New Edition” [with text], ELR 9, 1 (1979): 108–20; see also George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 196–97. In his letters to Elizabeth, Henry Wotton regularly addressed her as “Most resplendent Queen, even in the darkness of Fortune,” and in 1629 spoke of “beholding how her virtues overshine the darkness of her fortune.” Henry Wotton, The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), II: 293, 325.
114. I. W. [i.e., John Walton], “To my worthy friend, Mr. Henry Vaughan the Silurist” (1678), in Works of Henry Vaughan, p. 620.
115. John Cleveland, “The King’s Disguise,” in The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. John M. Berdan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), p. 164.
116. Vaughan, “The King Disguis’d,” in Works of Henry Vaughan, p. 626.
117. Benserade, Ballets pour Louis XIV, ed. Canova-Green, I: 91–160; here p. 135 (note the reference to Psalm 119: 105, “Your word [is] a lamp to my feet / And a light to my path”). As Charles Silin has noted, there are “at least five allusions to the successful issue of the recent difficulties” in the Ballet de la Nuit: Charles I. Silin, Benserade and His Ballets de Cour (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), p. 219.
118. Could this evocation of the darkness of rebellion to underscore the importance of the monarch at some point deconstruct itself, emphasizing instead the dark origins of the Sun King? See Aurélia Gaillard, “Le Soleil à son coucher: la nuit réversible de la mythologie solaire sous Louis XIV,” in Penser la nuit, ed. Bertrand, pp. 449–64, and Hélène Merlin, “Nuit de l’État et Roi-Soleil,” in La Nuit, ed. François Angelier and Nicole Jacques-Chaquin (Grenoble: Millon, 1995), pp. 203–18.
119. As cited in Vec, Zeremonialwissenschaft, p. 139: “Die Hoheit und Macht der Potentaten und Fürsten der Welt / leuchtet zwar sonderlich in dero Landen hervor … Aber es gläntzet dieselbiger noch heller wann andere Mächtige selbst dieselbe considerieren.”
120. Habermas described this specific relationship between representation, authority, and audience as “representative publicness” (repräsentive Öffentlichkeit), “the display of inherent spiritual power or dignity before an audience,” though he did not consider daily time or the night in its development. See The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. xv, 5–13. As we will see below in chapter 6, the night was equally vital to the development of a bourgeois public sphere in early modern cities.
121. Saint-Simon, Memoirs, trans. St. John, III: 307–8, and Mémoires, XXXIX: 2–4.
122. Ibid. For the court, the illumination was followed by nocturnal entertainment: “Scarcely had I time to return home and sup after this fine illumination than I was obliged to go to the palace for the ball that the King had prepared there, and which lasted until past two in the morning.” Evidence suggests that the Spanish court also nocturnalized its spectac
les, theater, and daily routines during the seventeenth century. See for example Hannah E. Bergman, “A Court Entertainment of 1638,” Hispanic Review 42, 1 (1974): 67–81, in which a young woman at court complains that her mother expects her to go to sleep by midnight (p. 70).
123. Norris, “Hymn to Darkness,” in Collection, pp. 37–38.
124. See Dewald, Aristocratic Experience, pp. 33–40. This corresponds with the understanding of the baroque presented by José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Theory and History of Literature 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
125. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 18, in Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), p. 55.
126. In a contemporary English translation – see Ludwig Krapf and Christian Wagenknecht, eds., Stuttgarter Hoffeste: Texte und Materialen zur höfischen Repräsentation im frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979).
127. From the contemporary English translation: Nicholas Faret (1596–1646), The Honest Man or the Art to Please at Court, trans. Edward Grimstone (London: Thomas Harper, 1632), as quoted in Margaret Lucille Kekewich, ed., Princes and Peoples: France and British Isles, 1620–1714 (Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 29–30.
128. Salatino, Incendiary Art, p. 19. La Fontaine’s response is discussed by Gaillard, “Le Soleil à son coucher”.
129. Rohr, Grossen Herren, p. 733, as cited in Möseneder, Zeremoniell, p. 39.
130. From Machiavelli on, realist discussions of the display of power and majesty were kept separate from actual presentations of a prince’s (simulated) greatness. Baroque political theory “revealed” and discussed the very mechanisms and techniques of power that it advised rulers to conceal. Michael Stolleis has discussed this paradox in his Arcana imperii und Ratio status: Bemerkungen zur politischen Theorie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980). Political theorists resolved the issue through their strategic contempt for the perceptions and awareness of the common people. The formation in the eighteenth century of a public sphere gradually challenged this contempt and the concomitant darkness and secrecy of absolutist political culture. See Jörg Jochen Berns, “Der nackte Monarch und die nackte Wahrheit – Auskünfte der deutschen Zeitungs- und Zeremoniellschriften des späten 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts zum Verhältnis von Hof und Öffentlichkeit,” Daphnis 11, 1–2 (1982): 315–50, Andreas Gestrich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts, Kritische Studien zur Geschichtswissenschaft 103 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 34–77, and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
131. The mystic writings of Denys the Areopagite also contributed to this understanding of spectacle in French political discourse in this period: see Yves Durand, “Mystique et politique au XVIIe siècle: l’influence du Pseudo-Denys,” XVIIe Siècle 173 (1991): 323–50, who argues for their direct influence on Louis XIV.
132. Lipsius, Sixe Bookes of Politickes, trans. Jones, pp. 68–70.
133. Nicola Sabbatini’s Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri (Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638) as translated in Hewitt, ed. Renaissance Stage, pp. 96–97.
134. For further examples in French political thought see Möseneder, Zeremoniell, pp. 38–39. Johann Heinrich Zedler’s Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon (Leipzig: Zedler, 1732–50) defined the masses (“Pöbel”) as “die gemeine Menge niederträchtiger und aller höhern Achtbarkeit geraubter Leute” (“the common crowd of base people deprived of all higher perception”), XXVIII: col. 948.
135. Rohr, Grossen Herren, p. 2.
136. See Christian Freiherr von Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von dem Gesellschafftlichen Leben der Menschen, und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen zu Beforderüng der Gluckseeligkeit des menschlichen Geschlechtes (Halle: Renger, 1721). Rohr opened his Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers with a long citation from Wolff’s Vernünfftige Gedancken.
137. See the overview provided by Jörg Jochen Berns, “Die Festkultur der deutschen Höfe zwischen 1580 und 1730,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift n.s. 34, 3 (1984): 295–311.
138. See Stollberg-Rillinger, “Höfische Öffentlichkeit,” pp. 147–50, and the concise remarks of Ulrich Schütte, “Das Fürstenschloß als ‘Pracht-Gebäude’,” in Die Künste und das Schloss in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Lutz Unbehaun with the assistance of Andreas Beyer and Ulrich Schütte, Rudolstädter Forschungen zur Residenzkultur 1 (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1998), pp. 15–29.
139. The scarcity of any direct discussion of the role of the night in the contemporary theorists of baroque court spectacle (such as Ménestrier or Rohr) is not surprising. Discussion of the night in the literature of spectacles was analogous (on the level of daily life) to the discussions of deception, illusion, and “image” in baroque political theory discussed above. Thus a tract could recommend the use of illusions of majesty and power, confident that the common people would see only the illusions – never the political advice behind them. Proclamations of a monarch’s greatness and advice on the importance of burnishing this image existed side by side, but never in the same text. Analogously, on the technical level references to the utility of darkness to create illusion, spectacle, and wonder are frequent; on the theoretical level we see a keen sense of the power of spectacle, but little explicit discussion of the need for darkness itself. On the gaze, landscape, and power, see Dianne S. Harris and D. Fairchild Ruggles, “Introduction,” in Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), pp. 23–29.
140. From a 1668 lecture on Poussin’s Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well (1648) given by the painter Philippe de Champaigne at the French royal academy of painting and sculpture, as quoted in John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 295–96.
5 “An entirely new contrivance”: The rise of street lighting, 1660–1700
1. Benjamin Franklin, Writings, ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987), pp. 984–88.
2. See Camille Couderc, “Economies proposées par B. Franklin et Mercier de Saint-Léger pour l’éclairage et la chauffage à Paris,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 43 (1916): 93–101. Franklin promoted the establishment of Philadelphia’s street lighting, the first in North America, in 1757.
3. Cristoforo Muzani (1724–1813), cited in Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 12–19, 14–15.
4. Friedrich Justin Bertuch, “Moden in Gebrauche und Eintheilung des Tages und der Nacht zu Verschiedenen Zeiten, und bey verschiedenen Völkern,” Journal der Moden [after 1786 Journal des Luxus und der Moden] 1 (May 1786): 199–201. See Gerhard Wagner, Von der Galanten zur Eleganten Welt. Das Weimarer “Journal des Luxus und der Modern” (1786–1827) (Hamburg: Bockel, 1994).
5. Cf. the comment of Johann Beckmann, Beyträge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen (Leipzig: P.G. Kummer, 1782), I: 62: “Gemeiniglich hält man die Erleuchtung der Straßen für eine ganz neue Einrichtung” (“The illumination of the streets is generally considered an entirely new contrivance”).
6. “eine ganz neue Ordnung der Dinge eingeführt,” Bertuch, “Moden,” p. 200.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 201.
9. J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 172. On coffeehouses, see below, chapter 6.
10. On modern street lighting see Mark J. Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” Journal of Urban History 14, 1 (1987): 7–37, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of Cal
ifornia Press, 1988).
11. There is no comparative work on early modern street lighting as an international and interurban development. Schivelbusch and Bouman offer comparative analyses of modern street lighting; Schivelbusch begins with a discussion of early modern street lighting in Paris. With an analysis indebted to Foucault, he emphasizes its relationship to absolutist surveillance and policing, but he does not consider the practical developments in Amsterdam detailed by Lettie S. Multhauf, “The Light of Lamp-Lanterns: Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 236–52. Eighteenth-century comparative discussions of street lighting include Paul Jacob Marperger, Abermahliger Versuch zur Abhandlung einer nützlichen Policey-Materia, nehmlich von denen Gassen Laternen, Strand- und Wacht-Feuern, und andern nächtlichen Illuminationibus oder Erleuchtungen der Gassen und Strassen (Dresden and Leipzig: “Verlegung des Authoris,” 1722), and P. Patte, De la manière la plus avantageuse d’èclairer les rues d’une ville pendant la nuit (Amsterdam: s.n., 1766).
Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) Page 38