Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  79. SdAL, Das bey der Nacht Hervorleuchtende Leipzig. The street lighting of Paris was celebrated in very similar terms in 1667: “Il fera comme en plein midi / Clair la nuit dedans chaque rue.” (“The night will be lit up as bright as day, in every street.”) Gazette de Robinet, October 29, 1667, cited in Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 90.

  80. Quoted in Böck, “Beleuchtung Wiens,” pp. 10–12.

  81. See Verena Kriese, “Die Vorstädte Leipzigs im 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 16, 2 (1989): 110–25. The suburbs were not illuminated: until the late eighteenth century. The early modern street lighting was limited to the area within the city walls.

  82. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 269–70. In comparison, in 1701 the Leipzig city council contributed 6,000 florins toward the construction of a major new public building, the poorhouse, orphanage, asylum, and workhouse of St. George. See Tanya Kevorkian, “The Rise of the Poor, Weak, and Wicked: Poor Care, Punishment, Religion and Patriarchy in Leipzig, 1700–1730,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (2000): 163–81.

  83. Aufgefangene Brieffe, pp. 890–91.

  84. Ibid. For an example of this temporary festive street lighting in Hanover in 1665, see Siegfried Müller, Leben im alten Hannover: Kulturbilder einer deutschen Stadt (Hanover: Schlüter, 1986), pp. 22, 146, and the examples above in chapter 4.

  85. Aufgefangene Brieffe, pp. 890–91. The article is titled “Von der Illuminations-Pracht und Mißbrauch / und hingegen von nützlichen und nöthigen Gebrauch der See-Lichter und Nacht-Laternen auch nunmehr zu Leipzig aufgesteckt worden.”

  86. Ibid., p. 888.

  87. Ibid.

  88. Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, pp. 93–96.

  89. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271, quoting from the Ratspatente of 1701–02. Richard Steele describes a similar fashion in London coffeehouses: “the students … come in their night-gowns to Saunter away their time … One would think these young Virtuoso’s take a gay Cap and Slippers, with a scarf and party-colour’d Gown, to be the Ensigns of Dignity.” “Hominem pagina nostra sapit,” Spectator 49 (April 26, 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I: 209. See Ariane Fennetaux, “Men in Gowns: Nightgowns and the Construction of Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Immediations: Research Journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art 1, 1 (2004): 77–89.

  90. The Leipzig ordinances regulating “night life” were all directed at heads of households and refer to nocturnal youthful disorder. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271. Young people in the urban night are examined in chapter 6.

  91. Wustmann, ed., Quellen, II: 271.

  92. Of course, the success of these attempts to police a city’s night life is another matter, as the following chapter will show.

  93. “Es wird manch Huren-Packt die Lichter müssen scheuen / Manch Dieb zu Bette gehen / der in die Nacht gelaurt.” Das bey der Nacht Hervorleuchtende Leipzig, SdAL, Tit. XXVI, Nr. 3, fo. 22v.

  94. Ibid.: “Wenn sie bey Sicherheit / sich Freund und Feind zu kennen / Die Strassen auff und ab zu handeln können gehn.”

  95. See the Vienna petition noted above and Gerhard Tanzer, Spectacle müssen seyn: die Freizeit der Wiener im 18. Jahrhundert, Kulturstudien 21 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1992), p. 58.

  96. Ibid.

  97. After all, the “citizens and artisans” of early modern cities had been, not long before, the “many apprentices, boys … and such unmarried folk … found idly in the streets … late in the evening,” as the 1697 and 1702 Leipzig ordinances described them.

  98. Herlaut, “L’éclairage,” p. 166: “en mars, la saison et les affaires remplissent la ville et la Cour est à Paris.” The longer court schedule was adopted.

  99. Irene Schrattenecker, ed., Eine deutsche Reise Anno 1708 (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1999), p. 131. The author is an unknown Venetian.

  100. Ralph Thoresby, The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., Author of the Topography of Leeds: (1677–1724), ed. Joseph Hunter (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830), II: 120 (June 15, 1712).

  101. Léon Clerbois, “Histoire de l’éclairage public à Bruxelles,” Annales de la société royale d’archéologie de Bruxelles 24 (1910): 91–106. Public street lighting was re-established in Brussels in 1703.

  102. Johann Georg Kohl, Alte und Neue Zeit. Episoden aus der Cultur-Geschichte der freien Reichs-Stadt Bremen (Bremen: Müller, 1871), pp. 22–25. See Staatsarchiv Bremen 2-D.20.b.1.e.2.a., Bd.1: “Rechnungsbuch der Beleuchtungsabgabe,” indicating that funds were collected for lanterns and oil starting in 1698.

  103. On French provincial street lighting see Daniel Bontemps and Hubert Beylier, Lanternes d’éclairage public: XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction du Patrimoine, 1986), pp. 2–10, and Martin, “Les débuts de l’éclairage des rues de Dijon,” pp. 253–55. On Caen, see Gabriel Vanel, ed., Recueil de journaux caennais, 1661–1777: publiés d’après les manuscrits inédits (Rouen: A. Lestringant, 1904), pp. 43–44.

  104. Thomas, L’éclairage des rues d’Amiens, pp. 11–15. On resistance to the street lighting in Tournai (annexed to France 1668–1713), see A. de la Grange, “Historire de l’éclairage public à Tournai (1275–1890),” Bulletins de la Société historique et archéologique de Tournai 25 (1894): 392–98.

  105. Friedrich Lau, Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1921), I: 131. By 1701 the other leading princes of the Empire had established street lighting in their main cities (Berlin, Vienna, and Hanover, with Leipzig in the works) and the Wittelsbach elector John William of Pfalz-Neuberg sought to keep up with his peers.

  106. Lau, Geschichte der Stadt Düsseldorf, I: 132; Hugo Weidenhaupt and Manfred Fey, Düsseldorf: Geschichte von den Ursprüngen bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Düsseldorf: Schwann im Patmos-Verlag, 1988), II: 71.

  107. Paul Sauer and Hansmartin Decker-Hauff, Geschichte der Stadt Stuttgart, vol. III, Vom Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Abschluss des Verfassungsvertrags fur das Konigreich Wurttemberg 1819 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993), pp. 139–40: “der größere Teil der Einwohnerschaft hohen und niederen Standes erkenne, was für schlecten oder gar keinen Nutzen die … eingeführten Laternen dem Publikum gebracht, welch große Kosten sie dagegen verursacht hätten.”

  108. The city agreed that the specific “lighting tax” would still be assessed, however, until 1744, suggesting that the objection to the street lighting went beyond its cost. Ibid.

  109. The original verse:

  Als unsre Stadt im Wohlstand sass,

  Da war es finster auf der Strass,

  Doch als das Unglück angefangen

  Hat man Laternen aufgehangen,

  Damit der arme Bürgersmann

  Des Nachts zum Bettlen sehen kann.

  Wir brauchen die Laternen nicht,

  Wir sehn das Elend ohne Licht.

  Hermann Ludwig, Strassburg vor hundert Jahren. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1888), p. 277.

  110. See Christian Casanova, Nacht-Leben: Orte, Akteure und obrigkeitliche Disziplinierung in Zürich, 1523–1833 (Zürich: Chronos, 2007), pp. 11–206. In Zurich no public street lighting was established until the French occupation in 1799.

  111. Tatler 263 (December 14, 1710).

  6 Colonizing the urban night: Resistance, gender, and the public sphere

  1. On the expansion of the night watch, see J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 169–207, Gerhard Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung in Paris: zur Entstehung und Durchsetzung von Normen im städtischen Alltag des Ancien Régime (1697–1715) (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2004), pp. 181–200, and Christian Casanova, Nacht-Leben: Orte, Akteure und obrigkeitliche Disziplinierung in Zürich, 1523–1833 (Zurich: Chronos, 2007), pp. 141–206.

  2. Eugène Defrance, Histoire de l’éclairage des rues de Paris (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1904), p. 36: “le grand nombre de vagabonds et voleurs de nuit … et la quantité de vols et meutres q
ui s’y sont faits le soir et la nuit”; Lettie S. Multhauf, “The Light of Lamp-Lanterns: Street Lighting in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam,” Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 239; Codex Austriacus, Supplementum Codicis Austriaci Sammlung Oesterreichischer Gesetze und Ordnungen … bis auf das Jahr 1720 (Leipzig: Eisfeld, 1748), III: 239: “zu Abwendung und Verhütung aller, nächtlicher weil eine Zeit her häufig in Schwang gegangen, und noch befürchtenden Mord und Diebereyen, wie auch Einführung einer allgemeinen Sicherheit.”

  3. State-Poems; Continued from the Time of O. Cromwel, to this Present Year 1697 ([London]: s.n., 1697), pp. 243–46, 245.

  4. I draw an analogy between the colonization of the night and the early modern understanding of the colonization of space and place, as seen for example in the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française: “Colonie. Peuple & habitans d’un païs qui se sont establis dans un autre.” (“Colony. People and inhabitants of one country who are established in another.”) For earlier references to “the colonization of the night” see Murray Melbin, Night As Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987), who accepts the image of the frontier as an unoccupied space; Norbert Schindler, “Nocturnal Disturbances: On the Social History of the Night in the Early Modern Period,” in Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 195: “Alongside the court aristocracy, the Counter-Reformation church … also sought to colonise the night and to extend into the evening its disciplinary grip on the everyday lives of subjects”; and Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171: “The colonization of the night was an essential part of the refashioned world of urban sociability.” On similar themes seen in the colonization of the night and in European colonization of Asia, America, and Africa, see below, n. 141, surveying the relevant scholarship on colonization and empire.

  5. 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): 200: “die Geschäfte des Tages allenthalben und immer desto später anfangen, jemehr sich die Societät verfeinert und der Luxus steigt.”

  6. On “casual time” as resistance to structured public places and times, a “night that causes an ‘accident’,” see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 202–03.

  7. Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 102, citing a Munich edict of 1630.

  8. On apprentices, servants, and maids in London night life, see Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 198–221. On nocturnal youthful disorder in smaller cities and towns see David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 79–84, 147–49; Frédérique Pitou, “Jeunesse et désordre social: les coureurs de nuit à Laval au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderene et contemporaine 47, 1 (2000): 69–92; and Norbert Schindler, “Guardians of Disorder: Rituals of Youthful Culture at the Dawn of the Modern Age,” in A History of Young People in the West, ed. Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), I: 240–82.

  9. Sälter, Polizei und soziale Ordnung, pp. 414, 194. D’Argenson served as lieutenant-général de police of Paris from 1697 to 1715; he was preceded by the first lieutenant-général de police, Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie (served 1667–97).

  10. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 413.

  11. From a Strasbourg ordinance of 1651 forbidding “das nächtliche, unmänschliche graßieren, Jauchzen, Jählen und Schreien in Gassen und Häusern” quoted in Johannes Beinert, “Moscherosch im Dienste der Stadt Straßburg,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Sprache und Literatur Elsass-Lothringens 23 (1907): 138–46, here 144.

  12. High-ranking imperial officials like Ludwig Wilhelm usually rented suitable accomodations in Vienna, as near the Hofburg as possible, but housing in the city was extraordinarily scarce. See John P. Spielman, The City and the Crown: Vienna and the Imperial Court, 1600–1740 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 75–100.

  13. As armed and liveried servants, lackeys were often singled out as especially violent and associated with night-time violence. As Scarron remarked:

  Pages, laquais, voleurs de nuit;

  Carosses, chevaux et grand bruit:

  C’est là Paris. Que vous en semble?

  See Léon Hilaire, “Pages et laquais,” L’Investigateur: Journal de l’Institut historique 52 (1881): 149–54, and Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2006).

  14. “Printz Louis mit Einigen Handkranaten (Unter die tumultierenden werffend) frieden gemacht, wodurch Pferde und Menschen beschädiget, Und etliche schon gestorben sind.” Ludwig Baur, “Berichte des Hessen-Darmstädtischen Gesandten Justus Eberhard Passer an die Landgräfin Elisabeth Dorothea über die Vorgänge am kaiserlichen Hofe und in Wien von 1680 bis 1683,” Archiv für Österreichische Geschichte 37 (1867): 271–409, 331–32.

  15. It is no coincidence that Ludwig Wilhelm gained some of his first miliary experience at the siege of Philippsburg in 1676.

  16. Female Tatler 67 (December 9, 1709), [p. 2]. See Fidelis Morgan, The Female Tatler (London: Dent, 1992).

  17. John Childs, ed., “Captain Henry Herbert’s Narrative of His Journey through France with his Regiment, 1671–3,” Camden Fourth Series 30 (1990): 271–369, here 304–05.

  18. A view of Paris, and places adjoining … Written by a gentleman lately residing at the English Ambassador’s at Paris (London: Printed for John Nutt, near Stationers-Hall, 1701), p. 11.

  19. Joachim Christoph Nemeitz, Séjour de Paris: c’est à dire, instructions fidèles, pour les voiageurs de condition, comment ils se doivent conduire, s’ils veulent faire un bon usage de leur tems & argent, durant leur Séjour à Paris (Leiden: J. Van Abcoude, 1727), ed. Alfred Franklin as La vie de Paris sous la Régence (Paris: Éditions Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1897), p. 230.

  20. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, 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.), XVII: 396.

  21. Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, Described by Himself, ed. Andrew Clark. Oxford Historical Society Publications 19 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), III: 187, 423; entries for May 25, 1686 and May 23, 1693. See A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), p. 228.

  22. See above, chapter 5, section 5.4.

  23. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 97–114.

  24. Auguste Philippe Herlaut, “L’éclairage des rues de Paris à la fin du XVIIe siècle et au XVIIIe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France 43 (1916): 130–240; here 226.

  25. Christian Otto Mylius, ed. Corpus Constitutionum Marchicarum (Berlin and Halle: Buchladen des Waisenhauses, 1737–55), part 6, section 2, cols. 37–38, 73–74, 169, and part 1, section 1, cols. 171–72; Catherine Denys, “Le bris de lanternes dans les villes du Nord au XVIIIe siècle: quelques réflexions sur la signification d’un délit ordinaire,” in La petite délinquance du moyen âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Benoît Garnot and Rosine Fry, Publications de l’Université de Bourgogne 90 (Dijon: EUD, 1998), pp. 309–19; Achilles Augustus von Lersner and Georg August von Lersner, Achill. Augusti von Le
rsner nachgehohlte, vermehrte und continuirte Frankfurthische Chronica Zweyter Theil (Frankfurt: Johann Adam Recksroth, 1734), p. 27; Patrick Meehan, “Early Dublin Public Lighting,” Dublin Historical Record 5 (1943): 130–36.

  26. Conrad Richter, “Die erste öffentliche Beleuchtung der Stadt Wien,” Alt-Wien 6 (1897): 10. In Clermont in 1698 lantern vandals were threatened with excommunication: André-Georges Manry, Histoire de Clermont-Ferrand (Clermont-Ferrand: Bouhdiba, 1993), pp. 166–67.

  27. Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, ed. Raymond Phineas Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), p. 25.

  28. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden [hereafter SHAD], Loc. 1779, “Acta, das zu Conservation der Nachtlaternen …”, fo. 3: “aus Muthwillen boßhafter Leuthe gar leicht gekränket werden möchten.”

  29. SHAD, Loc. 1779, fo. 5; Theodor Distel, “Miscellen 5,” Archiv für sächsische Geschichte n.s. 5, 1 (1878): 90–92.

  30. Schivelbusch (Disenchanted Night, pp. 86, 98, 121) makes this point. The political symbolism and practical value of the street lighting help explain the initial distribution of the lighting evenly across a city. As symbols of the power and authority of the monarch and city government, and as a practical deterrent to crime, it could hardly have been otherwise. To be sure, politically or commercially important streets and squares were better lit, but leaving a street or section of the city dark would imply that it was somehow outside the power and authority of the lights, and it would certainly offer a place for those “shy of the light” to gather. On the density of street lighting in Paris and Rouen, see Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800, trans. Brian Pearce (Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120, and Jean-Pierre Bardet, Rouen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: les mutations d’un espace social, Regards sur l’histoire 50 (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1983), pp. 125–27 and tables 60–61.