In 1697 the leading provincial cities of France were required by a royal edict to “immediately proceed to establish lanterns, conforming to those of our fine city of Paris.”34 This seemingly “enlightened” command from Louis XIV to set up street lighting was immediately recognized by all commentators as another revenue scheme: the thirty cities involved (see Map 5.1) would pay royal suppliers dearly for the installation and maintenance of the lanterns, with the profits going to the king.35 As we will see below in section 5.4, local authorities in Dijon, Amiens, and other provincial cities resisted the edict; some sought to buy an exemption from it. Among the cities’ protests against the edict requiring street lighting, the response of the ruling council or Magistrat of the city of Lille stood out: they explained that they had already established street lighting thirty years earlier and did not need the royal suppliers’ assistance.36 This was true: in 1667 Lille, capital of the French province of Flanders, became only the third city in Europe in which the complex and costly project of street lighting was realized, alongside Paris and Amsterdam. Why did Lille precede all other French provincial cities in the establishment of street lighting?
The streets of Lille were illuminated in the fall of 1667, two months after the French captured the city in the War of Devolution (1667–68). Louis XIV left Lille’s ruling council in place, but the city of 50,000 was now uneasy host to a garrison of 5,000 to 10,000 French troops. Protected by a citadel built by Vauban in 1668–70, Lille became a key French stronghold on the border with the Spanish Netherlands and near the Dutch Republic. The French occupation of Lille necessitated complex negotiations among French civil and military authorities, the governing patricians of Lille, a restive populace, and a large military presence. The policing of the night and the establishment of street lighting were an important part of this balance of overlapping authorities.37 The Lille case reveals a close relationship between attempts to police the urban night and attempts to rule the newly conquered territories of Walloon Flanders and integrate them into the French kingdom.
In the immediate aftermath of the French capture of Lille, security at night was paramount. Three days after the surrender of the city on August 28, the Magistrat issued an ordinance prohibiting all movement on the streets at night. This ordinance went beyond the standard requirement to carry at light when out at night, and instead established a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew. “All residents of the countryside and foreigners who came and will come into this city” were required “to retire to their homes each day in the evening before the bell called Le Vigneron (‘the wine-maker’) sounds without thereafter finding themselves back on the streets until daylight.” All residents were advised to “take care to have the things that they will need in a timely fashion, all the more [because] once the night watch has begun, they will not be free to go through the city unless it is a case of inexcusable [sic] necessity.” In such a case, “they will have to go with a light and address themselves to the first watchman [they meet] in order to be escorted to wherever they need to go and then return to their home.”38 This ban on all nocturnal movement was lifted on July 23, 1668 and replaced with the standard ordinance requiring anyone out at night to carry a lantern or face a heavy fine.39
In September 1667 the Magistrat established street lighting following the Paris model of lanterns suspended by cords over the middle of street.40 The traditional neighborhood authorities, the maîtres des places, were charged by the ruling council with the placement of the lanterns and their maintenance, while the responsibility for hanging out and lighting the lanterns was given to individual householders. As an update of the ordinance explained in January 1668: “wishing to obviate the insolence and disorders which occur in the evening in the said town,” the Magistrat ordered “all those who occupy corners and the entries of streets, and other locations designated by the maîtres des places” to put out candle-lanterns lit “from one hour after the evening bell until after midnight.”41 The ordinance is similar to that of Paris, though it is not clear who provided the 600–700 lanterns. The 1667 lighting was limited, but it went beyond the traditional requirement that residents hang out a lantern in two ways: the local maîtres des placeswere authorized to enforce compliance, and the placement of the lanterns on special ropes “hanging above the middle of the street”42 followed the new Paris model, lighting a street centrally from above rather than from lanterns in front of individual houses.
This street lighting arose alongside other measures intended to secure the night in Lille. In the fall of 1667 innkeepers were ordered to submit a list of their lodgers every evening, and the Magistrat again regulated the closing times for “Tavernes & Cabarets.”43In the period from 1667 to 1715, the Lille Magistrat addressed nocturnal security in about sixty separate ordinances and resolutions; the requirement that one carry a light if out on the streets at night was repeated eleven times in this period.44
But whom were the authorities policing? Lillois journals and chronicles all describe violence between French officers and citizens of Lille, duels at dusk between French officers, nocturnal robberies by common soldiers, and attacks on French troops in the first months and years after the French capture of the city.45 For French military and civil authorities, the actions of their own soldiers were of great concern, and they had to tread carefully. Following the annexation of Walloon Flanders by the French, all eyes were on the fate of Lille, “accounted the third Place of Traffic in the Low-Countries next Amsterdam and Antwerp,” under French rule.46 Louis XIV had personally accepted the city’s surrender in August 1667 and confirmed the authority and privileges of the rulingMagistrat. Lille, described as the “capital of the conquests of his majesty,”47 stood as a “test case” for the possible annexation of other cities of the Low Countries by France, hence the sharp concern to maintain order in the city, and especially to prevent crimes by the occupying French soldiers.
In September 1668, a few months after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle confirmed the annexation of Lille and Walloon Flanders by France, Michel Le Peletier de Souzy, intendant of the new French province of Flanders, wrote to the Marquis de Louvois, secretary of state, to report on nocturnal crime in Lille: “Yesterday I handed down a judgment very stern but also very necessary – people were beginning to thieve at night in the streets of Lille as in Paris; and a citizen had been despoiled down to the shirt by four Liège horsemen from the company of Berlost.”48 Three of the four were apprehended and Le Peletier reported that he condemned two of them to be hanged, despite their rank.49 In reply, Louvois affirmed these concerns: “Public safety during the night is so important that one would have thought they might have to be condemned to [be broken on] the wheel.”50 He considered this public spectacle of slow death, then continued, “I do not understand how in a place where the watch must do its duty as carefully as in Lille, one still dares to attempt to rob at night.”51 In this case, disciplining the night was vital to reducing the impact of the French troops on the occupied city.52
Turning the conquered Lillois into loyal subjects of the French king would take some time, however. In December 1669 the intendant Le Peletier complained that the Magistrat was disloyal and difficult to govern.53 In 1670 the visiting Spanish ambassador (the representative of their former Habsburg rulers) was cheered in the streets, and some of the city’s clergy preached against the alleged decline of public morals brought by the French.54 We can also see the resentment of the French occupation from the street, so to speak, in the journal of the Lillois master silk weaver Pierre Ignace Chavatte (1633–93). Chavatte, like Le Peletier and Louvois, saw the night as a significant site in the negotiations between the Lillois and their new masters. Chavatte recorded numerous crimes and misdeeds by the French and observed that French attempts to police the night could themselves trigger new conflicts: in 1672 his journal notes that “on 23 July between 10 and 11 o’clock at night a French sentinel who was at the corner of the market fired his musket at a man who passed with a lit wick [of his candle or lamp] in his hand … and three to four days after he died; he was a tailor by trade and of the Flemish nation.”55 Chavatte emphasized that the unfortunate tailor was killed even though he was carrying a light as required.
Despite the French affirmation of the governance of the Lille Magistrat, Chavatte observed that authority over the city streets at night belonged to the French. He recorded the declaration of war between France and the United Provinces on October 16, 1673, adding resentfully “that same day in the evening servants of the Magistrat of the city of Lille were arrested and taken to the watch because it was forbidden to walk without a lantern.”56 Chavatte reflected a broad distrust of the French occupiers of the city, and of their policing of the night. Conflicts between French soldiers and residents of Lille often flared up at night, as on February 7, 1675, when “in the evening in the tavern La Bourse d’Or there was a great dispute by the citizens with the French officers in which three to four bourgeois were wounded, and a French surgeon wounded in the head; and the citizens were apprehended and taken to prison.”57 In the same year the intendant Le Peletier acknowledged the circulation of libels “prejudicial to the service of the king.”58
In the 1680s street lighting factored into the slow détente between Lille’s ruling patricians, the administrators of Louis XIV, and the common people. In 1682, the Magistrat established paid lamp-lighters for the city’s street lighting, and the provision of street lighting gradually became more centralized and professional.59 In 1689 the échevins (high judges) of the ruling council, “having noted that the establishment of lanterns to illuminate the city during the darkness of the night served not a little to prevent quarrels, thefts and other disorders that are commonly committed under cover of the night,” praised the service.60 The Magistrat also seems to have become more attentive to damage to the lanterns, referring in 1692 to the need to prevent people from “cutting the cords of the public lanterns.”61 In March 1697 the Magistrat ordered four young men “from good bourgeois homes” to pay heavy fines for destroying thirty-three lanterns in the streets of Lille during the night of November 26–27, 1696.62
Early modern street lighting was thought to provide both prestige and security, but in Lille, the emphasis was entirely on the latter. None of the publicity that accompanied the establishment of street lighting in Paris or Leipzig (see below) appeared in Lille; conversely, none of the Lille ordinances regarding street lighting refer to the splendor, prestige, or beauty brought by the new amenity. In the occupied city, street lighting was seen as a response to the tensions and disorder brought by the French, rather than as an urban improvement. Only after two decades did Lille’s ruling council begin to refer to “the public lanterns” as a service of “the public trust.”63
The French conquest and integration of Lille and Walloon Flanders shows how much authorities’ attempts to police the night had in common with larger projects of territorial conquest and control. This comparison will be explored further in the discussion of policing, resistance, and the colonization of the night in chapters 6 and 7. In Lille, the establishment of street lighting slowly brought the French intendant and military authorities together with the city’s ruling council in a common project to light and secure the city’s streets.