Despite the general praise of street lighting echoed here, in some cities local authorities resisted the establishment of street lighting. The innovation was associated with luxury and the aristocracy, and citizens faced with new taxes to maintain the street lighting complained that those who paid the least for the lighted streets benefited the most.95 As a Vienna petition explained, “the citizens and artisans mostly stay at home and seldom go out after 7 o’clock in the evening, and do not benefit from the illumination as much” as the courtiers and officials.96 These complaints underscore the association of street lighting and “night life” with court society, although the image of restrained, early-to-bed burghers is certainly qualified by many other sources.97
In Paris, debate arose over the schedule of the new lighting. As was common with the earliest public street lighting, all agreed that the lighting would not be used during the short nights of the summer months. The question, then, focused on when to start and end the “lighting season” in the fall and spring. The citizens of Paris, while favoring the new street lighting, sought to limit its use to about five months of the year, from October to mid March, to reduce costs. When Parisians proposed this monthly schedule for street lighting in 1671, their argument was countered by the police commissioner La Reynie, who noted that it was important for the streets to be lit through the month of March, because “during March, the season and business fill the city and the court is in Paris.”98A Venetian traveler passing through Berlin in 1708 described the extension of the city’s street lighting out to the Charlottenburg palace:
On the sides of the street stand wooden posts with glass lanterns on top; they stand along the entire four-mile-long street and burn through the entire night when the king is in Charlottenburg. That is for all who are constantly at court very commodious.99
The Leeds antiquarian Ralph Thoresby described a very similar sight when he visited London in 1712. He “could not but observe that all the way, quite through Hyde Park to the Queen’s palace at Kensington, has lanterns for illuminating the road in the dark nights, for the coaches.”100
When threatened with the expense of the street lighting, townspeople could resist its imposition and the increased nocturnalization it entailed. As we saw above, the oligarchs of self-governed or semi-autonomous cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, Dublin, or London took the initiative to establish and pay for street lighting. But one could see these cities as exceptions in light of the many (generally smaller) cities in which street lighting failed to draw sufficient public support. In Brussels, for example, public lighting was set up in 1675 but abandoned by 1680 as result of the expense.101 Private citizens in Bremen set up street lighting on one section of a single street, the Langenstraße, in 1698; even this drew protest from one resident who did not want a lantern attached to his house. The entire city was not regularly illuminated until 1757.102 Across France, street lighting was established in thirty cities by royal edict in 1697, but city councils resisted the imposition of the lighting and the attendant costs. Dijon, for example, was illuminated with 600 candle-lanterns in 1698, but only after the city council unsuccessfully sought to buy an exemption from the royal edict requiring the street lighting.103 In Amiens, the city council delayed buying the lanterns from the royal supplier until 1701. Once purchased, the lanterns were placed carefully in the attic of the city hall. No further steps were taken to install them; several years later the council auctioned them off. Only in 1718 did the Amiens city council actually illuminate the city’s streets – on its own initiative.104
These local authorities apparently preferred a traditional urban night illuminated sporadically by hand-held torches or lanterns to the cost of the street lighting. In several other cases local authorities actually removed the street lighting imposed upon them by their princes. The residence cities of Düsseldorf and Stuttgart illustrate this response to the costs and benefits of public street lighting.
Düsseldorf became the residence of John William of Pfalz-Neuberg, duke of Jülich and Berg (called “Jan Willem”; from 1690 also elector of the Palatinate) in 1679. Jan Willem transformed the modest city into a center of court culture, building a baroque theater and a new riding school while renovating the ducal palace. In 1699 he ordered the establishment of street lighting in the city. By 1701 a modest 383 lanterns were in place; 50 of these, used to light the area around the ducal palace and the court buildings, were gold-plated. The elector initially paid for the street lighting from the state budget, but in 1704 “the burden and maintenance of the aforementioned lanterns was forced upon the city.”105 In numerous petitions and at the territorial parliament representatives of the city sought to shift the cost back to the duke, or abandon the lighting altogether. After the death of the elector in 1716 the court left Düsseldorf and the city’s economy collapsed. In 1718 the representatives of the city argued that the “very costly” lighting served no purpose and that the citizens did not want it at all. In the winter of 1720 the city officials finally got their wish: the street lanterns were taken down and stored in a warehouse. A few were put back in use in the 1730s but city-wide lighting did not return until decades later.106
In Stuttgart, traditional residence of the rulers of Württemberg, Duke Eberhard Ludwig (1693–1733) began to pressure the city magistrates to set up public lighting in 1714. The city officials demurred, arguing that the costs of the lighting far outweighed its benefits. The street lighting was finally set up in time for Carnival in 1716 at the behest of the duke. But city officials continued to argue against the lighting, claiming in July 1716 that it was even more expensive than first estimated, and that some of the lanterns had been vandalized or destroyed. Further, the city magistrates claimed that Stuttgarters were happy to carry their lanterns and torches with them, or rely on moonlight, to get around that city at night. Duke Eberhard continued to insist on public street lighting, paid for by the city. In response, in September 1717 city officials again argued that “the larger part of the residents of high and low estate recognize that the installed lanterns have little or no value to public, but they have incurred great expenses.”107 Even after the court moved to Ludwigsburg, the street lighting and its expense remained, provoking anger and anonymous placards. The city magistrates finally won out in 1732, arguing that the funds for the street lighting could instead be used to purchase a new school building. Here the state administrators sided with the Stuttgart officials, and the Duke relented: the lighting was taken down on October 29, 1732.108
The last word on local resistance to street lighting comes from Strasbourg, where citizens were forced after decades of struggle to support street lighting in 1779. In response, these verses were posted anonymously on the city hall:
As our city stood in prosperity,
It was dark out on the street,
But as our misery has begun,
Lanterns on the street are hung,
So that the citizen – poor man!
Can see at night to beg.
We do not need the lanterns bright,
We can see our poverty without their light.109
Public street lighting threatened the traditional night life and political order of these middling European cities.110 The expansion of elite social life into the urban night described here, resisted in some cases by local authorities, was also challenged by the traditional inhabitants of the night: servants, apprentices, and students, as well as tavern visitors, prostitutes, and those who occasionally sought to escape the social legibility of early modern daily life. On city streets at night the work, leisure, and social representation patterns of courtiers, burghers, and youth could collide violently, as we see in the next chapter.