In 1710 Richard Steele described the nocturnalization of London’s daily life in a Tatler essay: “we have thus thrown Business and Pleasure into the Hours of Rest, and by that Means made the natural Night but half as long as it should be.” The result was a shift to later rising in the morning, and Steele asserted that “near Two thirds of the Nation lie fast asleep for several hours in broad Day-light.”111 Despite some exaggeration of the numbers of leisurely late sleepers, it is clear that the pleasures of the night were emerging as a significant part of urban daily life. Princes and burghers sanctioned and promoted new levels of nocturnal “Business and Pleasure” in European courts and cities, seeking prestige or profit by lengthening the day. The hours from dusk until dawn were no longer seen only as a threatening time of semi-licit activity or supernatural danger. The old views remained, of course, but courtiers and citizens began to use the night for respectable leisure and sociability. The inclusion of street lighting in Andreä’s1619 Christianopolisreveals the trajectory of new relationships with the night from the sacred to the political and the practical.
The shift of respectable daily activities into the evening and night went beyond the elites who initiated it: bourgeois gentlemen imitated noble fashions, and household servants had to adjust to new cycles of daily time. Court and city authorities used street lighting to sharpen a distinction between their own growing nocturnal sociability and the night life of the “apprentices, boys, maids and such unmarried folk found idly in the streets.” Their attempts to police the urban night through street lighting evoked the resistance of this indigenous nocturnal youth culture. New uses of the night by “persons of quality” thus reshaped daily life for servants, apprentices, and common people in European courts and cities.
In Lille, street lighting was intended to protect the townspeople against the nocturnal crimes associated with the thousands of troops suddenly stationed there. French administrators and Lille patricians found a common goal in the policing of the city’s streets at night. The Leipzig case shows how street lighting could bring the courtly night of nocturnal spectacles together with burghers’ interest in increased security and sociability. In Leipzig in 1701 (as in Paris in 1667 and Vienna in 1688) the initiative to illuminate the city came from the court, not from the city council, and the courtier-mayor Franz Conrad Romanus – the direct representative of absolutist government in Leipzig – implemented the street lighting. The Leipzig lanterns were made in imitation of the lanterns of Amsterdam, the most technically advanced of the time. But the political symbolism of the baroque court is evident in their use: the power of illumination, which bedazzled at the Dresden court, now served to secure and beautify Leipzig, at the same time muting resistance to absolutist control over the city council. The night and its illumination thus link the representational needs of baroque monarchs with the practical goals of policing urban public space and time.