Chapter Six
By 1700 life at court meant late hours, and permanent public street lighting was reshaping everyday life in dozens of cities across Northern Europe. Dutch city councilors, London merchants, and the police administrators of the Sun King all sought to expand respectable daily activity into the night in the second half of the seventeenth century. This unique alignment of interests across political and economic formations attests to the powerful forces behind nocturnalization. Sovereigns and self-governing cities celebrated at night and established street lighting with the same stated goals: to reflect their own glory and to protect their subjects.
Regular public street lighting, together with an improved and expanded night-watch, was the infrastructure of urban nocturnalization.1 It was also the most visible and expensive aspect of the project. According to its heralds, the lighting responded to “the great number of vagabonds and thieves at night … and the amount of robberies and murders that are committed in the evening and at night” (Paris), and marked a concerted effort to “detect burglaries and prevent foul play” (Amsterdam), “for the reduction and prevention of all the recently increasing nocturnal and frightening murder and theft, and for the introduction of general security” (Vienna).2 One London enthusiast singled out the social groups that would be driven away by the lighting:
The scatt’ring Light gilt all the Gaudy way,
Some people rose and thought it day.
The plying Punks crept into Holes,
Who walk’d the streets before by sholes;
The Night could now no longer skreen
The Tavern-sots from being seen.3
The proclamations all refer to disorder and danger on city streets at night. “Plying Punks” and “Tavern-sots” were nothing new in this period, but the steps taken to control their nocturnal activities were.
In several ways, these efforts to impose a new order on city streets after dark resemble a “colonization of the night.”4 What benefits do we obtain by using this analogy to describe the nocturnalization of daily life in the cities of early modern Europe? An awareness of nocturnalization in the cities as uneven, contested, and multi-sided would be the first benefit. Any critical definition of colonization recognizes the violence necessary to colonize. Both logically and historically, the colonization of inhabited spaces means the exercise of power or authority, or both, over the people already there. Of course, many myths of colonization posit a physically “empty space” devoid of indigenous people, or natives so culturally “empty” that they embrace the cultural authority of the colonizer. Myths aside, however, the colonial exercise of power and authority is never far from violence or the threat of violence. The analogy with colonization can enhance our understanding of the urban night by taking us beyond the dire warnings and celebratory verses provided by the proponents of street lighting.
By focusing on nocturnal crime – and by defining the traditional night life of young people as criminal – early modern princes, courtiers, city councils, and merchants expanded their activities, privileges, and authority into the hours after sunset. In the deliberations and proclamations establishing the street lighting, they described the urban night as overrun with violent crime. Considering the dangerous, seemingly untamable city evoked by proponents of street lighting, it is especially significant that when commentators looked back on the process of nocturnalization, they described it as natural or inexorable. After surveying the course of nocturnalization over the previous century, Friedrich Justin Bertuch concluded that “all these observations [of nocturnalization], which could easily be multiplied, prove clearly the occupations of the day begin ever later, the more society is refined and luxury increases.”5 Bertuch does not consider the inhabitants of the space that is being colonized by a society ever more refined and “policed”. This discourse of colonization depicted the night as a dangerous frontier, or, conversely, as a “natural” site of expansion for polite “society.” Neither depiction of the night – as filled with violence or as an empty space – takes into account the traditional cultures of the urban night and their resistance to nocturnalization.6 The metaphor of colonization widens our view to include those who resisted nocturnalization, shaped its boundaries, or found their daily lives caught up in it.
This is especially important in the urban context. Nocturnalization at court encountered little resistance. Rulers modified the structures of daily time in the delimited space of the court (in the narrowest sense, the royal household) without much opposition. There were few institutions within the court which could (or would seek to) resist new habits and schedules. In cities, the forces promoting and resisting nocturnalization were much more complex, aligned across class, gender, and age. As we saw in the previous chapter, some local authorities saw street lighting as an expensive luxury and resisted its establishment. In middling cities like Bremen, Amiens, Düsseldorf, and Strasbourg the most visible aspect of nocturnalization was delayed for decades, and the colonization of the night seemed far less inevitable. The traditional order of the night did not go quietly.
Focusing on the traditional order of the night leads us to a more active level of resistance to the colonization of the night. Court and city authorities used street lighting to sharpen the distinction between their own expanding “respectable” nocturnal sociability and the night life of young people. These authorities admonished heads of households to prevent “their children, namely sons and daughters, as well as male and female servants, from roaming around during night time. Also, their beds ought to be in locked and sheltered chambers, and [household heads must] check frequently in this case too.”7 These young people and servants were the natural masters of the urban night, and by all accounts had been for centuries.8 But we must consider nocturnalization as more than a “top-down” process. When early modern elites, from princes and courtiers to town councils and wealthy merchants, expanded their activities, privileges, and authority into the hours after sunset, they sought to secure and regulate this part of the day. But this meant regulating the young people of their own classes along with the youth of the common people. The colonization of the night took place within as well as across classes. In 1700 the lieutenant-général de police of Paris, Marc-René d’Argenson, reported that he was forced to intervene in the family affairs of “several bourgeois and even a few of the most distinguished merchants,” who “neglect so much the education of their children that they leave them among the rascals and night-walkers.” As we will see below, restraining “the debauchery and licentiousness … of these young people” at night was a major project, led by d’Argenson, in the Paris of Louis XIV.9
This regulation of behavior “in the leading groups of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie – in the direction of greater foresight and a stricter regulation of libidinal impulses,”10 which forbade “the nocturnal, beastly roaming about, shouting, yelling, and screaming in lanes and houses,”11 has of course been described as a civilizing process. But from a nocturnal perspective the process looks quite different. A 1682 report from Justus Eberhard Passer, ambassador of Hesse-Darmstadt at the imperial court, gives us a glimpse of the violent side of the civilizing process on the streets of Vienna in the middle of the night. On February 12, 1682, Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm I of Baden celebrated Carnival and his recent promotion to imperial “Feldmarschall-Leutnant” at a “special ball and luxurious meal [Merenda]” at his residence in Vienna.12 Reflecting the nocturnalization of court life, the festivities continued late into the night. Passer reported that at 3 a.m. the “lackeys” outside (“many hundreds who waited on their masters”) grew restless (and cold, no doubt) and started to brawl with one another and some soldiers.13 When the brawl on the street got the attention of the margrave and his guests inside, many “Cavalliers” came down to stop the fray by riding into it, but this only made matters worse. The fighting did not stop, Passer explained, until “Prince Louis made peace with several hand grenades, which he threw among the rioting people.” As a result, Passer continued, “horses and people were damaged, and some have since died.”14
The ambassador’s laconic words – horses and people “damaged,” noting that “some [humans or horses?] have since died” – show no particular shock or censure. The margrave’s hand grenades sent a double message about the night: the brawling lackeys, soldiers, and other servants should accustom themselves to the late hours of their superiors. They would have to wait on their masters during a time which they had previously considered their own. To the rash cavaliers the margrave demonstrated a cooler, more civilized approach to the brutal exercise of violence. Hand grenades were more effective than directly engaging the brawlers in the dark.
The hand grenades used by the margrave themselves reflect the nocturnalization of warfare in this period. They were a relatively new weapon, developed during the Thirty Years War for siege combat. On the walls and in the trenches around besieged cities, attackers and defenders alike used the grenades when the enemy was nearby but could not be seen – as was often the case in the violent night skirmishes that accompanied a siege. The development of the hand grenade reflects the central importance of siege warfare, and of the night in siege warfare, in this period.15 In a sense, Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm was using the grenades in a siege on the night of the February 12, 1682. He and his fellow aristocrats were occupying a new site in urban space and time by celebrating very late into the night. The lackeys who waited on them responded to this encroachment on a time of their own relative freedom with an outburst of violence. Perhaps for a moment, looking down at the fighting in the street, the margrave felt besieged in his urban palace. He responded with a siege weapon, the hand grenade.
Lackeys, pages, and other servants resisted nocturnalization in many ways, but when they disturbed the new night life of the well-born, they could face brutal violence or its threat. In London’s theaters in the early eighteenth century, footmen were customarily allowed free entrance to the upper gallery, with the assumption that they were waiting on their masters. Their behavior during the plays, however, led to complaints in the periodical press, including a mock advertisement in the Female Tatler of December 9, 1709. In jarringly violent terms, the notice described a “lost item,”
Dropt near the Play house, in the Haymarket, a bundle of Horsewhips, designed to belabour the Footmen in the Upper Gallery, who almost every Night this Winter, have made such an intolerable Disturbance, that the Players could not be heard, and their Masters were obliged to hiss them into silence. Whoever has taken up the said Whips, is desired to leave ’em with my Lord Rake’s Porter, several Noblemen resolving to exercise ’em on their Backs, the next Frosty Morning.16
The violence which here protects the nocturnal sociability of the masters and mistresses is only a threat – in contrast with the hand grenades of Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm – but it springs from a fantasy of brutal nocturnal discipline that erases the line between human and beast.
The Vienna incident and the London advertisement underscore the fact that, like all colonized sites, the night was contested territory. This chapter explores the violence involved in these contests and argues that urban nocturnalization is better understood as an analogue to colonization rather than as a civilizing process. Courtiers and citizens sought to control a realm already inhabited by youths (including students and other elite young men), lackeys, vagrants, prostitutes, tavern visitors, and – cutting across social distinctions – all those who sought anonymity. This colonization created spaces and times of modernity in the city, shaping access to public life in decisive new ways.