Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (21 page)

The adversities faced by rulers in this period were driven by the confessional divisions of Western Christendom. But the hardening of Christian confessions immediately created the need to transcend them. Paradoxically, to speak to Christians of all confessions baroque rulers had to display power and authority to one another in Christian
and
natural terms. The anonymous
Ceremoniale Brandenburgicum
(1699), an influential treatise on political ceremony, explained this in terms of light and radiance: “The authority and power of the potentates and princes of the world shines forth especially in their own lands … But it shines even more brightly when others who are themselves powerful regard it.”
¹¹⁹
Seventeenth-century princes, courtiers, and artists supplemented the display of traditional Christian authority with supraconfessional representations of political power, just as the secular
étatiste
thought of Hobbes served as the dark side of the divine right doctrines of Bossuet. By mapping the contrast of darkness and light onto their political displays, princes and courtiers made the night essential to what Habermas termed the “representative publicness” of the court.
¹²⁰

The hardening of confessional divisions meant that even the rulers of confessionally monolithic kingdoms like Spain needed to display their grace, power, authority, and culture in supraconfessional terms. We can see this through the experienced eyes of the duc de Saint-Simon during his embassy to the Spanish court in 1721. Invited by his Madrid host, Don Gaspard Giron, “to go and see the illuminations of
the Place Mayor,” Saint-Simon and his retinue “were conducted by detours to avoid the light of the illuminations in approaching them.” The French courtiers’ first view of the illuminated plaza was carefully arranged for maximum theatrical effect:

we arrived at a fine house which looks upon the middle of the Place, ... where the King and Queen go to see the fêtes that take place. We perceived no light in descending or in ascending the staircase. Everything had been closed, but on entering into the chamber which looks upon the Place, we were dazzled, and immediately [as] we entered the balcony speech failed me, from surprise, for more than seven or eight minutes.

The contrast between darkness and light made a powerful impression on Saint-Simon, who praised the “splendor” and “majesty” of this display. The square was lit from each of its balconies, from which “two torches of white wax were placed, one at each end of the balcony, supported upon the balustrade, slightly leaning outwards, and attached to nothing.” Saint-Simon registered the desired effect: “The light that this gives is incredible; it has a splendor and a majesty about it that astonish you and impress you. The smallest type can be read in the middle of the Place, and all about, though the ground-floor is not illuminated.”
¹²¹

As the representative of Louis XV to Philip V, the duke’s response was carefully registered in turn by the Spanish courtiers: “Don Gaspard Giron and the Spaniards who were with me in the house from which I saw the illumination, charmed with the astonishment I had displayed at this spectacle, published it abroad with all the more pleasure because they were not accustomed to the admiration of the French, and many noblemen spoke of it to me with great pleasure.” At a royal audience the following day, Saint-Simon made certain to express to King Philip his “astonishment at an illumination so surprising and so admirable.”
¹²²

Saint-Simon’s report from Madrid suggests that the nocturnalization I have documented in Northern Europe reflects a change in style across the European court system. As confessional divisions proved unbridgeable, nocturnal displays of power and authority grew at courts across Europe. This diffusion is not surprising, as these courts were entirely international. At the time of Saint-Simon’s embassy in
1721, the king of Spain was a French Bourbon, the king of England a former Lutheran from Hanover, and the king of Poland a Saxon convert to Catholicism; a few years later the Livonian Catherine I would inherit the Russian throne. For these rulers, nocturnalization was a new technique to display power and share pleasure at court and beyond. Confessional divisions led rulers, ministers, and courtiers to seek new ways to present glory – it did not matter whether the princes were Catholic Spanish Habsburgs or Calvinist Hohenzollerns: they often chose darkness and the night to display their splendor and majesty.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in the verse of John Norris of Bemerton. His “Hymn to Darkness” opened with the traditional association of darkness with maternity:

Hail thou most
sacred Venerable
thing,

What Muse is worthy thee to sing?

Thee, from whose pregnant
universal
womb

All things, even
Light
thy
Rival
first did Come.

But for Norris, darkness and light are complementary:

The
Vision
of the Deity is made

More sweet and
Beatific
by thy
Shade
.

The aesthetic and political recoding of the night come together as Norris likens darkness to the ideal baroque sovereign, awesome and unchallenged by his subjects. As in the
Ballet de la Nuit
, God himself uses darkness as the backdrop for his majesty and authority. Summing up the uses of the night in baroque political symbolism, Norris makes the connection with political ceremony explicit:

Thus when he first proclaim’d his sacred Law

And would his
Rebel
subjects
awe
,

Like Princes on some great
solemnity

H’appear’d in’s
Robes
of
State
, and Clad himself with
thee
.
¹²³

Norris understood well the importance of night for the supraconfessional display of power and authority in the seventeenth century. As we have seen, the use of darkness and the night as the “Robes of State” by sovereigns was a distinctive feature of baroque statecraft.

Norris’s praise of divine, majestic darkness must be brought down to earth, however. Princes used the night to conceal, dissemble, or deceive – the dark side of the night’s role in political culture. The utility of darkness for baroque political expression corresponds well with discussions of the political value of illusion and deception in the seventeenth century.
¹²⁴
Like the darkened illusions of the perspective stage and the great European fireworks displays, this discourse of illusion and perception in political power developed first in Renaissance Italy. It was Machiavelli who advised that “in general, men judge more by sight than by touch. Everyone sees what is happening, but not everyone feels the consequences. Everyone sees what you seem to be; few have direct experience of who you really are.” The Florentine then commented on the display of majesty at court: “Those few” with direct experience of a prince’s true intentions “will not dare to speak out in the face of public opinion when that opinion is reinforced by the authority of the state.”
¹²⁵
To control what subjects see and what image the prince presented, the illusions powered by the contrast between darkness and light were vital. When Georg Rodolf Weckherlin (1584–1653), secretary to the duke of Württemberg, reported on a week-long celebration at the Württemberg court at Stuttgart in 1616, he expressed the desired effects of the baroque court festival:

My soul was amazed with marvel: mine eyes did dazzle: and all my senses were overwhelmed by the majesty, beauty, riches and magnificence of those brave Princesses, Princes, Ladies, Lords and Knights.
¹²⁶

His French contemporary Nicholas Faret’s
L’honneste-homme; Ou, L’art de plaire a la court
(1630) described the court as “this theatre” in which the courtiers surround a sun king who “distributes unto them certain beams of his magnificence.” At court “princes and great men are about a king like goodly stars, which receive all their light from him.” But the brilliance of the monarch overwhelms the courtiers: “it is all confounded in this great light … The greatest part of the meaner sort consume themselves near this fire, before they can be warm.”
¹²⁷
Faret’s astute description of a sun king whose light leaves “all confounded” reappears in an account of the overpowering fireworks display presented to Louis XIV by Nicolas Foucquet
at Vaux-le-Vicomte in August 1661. Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95) described the scene: “Suddenly we saw the sky darkened by a dreadful cloud of rockets and serpents.” He immediately asked: “Should one say ‘darkened’ or ‘illuminated’?”
¹²⁸
Light and darkness themselves were confounded as this dazzling nocturnal display left its audience blinded by the light.

The nocturnal pleasures, performances, and pyrotechnics of the court show a recurring sense that the spectacular contrast between darkness and light (real or symbolic) was an indispensable way to amaze, dazzle, and overwhelm – or dissemble. As Rohr noted, festivities can “better conceal the calamitous times that might press upon a land or city.”
¹²⁹
Concerns about the relationship between state power and official deception have lost none of their relevance in our own time.
¹³⁰

Seventeenth-century political writers from Justus Lipsius to Louis XIV agreed that princes need celebrations and ceremonies to communicate with the common people, who perceive only the superficial and sensual.
¹³¹
Lipsius argued that common subjects are fundamentally unable to perceive or support the common good, “not making any difference between that which is true and false.”
¹³²
The Flemish philosopher wrote in the spirit of his age. Advice on the perspective stage from Nicola Sabbatini’s
Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines
(
Practica di Fabricar Scene e Machine ne’Teatri
, 1638) reflected Lipsius’s hierarchy of perception and understanding in practical terms: “the common or less cultivated persons are set on the tiers and at the sides”; the workings of the stage machines might be visible from there, but “such people do not observe them minutely.” In contrast, “the persons of culture and taste should be seated on the floor of the hall, as near the middle as possible, in the second or third rows. They will have the greatest pleasure there, since … all parts of the scenery are displayed in their perfection.”
¹³³
The better sort could take pleasure in the illusions of the stage – or the state – while “common or less cultivated persons” would be impressed even by an imperfect display.

Scholars credit Lipsius with the spread of this educated contempt for the common people in the seventeenth century.
¹³⁴
His views were
repeated by political philosophers such as Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who legitimated the social hierarchy of their age by mapping it on to a hierarchy of perception and understanding. The lower estate recognized only superficial and immediate impressions:

The common man, who relies merely on the external senses and makes little use of reason, cannot by himself properly grasp the majesty of a king. But through
the things that come before his eyes
and that touch his other senses, he receives a clear impression of his [sovereign’s] majesty, power and authority.
¹³⁵

It was in these terms that Julius Bernhard von Rohr argued that the inability of subjects to truly comprehend majesty was the primary reason for court spectacles and ceremonies.
¹³⁶
This contempt for the common people fits well with prevailing argument among scholars of court society that the diverse elements of the prince’s spectacles and pleasures were intended to speak simultaneously on several levels to several audiences.
¹³⁷
The political philosophy behind it all stated that the display of majesty did not merely reflect political power – it created it.
¹³⁸

When we use daily life as a category of analysis, the sun kings of the age of Louis XIV and Augustus II start to look more like “princes of darkness.” This was the image of Louis XIV, hooded and crowned by the moon, presented in a Netherlands caricature of 1691 (
Figure 4.7
). The constant use of darkness and the night by such sun kings to enhance their own (limited) brilliance invited this subversive identification. In daily life at court, the night connected autocratic rulers, aristocratic courtiers, and common subjects in a series of hierarchical fields of vision. Subjects gazed up at spectacles of light and power projected onto the night sky while princes and courtiers, seemingly face-to-face, shared an intimate “time of pleasures.” Darkness was vital to each of these displays: it enabled rulers to offer pleasure, demonstrate magnificence, and deceive their subjects, combining the fundamental political strategies of this age.
¹³⁹
The seventeenth-century insight that “shadows and lights are relative and reciprocal” and that “the order of nature … has made these two conditions inseparable,”
¹⁴⁰
extended from God to earthly rulers. This insight helps explain why in an age of “sun kings” the night became more important than ever before.

Figure 4.7
“Le Roi de France, l’Homme immortel Chef de la Ste. Ligue,” print by Jacob Gole (after Dusart?) depicting Louis XIV as a hooded arsonist, 1691. © Trustees of the British Museum, S.6693.