Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (23 page)

do not allow the night to be completely dark, but light it up with lamps burning at intervals, the purpose of which is both to take care of the safety of the community and to prevent useless wandering about; they also make the night watches less worrisome.

As we will see below, the first European street lighting, established in the 1660s, marked an extraordinary turning point in the history of the night. There was no actual street lighting that could serve as a model for Andreä in
1619
, and none of his predecessors imagined street lighting in their utopias. The traditional association of the night with sin and the Devil are clear, but Andreä innovates by acknowledging legitimate night work:

In this way they also set themselves against the dark kingdom and murky games of Satan, and wish to be reminded of the Eternal Light … Let us not draw back from that arrangement [i.e., street lighting] which calms the fears of
people working in the darkness
[my emphasis], and which makes it easier to see through the veil which our own flesh is glad to draw over licentiousness and dissolute behavior.

Quite presciently, Andreä notes that street lighting will be an expensive proposition, but he imagines a night freed from moral and physical darkness:

Also there is no reason to discuss the expense here in Christianopolis, since they are extremely frugal in other respects – whereas in other places there is the greatest extravagance in almost everything. If only more were spent on light there would not be so much opportunity at night for all kinds of evil, nor such a great number of shady dealings!
²⁴

This account of street lighting stands out because the rich utopian tradition from which Andreä drew, in particular More’s
Utopia
and Campanella’s “city of the sun,” made no provision for such legitimate nocturnal activities.

Like his contemporary Böhme, Andreä understood the everyday world as a Christian allegory without abandoning its intrinsic significance. Each detail of Christianopolis represents an aspect of the life of the individual Christian, but Andreä also sought to realize an actual community like Christianopolis among his peers. On both levels – as allegory and as daily life – the imagined street lighting of
Christianopolis
documents a new relationship with darkness and the night emerging in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The street lighting imagined by Andreä in
1619
anticipated the actual establishment of public street lighting in European cities by a half-century. To create and maintain this sort of street lighting both technical and political problems had to be solved. The spread of street lighting across Northern Europe was based in part on the refinement of lamp and lantern design. The decisive steps were taken in Amsterdam, where the painter and inventor Jan van der Heyden (1637–1712) experimented during the 1660s with oil-lamps in glass-paned lanterns. Lamp-lanterns of his sophisticated design, which used the current of air drawn into the lantern by combustion to keep soot from collecting on the glass, made Amsterdam the first European city to install truly effective street lighting. Admiring the city, the German student Friedrich Lucae commented that “in the evening the entire city is illuminated with lanterns, so that one can
pass through the crowds of people just as in broad daylight.”
²⁵
The superiority of van der Heyden’s design is suggested by its rapid adoption across the United Provinces and Hamburg (under the supervision of van der Heyden), and by its unauthorized use in Berlin, Dublin, Leipzig, and elsewhere.
²⁶
Figure 5.1
shows an overview of the van der Heyden lantern design: note the air intake hole in the lantern post.

Figure 5.1
Oil-lamp, lantern, and post designed by Jan van der Heyden, 1660s. Archives municipales de Lille, Affaires Générales 1256, dossier 9, fo. 122 (
c
. 1700).

When we see early modern street lighting as an international development, the political initiative to establish the lighting becomes especially significant. Despite its presumed benefits, city councils were not eager to incur the new expense of public lighting. Patricians in self-governing cities such as Amsterdam and Hamburg chose to set up and pay for street lighting themselves, but they were the exception. In most cases territorial rulers established the lighting in their capital cities and forced their subjects to pay for it.
²⁷
In cities including Paris, Turin, Berlin, and Vienna, the initiative came from the monarch. In London and Westminster, private street-lighting companies contracted with the city to light specific streets and collect the corresponding fees; in Dublin (1697) and Lübeck (1704) individual entrepreneurs tried (with less success) to provide the service.
²⁸

The introduction of street lighting in Paris in 1667 by the “council for the reform of the policing of the city” of Louis XIV was the first of many cases of royal initiative to provide public lighting. Jean Baptiste Colbert proposed the street lighting to the council in a discussion of the night watch in December 1666, and he and his uncle Henri Pussort carried out the lighting project in 1667. The lighting and improved street cleaning were financed by a new “tax of mud and lanterns” (
taxe des boues et lanternes
), which became the only significant direct tax on householders in Paris under the Old Regime.
²⁹
By 1702 there were 5,400 public candle-lanterns in place across the city, lit from October to March.
³⁰
Unlike the Amsterdam lanterns mounted on posts, in Paris the lanterns held candles and were suspended about fifteen feet above the middle of the street by ropes, raised and lowered with a
pulley.
Figure 5.2
shows two lanterns above the rue Quinquempoix in 1720.

Figure 5.2
Print showing the rue Quinquempoix, Paris, 1720, with candle-lanterns suspended above the street. From the broadsheet “Abbildung des auf der Strasse Qvincampoix in Paris enstandenen so berühmten Actien-Handels” (Nuremberg: Christoph Weigel, 1720). © Trustees of the British Museum, 1882,0812.461.

Compared with Paris, Berlin was a modest provincial town in the second half of the seventeenth century, but it was the residence of Frederick William I, the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg-Prussia (1640–88), who ordered in 1679 that the residents of Berlin should hang a lantern light outside every third house at dusk each evening from September to May. The Berliners failed to comply and on September 23, 1680 the citizenry petitioned the elector to eliminate the lighting requirement, arguing that they could not afford it.
³¹
The elector responded by establishing public street lighting on the Amsterdam model, using van der Heyden’s lantern design and maintenance plan. About 1,600 lanterns went up in the three districts of the city (Berlin, Cölln, and Werder) – all at the citizens’ expense.
³²

As Vienna recovered from the siege of 1683, imperial authorities began to police the city more effectively. In 1685 an imperial patent reinforced the city law requiring anyone out after the curfew
bell to carry a lantern. In 1687 the imperial administrator of Lower Austria, Count Johann Quintin Jörger, began the establishment of public street lighting in Vienna. Several obstacles to the plan quickly emerged: there were not enough tinsmiths in Vienna to manufacture the lanterns, the start-up and maintenance costs were higher than expected, and the city council resisted the lighting measure because of its expense. With the support of Emperor Leopold I, Jörger was able to set up the lighting by the following spring: the streets were lit for the first time on Pentecost eve (June 5), 1688. The lighting was
financed by a tax on imported wine, arranged through an intricate compromise with the city council. In 1698 the city council, which was already supplying twenty-six night-lanterns for the inner courtyard of the imperial palace (the Hofburg) itself, was asked “by the spoken request of the imperial court” to also illuminate the imperial palace of Ebersdorf, just outside the city walls, with fourteen lanterns.
³³
The court made ready use of the municipal lighting system to illuminate its own representative buildings.

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