Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (29 page)

In Paris public order at night was the main concern. By the 1690s many of the city’s cafés stayed open all night, marked by a lighted lantern at the door.
⁷⁵
These establishments, licensed through the guild of
limonadiers
, were singled out in an ordinance of February 16, 1695 as “places of assembly and refuge for thieves, rogues, and malicious and dissolute people; this happens all the more easily because they are designated and distinguished from other houses by their private lanterns, out on the street, that are lit every evening and serve as signals.”
⁷⁶
Lieutenant-general of police La Reynie ordered that henceforth all
limonadiers
shops must close at 5 p.m. from November 1 to March 31 and at 9 p.m. from April 1 to October 31. After these hours it was “forbidden to admit any person of one or the other sex, whatever age or profession they might be.” In the case of the cafés of Paris, the colonization of the night meant the
elimination
of private lighting at night: the 1695 ordinance required all café proprietors “who have placed private lanterns on the street in front of their homes and shops to remove them within twenty-four hours.”
⁷⁷
The sharp restriction of the cafés’ evening hours was quickly relaxed: less than a month later the closing hours were extended to 6 p.m. (December and January), 7 p.m. (November and February–March), and 10 p.m. from April to November. In October 1695 they were extended again to 7 p.m. in the winter and 10 p.m. in the summer.
⁷⁸

By the end of the seventeenth century, coffeehouses were an established part of urban life for the well-born. The finer establishments resembled the private parlors of aristocrats’ homes, transplanting an aristocratic space into bourgeois life.
⁷⁹
It was in coffeehouses that many burghers first encountered billiards, for example, as well as chocolate, tea, and fine porcelain. But coffeehouses taught the aristocratic consumption of time as well, leading respectable men into late hours. A letter of Mary Jepp Clarke (1656?–1705), wife of the Whig MP Edward Clarke and lifelong friend and correspondent of John Locke, describes evening leisure for “young gentlemen” in London. Writing to her sister-in-law Ursula Clarke Venner in March 1691,
Mary agreed that her young male cousin Venner “should lodge as near us as he can” because the young man is “a perfect stranger here and to the tricks of the town which many times young gentlemen fall into at first.” The risk, Clarke notes, lies in the typical use of the night by young men in London:

for want of a friend to go to when the evening draws on, [they] … so get to a coffee [“coughfy”!] house or tavern or worse to spend their time, but to prevent that necessity in my cousin while I am here at least, I will get a lodging for him in the same house where we are.
⁸⁰

Clarke considered socializing in the evening a “necessity” for young gentlemen but sought a more domestic, feminine setting for her cousin’s evenings in London. Writing for young gentlemen visiting Paris in 1718, Joachim Christoph Nemeitz noted that “I approve that a young traveler goes from time to time to coffeehouses, in the late afternoon or around evening time, to listen to the conversation of the news-bearers.”
⁸¹
In his
Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Private Persons
(
Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Privat-Personen
, 1728), Julius Bernhard von Rohr advised his readers that “among the ways of passing the time that one finds in large cities, especially in the winter and in the long evenings, it might happen that a young person visits the coffeehouses.”
⁸²
The key, Rohr cautioned, was in the choice of coffeehouse, as not all were respectable.

In texts and images coffeehouses are always represented at night, suggesting that evening gatherings were the most salient part of this new institution. One of the best-known images from London, probably from the 1690s, shows numerous candles on the tables and a man illuminating a picture or notice on the wall (
Figure 6.2
). The cafés of Paris, with their distinctive décor and clientele, are recorded by the frontispiece of the Chevalier de Mailly’s
Les entretiens des cafés de Paris et les diferens qui y surviennent
of 1702, which shows well-dressed men and women enjoying conversation and games by candlelight while served by a boy in Armenian garb (
Figure 6.3
).
⁸³
An engraving by Casper Luyken (1699) published widely in the early eighteenth century shows a candlelit scene with a maid bringing a dish of coffee (
Figure 6.4
).
⁸⁴
These two images and the Dutch
illustration of
’t Koffyhuis
(
Figure 6.5
) are each centered on the candles that illuminate the dark space of the coffeehouse. The earliest representations of the coffeehouse on stage were also nocturnal. In London a play called
Knavery in all trades, or, The coffeehouse a comedy
, performed and printed in 1664, presented a scene of “The Coffeehouse discovered; three or four Tables set forth, on which are placed small Wax-Lights, Pipes, and Diurnals.”
⁸⁵
In his play
Le Caffé
(1694), Jean-Baptiste Rousseau sets much of the action at night in the Paris café of Madame Jérosme, who at midnight asks her male customers to leave because “it is the hour when women replace men in the cafés.” As we will see below, this claim that women arrive at midnight includes some dramatic license, but the association of café life with the night is clear. When Madame Jérosme is asked “Do you agree with this nocturnal recreation?” She replies “Oh, certainly – if one had no other income than the expenditures made here by day, without the fortuitous income of the night, it would be foolish to aim very high.”
⁸⁶
The frontispiece of the play
’t Koffyhuis
, published in Amsterdam in 1712, presents a similar scene illuminated by candlesticks and a chandelier.
⁸⁷

Figure 6.2
A London coffeehouse with a woman behind the counter, left; mid or late 1690s (the inscription “A.S. 1668” is false). © Trustees of the British Museum, 1931,0613.2.

Figure 6.3
Paris café scene with well-dressed women patrons; frontispiece of Chevalier de Mailly,
Les entretiens des cafés de Paris
(Trevoux, 1702). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 6.4
Dutch / German coffeehouse scene with a maid serving a dish of coffee. Engraving by Casper Luyken, 1699. Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

Figure 6.5
Dutch coffeehouse scene from the frontispiece of Willem Van Der Hoeven,
’t Koffyhuis: kluchtspel
(Amsterdam,
1712
). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Across Europe, authorities were concerned about late hours and political conversations at coffeehouses. The attempt by Charles II to close “the Multitude of Coffee-houses” in England in 1675 is well known. His proclamation described them as “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons” which “have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many Tradesmen and others, do therein misspend much of their time,” although there is no mention of the night or late hours in the proclamation or any of the official discussions leading up to their suppression.
⁸⁸
As mentioned above,
La Reynie imposed closing hours on the cafés of Paris in 1695; a decade earlier, a minister of Louis XIV wrote to La Reynie, explaining “The king has been informed that, in several places where coffee is served, there are assemblies of all sorts of people, and especially foreigners. Upon which His Majesty ordered me to ask whether you do not think it would be appropriate to prevent them from assembling in the future.”
⁸⁹
No action was taken – apparently it was not considered opportune to close these cafés in Paris.

Vienna authorities imposed a 10 p.m. closing time on coffeehouses in summer and winter in 1703; in 1706 several coffeehouses were cited for violations, and in 1707 the closing time in winter was moved to 9 p.m.
⁹⁰
In his guide to the imperial court and Vienna the French Benedictine Casimir Freschot also remarked on the city’s night life and on the discussion of “the conduct of generals, ministers, and even the Emperor himself” in the cafés of Vienna.
⁹¹
In Leipzig the city council was concerned to regulate coffeehouses from their first establishment in 1694. A flurry of regulation began in 1697, when the council noted that “especially in the new and unauthorized tea- and coffee-rooms … guests are kept after the hour set in the Electoral Saxon ordinance.” Gambling, luxury, and “the company of suspicious women” are mentioned. Later that year and in 1701 the council issued further ordinances regulating young people on the streets at night.
⁹²
The council’s regulation of coffeehouses escalated in 1704, when it threatened to reduce number of coffeehouses in the city or forbid them entirely.
⁹³

The fate of the coffeehouses of Frankfurt am Main in 1703–05 reveals just how much anxiety their late hours and political associations could cause. In 1702 the Frankfurt
Rechenmeister
“ordered the owners of the coffee houses … that they … should not keep their guests longer than 9 o’clock in the evening in the winter, and in the summer only until 10 o’clock” – as we have seen, a typical regulation of the hours of coffeehouses and other public houses. There were in fact only three coffeehouses in Frankfurt at this time, but they greatly concerned the city council. The following year the council’s regulation of the coffeehouses went much further. On November 20, 1703 the Frankfurt city council, citing “disturbing and dangerous times,” ordered that “we shall three months from today entirely abolish the coffeehouses.” In the
meantime, the coffeehouse proprietors were threatened with “immediate prohibition” of their trade if they failed to close their establishments promptly at the curfew bell and further ordered “not to re-open for anyone, whomever it might be” after closing time. In the three months they would be allowed to remain open, the proprietors of the coffeehouses were warned to “set aside no special rooms for any guests other than the ordinary main room, eliminate all gaming, and serve nothing other than coffee, tea, and chocolate.”
⁹⁴