Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History) (30 page)

Three months later, on February 21, 1704, the council reported that:

the deadline for closing the coffeehouses has passed … so today the coffeehouse keepers shall be sent to the office of the
Rechneiamt
and informed that they must immediately take in their coffee signs and serve no guests coffee or other drinks, on pain of severe punishment. And the honorable
Rechneiamt
shall be reminded to take care that none of the taverns serve any coffee or other warm drinks.
⁹⁵

The office that enforced the abolition, the
Rechneiamt
, reported on the same day that “the coffee-men have been informed by a servant of this office that the coffeehouses shall now be abolished and cease; nor shall they serve tea or chocolate any more.” The coffeehouse owners were ordered “today to take down the coffee signs from their premises and be coffee-men no longer.”
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The coffeehouses remained closed for over a year. On March 24, 1705 two former coffeehouse owners were allowed to reopen under several conditions, including new closing hours of 9 p.m., summer and winter.

The city council’s decision to close Frankfurt’s coffeehouses in 1703 was political. Among dozens of taverns, inns, and other public houses, the city’s three coffeehouses stood out as gathering places for wealthy merchants, military officers, and diplomats involved with the War of the Spanish Succession. The city’s troops had just shared in the defeat of imperial forces at the Battle of Speyerbach on November 15 when the plan to close the coffeehouses was announced. Long-standing tensions between the patrician oligarchy ruling Frankfurt and the merchants and craftsmen who formed its economic base threatened to boil over, and the council saw the coffeehouses as a threat to their rule.
⁹⁷
Despite scholars’ concerns about an overemphasis on coffeehouses
in the history of early modern public life, in the Frankfurt case the coffeehouses were singled out for closure because of the political connections of their customers.
⁹⁸
In 1705 thirty-six established merchants petitioned the Frankfurt council for approval of a private club they had established. It met only in the evenings and served as a replacement for the prohibited coffeehouses, underscoring the importance of nocturnal sociability in bourgeois and coffeehouse culture.
⁹⁹
In larger cities across Northern Europe these private clubs, described by Joseph Addison matter-of-factly as “nocturnal assemblies,” flourished in the eighteenth century.
¹⁰⁰

The evidence here shows that the hours after sunset were fundamental to the sites and practices of the public sphere at the end of the seventeenth century. In a valuable intervention in the discussion of the formation of a public sphere in early modern Europe, Brian Cowan contrasted a public focused on “the magisterial realm of state power and high politics” with “the world of commercialized leisure that developed independently of the state.”
¹⁰¹
Together, ministers of state and consumers of leisure colonized the night and created the time and space in which the bourgeois public sphere formed.
¹⁰²
The process was anything but linear, of course: young people resisted the discipline that was the cutting edge of the colonization of the night, and political authorities struggled to control the “highly disturbing discourses and every sort of dangerous conversation, late into the night” that seemed an unavoidable corollary of nocturnalization.

This back-and-forth process of nocturnalization is the analogue in daily life to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere itself. The ambiguous relationship between the urban night and the state seen here mirrors a key aspect of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere:

Bourgeois publicness may be grasped first as the sphere of private people come together as a public; these [people] quickly claimed the public sphere regulated by the authorities against the public authorities themselves.
¹⁰³

Private persons used the night which the authorities had helped secure as a time to test the limits of these same authorities, and city authorities found themselves policing and restricting the very nocturnal sociability they facilitated through their colonization of the night.
Seeing the bourgeois public sphere as an aspect of nocturnalization (both in its sites and practices, as discussed here, and in its intellectual predilections, as will be discussed in
chapter 8
) further historicizes Habermas’s arguments. At present, the most trenchant historical analysis of the rise of a public sphere has come from scholars of gender in early modern culture.
¹⁰⁴
How does using the night as a category of analysis shape our understanding of gender and the public sphere in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries?

Looking back, Friedrich Justin Bertuch sought to explain the nocturnalization of early modern daily life in his 1786 essay on “the uses and divisions of the day and the night in various ages, and among various peoples.” After noting that “the pleasures of the evening and night … are the ruling fashion in France and England, and in every large city, where luxury and the need for entertainment are always on the rise,”
¹⁰⁵
he began his analysis with the observation that “the day invites movement and the night rest.” The entertainments of the daylight hours, such as tourneys, the hunt, horse-racing, and the like, he then contrasts with the pleasures of the night, such as the theater, cards, and conversation. The predominance of the nocturnal pursuits reflects, in Bertuch’s understanding, the feminization of European culture: “In the past, when most nations of Europe were somewhat rawer, but also stronger and more manly, they more loved strenuous bodily exercises; now as they become more polite and refined, the calmer and more thoughtful pastimes replace the physical ones.”
¹⁰⁶

Bertuch’s connection of night life and feminization was first voiced in England and France in the second half of the seventeenth century. An early English broadside on the coffeehouse, the
News from the Coffe-House
of 1674, claimed that the culture of the coffeehouses confused gender roles:

Here Men do talk of every Thing,

With large and Liberal lungs,

Like women at a Gossiping,

With a double tyre of Tongues.
¹⁰⁷

Fears of feminization shaped elite culture in France and England at the end of the seventeenth century: concerns about the emasculating effects of absolute monarchy in France ran parallel to worries about politeness, commerce, and luxury in England.
¹⁰⁸
But these concerns about feminization should not obscure a broader question: how did nocturnalization affect women’s place in public and daily life? To go beyond generalizations and assess how early modern women used and experienced the urban night requires precise attention to a range of sites, from the court and the theater to the coffeehouse, salon, and street.

At court, we saw women and men together extending the day into the evening and night. Neither the favorable nor the critical descriptions of night life at court examined in
chapter 4
of this book make any distinction between women and men – both are the new denizens of the night, for better or for worse (recall Faramond’s “Clorinde and Cleomenes”). The aristocratic use of daily time could be seen “in the lives of the courtiers of both sexes, who make night into day and day into night.”
¹⁰⁹
No sources on the night at court suggest that there is any time for men to be active when women should not be, or vice versa.

How did the gender order of daily time at court look in the light of the street lamps? In urban spaces that served as extensions of the court, for example in Vienna or Paris, aristocratic women used the night freely to socialize and maintain social networks. Not long after street lighting was introduced in Paris, Madame de Sévigné described an evening spent chatting with her friends until midnight “chez Mme De Coulanges” – the date was December 4, 1673. Madame de Sévigné decided to escort one of their number home, although it meant a trip across Paris: “We found it pleasant to be able to go, after midnight, to the far end of the faubourg Saint-Germain.” The new street lighting made this possible: “We returned merrily, thanks to the lanterns and safe from thieves.”
¹¹⁰
One detects no sense of danger to her safety or reputation in this account. This relationship to the night was summarized by the writer Gregorio Leti in a letter to the marquise de Courcelles of 1679. Leti observed that the domestic occupations of women “constitute a state of servitude, as we have observed in all
lands of the earth, in times ancient and modern.” But recently the aristocratic relationship to the night had changed all this: “However, one can say that French ladies have put this state of things into good order, since three parts of the night out of four, and two out of the four parts of the day are spent in strolls, visits, late evenings, balls, and games.”
¹¹¹
Leti’s slightly critical tone underscores the novelty of this night life.

A contemporary of Madame de Sévigné, the Austrian countess Johanna Theresia Harrach (1639–1716), made and received countless evening social visits in Vienna and spent time at the imperial court and its theater on long winter nights from about 1665 on. As the wife of the imperial ambassador to Spain, she maintained a wide social network and presence at court, especially during her husband’s absences in Spain. Her detailed daily letters show that she usually returned home between nine and ten at night: when the court was in Vienna from November through April, this schedule meant regularly traveling through the city by carriage long after dark.
¹¹²
In similar terms, in a letter written from London on February 13, 1710 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu considered herself to be “the only young woman in town … in my own house at ten o’clock to-night.” It was “the night of Count Turrucca’s ball,” a “Splendid … entertainment” hosted by the Portuguese ambassador. Lady Mary’s narrow conception of “the town” gives us a clear indication of which women were out after 10 p.m. with their reputations intact.
¹¹³
John Vanbrugh’s unfinished play
A Journey to London
(written in the early 1720s) satirized the night life of aristocratic women in a lively exchange between “Lord Loverule” and his wife, Lady Arabella:

LORD LOVERULE:
But, madam, can you think it a reasonable thing to be abroad till two o’clock in the morning, when you know I go to bed at eleven?

LADY ARABELLA:
And can you think it a wise thing (to talk your own way now) to go to bed at eleven, when you know I am likely to disturb you by coming there at three?

LORD LOVERULE:
Well, the manner of women’s living of late is insupportable, and some way or other –

LADY ARABELLA:
It’s to be mended, I suppose. – Pray, my lord, one word of fair argument. You complain of my late hours; I of your early ones;
so far we are even, you’ll allow. But which gives us the best figure in the eye of the polite world? My two o’clock speaks life, activity, spirit, and vigour; your eleven has a dull, drowsy, stupid, good-for-nothing sound with it. It savours much of a mechanic, who must get to bed betimes that he may rise early to open his shop, faugh!

LORD LOVERULE:
I thought to go to bed early and rise so, was ever esteemed a right practice for all people.

LADY ARABELLA:
Beasts do it.

After comparing her husband to a low “mechanic,” Lady Arabella responds to her husband’s concerns about her late-night companions: “I’ll have you to know I keep company with the politest people in the town, and the assemblies I frequent are full of such.”
¹¹⁴

The daily rhythms of a well-born couple in London emerge from the diary of James Brydges (1674–1744; made first duke of Chandos, 1719). Brydges and his wife Mary maintained a busy social life in London, recorded in Brydges’s diary for the years 1697 to 1702. Coffeehouses were fundamental to James Brydges’s daily life; he records visiting them during the day and at night, traveling across London with his wife by coach. As Brian Cowan has noted, Mary Brydges never accompanied her husband into any of the coffeehouses. Her evenings were spent in domestic visits, which were no less important for the socially aspiring couple. They make similar use of the evening and night for socializing and leisure, but the public houses visited by the husband contrast with the domestic socializing of the wife.
¹¹⁵

The purported freedom of “French ladies” over “three parts of the night out of four” carried over into the first cafés of Paris as well. As historians of coffee have established, the cafés of Paris presented a distinctly aristocratic décor which contrasted with the more utilitarian furnishings of English coffeehouses. The first truly successful café in Paris, the Procope, opened in a former Turkish bath in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain in 1686. The proprietor kept the mirrors, chandeliers, and marble table-tops of the bathhouse, and these “well-furnished rooms” quickly attracted a well-to-do clientele.
¹¹⁶
As noted above, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau’s play
Le Caffé
(1694) revolves around the presence of women as customers at night in the café of Madame Jérosme.
¹¹⁷
An ephemeral style journal,
Le porte-feuille
galant
, explained in 1700 that “cafes are places frequented by honest people of both sexes.” The social variety mentioned so often in accounts of coffeehouses and cafés appears here as well. “You can see all sorts of characters,” including