Day and Night

Tim Blanning reviews Craig Koslofsky's Evening's Empire: A history of the night in early modern Europe:

In 1710, Richard Steele wrote in Tatler that recently he had been to visit an old friend just come up to town from the country. But the latter had already gone to bed when Steele called at 8 pm. He returned at 11 o’clock the following morning, only to be told that his friend had just sat down to dinner. “In short”, Steele commented, “I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest”. During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”.

The case is well made, supported by an impressive range of archival and printed sources, mostly French, English and German. More than fifty years ago, Richard Alewyn published his study of court festivities Das grosse Welttheater (“The great theatre of the world”). It proved to be highly influential, not only in its own right but also because it supplied Jürgen Habermas with much of what little empirical illustration he provided in his even more seminal The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Alewyn’s main concern was the change that took place in the seventeenth century, as the grand secular festivals moved spatially from streets and public squares into palaces, and temporally from day to night. Now the carriages of courtiers going home to bed passed labourers going to work. Koslofsky gives due recognition to Alewyn’s insight but goes a long way beyond it. . . .

In the sixteenth century, he points out, the main media of royal representation were the jousts and tournaments held in the daytime, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the Anglo-French spectacular of 1520. By the time of Louis XIV, all the major events – ballets de cour, operas, balls, masquerades, firework displays – took place at night (a major exception, of course, was hunting, about which Koslofsky has nothing to say). When was the “art of illumination” discovered in the Holy Roman Empire? asked a Saxon writer in 1736, and concluded that it must have been towards the end of the previous century. The kings, courtiers – and those who sought to emulate them – adjusted their daily timetable accordingly. Unlike Steele’s friend, they rose and went to bed later and later. Henry III of France, who was assassinated in 1589, usually had his last meal at 6 pm and was tucked up in bed by 8. Louis XIV’s day began with a lever at 9 and ended (officially) at around midnight.

Fascinating. I sort of thought that the shift to "night life" came with improvements in artificial lighting, like the whale-oil-burning "hurricane lamp" of the later 1700s. But perhaps the causality ran the other way, and a huge effort was made to develop new lighting sources because of the new fashion.