Evening's Empire (New Studies in European History)

by Craig Koslofsky

  This new idiom was of course the baroque, characterized by its “enthusiasm for spectacular means of irresistible persuasion.”6 Rulers deployed it in spiritual and secular contests across the fault lines of Western Christendom. The baroque expression of ideas, values, and goals sought to transcend the crisis of authority of the confessional age by bringing new emotional and intellectual forces into play, “shadowed” though they were “by suspicions about the pervasiveness of illusion or secrecy.”7 Darkness and the night were essential to baroque attempts to articulate and transcend confessional sources of authority: nocturnal darkness intensified the light that represented the Divine or the prince.8 The new uses of the night show rulers’ attempts to strengthen and supplement confessional sources of authority (“most Christian king”, “most Catholic king”, “defender of the faith”) with the “natural” authority of a “sun king.” Rulers had long presented themselves as light-givers and identified themselves with the sun, but in the baroque age princes deliberately used the chiaroscuro of light in the night to intensify these images, which began to supplement (though not supplant) traditional Christian symbols of power and authority.

  4.1 Nocturnal spectacles and pleasures

  Performing in his first court ballet on February 23, 1653, at age fourteen, Louis XIV of France (1643–1715) presented himself for the first time as “le roi soleil.” Louis danced several roles in the ballet, and in his final appearance, which concluded the play, he appeared in a radiant costume as the sun. (See Figure 4.1.) The first appearance of Louis as a sun king is striking, but its context is equally significant. The performance was the Ballet de la Nuit by Isaac de Benserade – and here, as in countless other spectacles of the era, a darkened background enhanced the appearance of a radiant monarch, evoking his power to dispel darkness and bedazzle his subjects.9 The court ballet, performed in the Petit-Bourbon just outside the Louvre, was open to all, from the royal family to the commoners of Paris. And this Ballet de la Nuit was performed at night, using the latest staging techniques and lighting effects, designed and operated by Giacomo Torelli.10 The Jesuit scholar of royal ceremony Claude-François Ménestrier singled it out as the finest example of the genre for the splendor of its costumes, stage décor, and lighting effects.11 Like Norris’s “Hymn to Darkness,” this episode in the “fabrication of Louis XIV” calls our attention to the use of the night (both symbolic and real) in the representation of a celestial ruler. Because it was performed at night, this ballet also reveals the nocturnalization of court theater, public spectacle, and elite sociability. The Ballet de la Nuit thus invites an examination of darkness and the night in court spectacles and in everyday activities at court.

  Figure 4.1 Louis XIV costumed as the sun in the Ballet de la Nuit, 1653. Pen, wash, and gouache touched with gold. Workshop of Henry de Gissey, contemporary illustration. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

  How did contemporaries view the court performances and royal spectacles of the baroque era?12 These events were meant to be “allegories of the state of the times” (as Ménestrier explained) and drew their importance, as Karl Möseneder has argued, from two fundamental political principles of the seventeenth century regarding the display and perception of power and authority. Like God, temporal rulers had to display their greatness in material creation. And common subjects had to be shown their sovereign’s majesty as directly as possible because they could not otherwise comprehend the abstract authority of the prince.13

  The comments of Louis XIV on the political role of spectacles at court addressed both the display and the perception of majesty. In the Mémoires, advice to the Dauphin written from 1661 on, the king described in practical terms the value of festivals and entertainment to the ruler. According to Louis, the court should be a “society of pleasures, which gives the courtiers an honest [honnête] familiarity with us, and touches and charms them more than one could say.” He contrasted this familiarity with the distance of his lesser subjects: “the people, on the other hand, enjoy spectacles, at which we, in any event, endeavor always to please.” Together, spectacles and pleasures were essential tools of government. “All our subjects in general are delighted to see that we like what they like,” commented Louis: “By this we hold their minds and their hearts, sometimes more strongly than we do by rewards or kindnesses.”14 Festivities, Louis XIV continued, directed the attention of the people away from deeper political issues, which they were in any case incapable of truly understanding, accustomed as they were to perceiving only the superficial.15 Here Louis XIV echoed Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), the influential Flemish Neostoic philosopher whose Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex) first appeared in 1589 and went into thirty-one Latin editions (and as many vernacular translations) in the seventeenth century. Lipsius discussed “the nature of the common people, and by what means the same may be discreetly governed” in the fourth book of the Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae, arguing that princes need celebrations and ceremonies to communicate with the common people, who are “void of reason … not led to judge of any thing by discretion or wisdom.” His analysis is founded on the assertion that “the common people are unstable, and nothing is more inconstant than the multitude.” There follows a selective concordance of classical authors intended to show “the chiefest passions of the people,” who are envious and suspicious, easily flattered and “slow of spirit.”16 Critics of increasing royal power such as Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) also acknowledged the political role of spectacles and pleasures:

  It is a sure and ancient maxim in politics that to allow the people to be lulled by festivals, spectacles, luxury, pomp, pleasures, vanity and effeminacy, to occupy their minds with worthless things, and to let them relish trifling frivolities, is efficiently preparing the way for a despotism.17

  As the time of both extraordinary spectacles and everyday pleasures at court, the night was, as we will see, fundamental to this political culture.

  After 1650, political theorists described the distinct but complementary roles of “pleasures” and “spectacles” and began to examine these events more systematically. Michel de Pure’s Principles of Spectacles Ancient and Modern (Ideé des spectacles anciens et nouveaux, 1668) lists ten forms of modern spectacle: theater, balls, fireworks, jousts, “Courses de Bague,” carrousels, masquerades, military exercises, royal entries, and ballet. His contemporary Ménestrier offered a similar list.18 The German school of Zeremonialwissenschaft (ceremonial studies), centered in Saxony and Brandenburg in the first half of the eighteenth century, discussed at length the relationships among spectacle, ceremony, and authority.19 The crowning work of the Zeremonialwissenschaftler was Julius Bernhard von Rohr’s Introduction to the Knowledge of Ceremony of Great Rulers (Einleitung zur Ceremoniel-Wissenschaft der Grossen Herren, 1729; second edn., 1733), which offers a similar analysis of courtly entertainment.20 According to Rohr, “pleasures [and] diversions” have “certain political goals behind them. They are meant to gain the love of the better sort and the rabble, because people’s spirits are more easily guided through such festivities which caress the exterior senses.”21 Rohr lists twelve types of diversions, including chivalric sports, opera, ballet and theater, and processions.22 Old and new sit side by side in all these lists, but the nocturnalization of court entertainment and festivity is especially striking. Of the dozen listed by Rohr, six (carnival/masquerade, dances/balls/ballet, opera, costume feasts, illuminations, and fireworks) were necessarily or typically nocturnal. The remaining equestrian diversions could also be held at night inside purpose-built riding halls. Torchlit evening sleigh rides are described at the imperial court in Vienna from the early seventeenth century on.23

  The nocturnalization of spectacle in the seventeenth century reshaped court architecture. The great spaces built for balls and celebrations at European courts (such as the Whitehall Banqueting House in London, the Herkules-Saal or the Kaiser-Saal at
the Munich residence, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, or the Riesensaal of Dresden’s Royal Palace), lit by innumerable candles, made possible more exclusive evening gatherings, allowing court society to develop and emphasize the night as never before in European civilization.24 Richard Alewyn was the first to link innovative uses of daily time with the new secular spaces of the baroque (some of the largest constructed since antiquity) in his work on baroque festival culture.25 He noted that between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, princely celebrations show a slow shift from the street to the court and from day to night. This was “the sharpest break in the history of celebrations in the West,” marking a new era in the history of the night.26

  The slow movement of European festivals and celebrations into the night, which had begun in the fifteenth century, quickened in the seventeenth.27 Lighting up the night had always been an elite privilege, but baroque celebrations used the night on an unprecedented scale as nocturnal entertainment began to take precedence over daytime festivities. In France a new era in the history of celebrations began on August 17, 1661, as the financier Nicolas Foucquet welcomed the young Louis XIV to Vaux-Le-Vicomte, Foucquet’s magnificent estate southeast of Paris.28 Vaux-Le-Vicomte, the first baroque chateau in France, is often described as the inspiration for Versailles. The king and his courtiers arrived at Vaux-Le-Vicomte in the late afternoon. After viewing the chateau, the royal party waited for sunset, when Foucquet’s celebration was to begin.29 The former protégé of Mazarin presented to the king an imposing nocturnal barrage of culture and luxury intended to display the wealth, power, and taste of the second-most powerful man in the kingdom. Molière wrote and performed in the evening’s comedy-ballet, The Impertinents (Les Fâcheux), with music composed by Pierre Beauchamp. The set designs, lighting, and fireworks displays were the work of Charles Le Brun and Torelli. The comedy-ballet, which began after the souper, was followed by several fireworks displays. Accounts of the celebration carefully noted that all this took place after dark, with the king and courtiers retiring sometime after 2 a.m. The nocturnal Gesamtkunstwerk Foucquet had presented served as a model for the well-known baroque celebrations of Louis XIV, such as the Plaisirs de l’île enchantée of 1664 and the Fête de Versailles of 1668.30 Rich accounts of the celebrations communicated in word and image (see Figure 4.2) the nocturnal splendor to a wider audience.

  Figure 4.2 Print by Israel Silvestre of firework display during “Les plaisirs de l’ile enchantée. Troisième journée,” 1664. © Trustees of the British Museum, 1889, 1218.139.

  If we look back a century, we can see what was new about nocturnalization at court. On June 27, 1559, Henry II of France (1519–59) opened a five-day tournament to celebrate the weddings of his daughter Elisabeth to Philip II of Spain and his sister Marguerite to Emmanuel-Philibert, duke of Savoy. The daytime jousts were the focus of the celebration, especially on the fateful third day. According to the eyewitness account of Antoine Caraccioli, bishop of Troyes, by five o’clock in the afternoon “the hour [was] late, the weather extremely hot, and the tournament concluded.” Queen Catherine and the noble spectators begged to Henry to retire, but he insisted that “he would break his lance once more,” with fatal results.31 To be sure, the festivals and celebrations of Henry II included lavish banquets at night, but the most elaborate events unfolded during the day.

  English court celebrations under Henry VII and Henry VIII, like the Burgundian court practices that inspired them, could involve complex allegorical figures dancing at banquets in the evening, as at the Feast of the Pheasant at Lille in 1454 or at the court pageant celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur and Catharine of Aragon in 1501.32 In these cases, however, the central message of the celebration was still articulated during the day. The evening entertainments “were appendages to the basic ingredients of any festive evening, feasting and dancing,” and they made no technical use of light and darkness.33 In this way they contrast sharply with the most important English court spectacles of the seventeenth century, the masques of James I and Charles I. The Burgundian and Tudor festivals would have been incomprehensible without their daytime elements; the Stuart court masques dropped the daytime events and communicated only at night with theatrical lighting and effects.34

  The courts of Protestant Germany show a similar expansion of the nocturnal aspects of festivals in the second half of the seventeenth century. In 1596, in celebration of the baptism of his eldest daughter, Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel held a chivalric tournament based on the myths of Jason and Perseus. Among the several days of jousting, racing, and knightly sport, only the climax of the entire celebration, marked by a spectacular fireworks display, was held at night.35 After 1650, German princes began to shift these celebrations into the evening and night as a sign of luxury and prestige. The month-long “Festival of the Planets” celebrated at the gathering of the dukes of Saxony in Dresden in February 1678 exemplifies this development.

  The “Festival of the Planets” organized by Elector John George II (1656–80) for his three brothers (dukes of the cadet lines of Saxony-Weißenfels, Saxony-Merseburg, and Saxony-Zeitz) also offered numerous jousts and other equestrian sport. But the emphasis had shifted to the evening activities. On at least thirteen evenings the festival included entertainment (opera, ballet, and theater) in Dresden’s court theater, the Komödienhaus, built in 1664. These performances, in particular the court “Ballet of the Planets,” were the centerpieces of the festival.36 The Dresden “Festival of the Planets,” which concluded with a massive fireworks display, was meant to demonstrate to the three younger brothers of John George II the culture and power concentrated at the Dresden court. For much of the festival, John George II and his court artists chose the night as the most effective background for this display; without these nocturnal performances the festival’s theme would have made no sense.

  The nocturnal celebrations of the Dresden court reached their high point under Frederick Augustus I, from 1697 also King Augustus II of Poland (1694/97–1733).37 Through his election to the Polish throne in 1697 and his spectacular cultural politics, centered on his opulent courts at Dresden and Warsaw, Augustus sought to join the preeminent monarchs of his era.38 Also depicting himself as a sun king, his celebrations, such as the nocturnal festivities at the Holländisches Palais during the wedding of the electoral prince in 1719, turned night into day. Even equestrian events were held at night: the Dresden Reithaus, illuminated by thousands of candles, was the scene of riding displays during Carnival in 1695 (see Figure 4.3) and during the visit of the Danish king Frederick IV (1699–1730) to the Saxon court in 1709.

  Figure 4.3 Illuminated tourney in the Dresden Reithaus, 1695. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett. Photo courtesy SLUB / Dept. Deutsche Fotothek, Herbert Ludwig.

  Alongside these nocturnal festivities, a much older use of the night was the display of fireworks, taken to new heights at the courts of the baroque era.39 With unintended irony, fireworks lit up the heavens for an instant before falling to earth, marrying the spectacular display of nocturnal power to a sense of the instability and illusion behind this display.40 This period also expanded the visual and political counterpoint to the fireworks display, the urban “illumination.” Instead of the single skyward focus of the fireworks display, the illumination placed multiple lights in the windows of a single building or across an entire city, a massive yet precise display of loyalty and obedience to the ruler who ordered the illumination or was celebrated by it. (See Figure 4.4, illumination of the Hôtel de Ville, Ghent for the entry of the Habsburg Charles VI in 1717.) A Viennese pamphlet of 1706 lauded “true-hearted vassals / who have illuminated your houses and palaces / with new fires of joy” – an offering of light and loyalty to the emperor.41 A Saxon author writing in 1736 emphasized the novelty of the practice: “It is difficult to say when the art of illumination arose in Germany. In my opinion it is unlikely one would have seen them before the end of the previous seventeenth century.”42

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bsp; Figure 4.4 Illumination of the Hôtel de Ville, Ghent, 1717. Engraving, 1719. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Bildarchiv, Vienna, 462.224-A/B.

  Two aspects of the political role of spectacles must be mentioned here. First, it is important to note that early modern polities not dominated by courts, such as the Venetian Republic, the United Provinces, and the German Free Imperial Cities, also used fireworks, illuminations, and theater to display power and authority to domestic and foreign audiences. Figure 4.5 shows a magnificent fireworks display in Bremen celebrating the “Respublica Bremensis” from 1668.43 Second, the politics of spectacle and pleasure described here did not guarantee political success. The masques of Charles I of England presented to the king an ideal world of authority and virtue, but they had little meaning to important parts of the political nation. The last masque staged for Charles I, Sir William Davenant’s Salmacida Spolia of 1640, was viewed with trepidation by its audience; one courtier considered himself “being so wise as not to see it.”44 In similar terms, the spectacular court life of King-Elector Augustus II of Poland and Saxony did not attract the Saxon nobles who opposed his conversion to Catholicism and his absolutist policies. Throughout his long reign, these nobles had to be forced to attend some of his major celebrations. Of the 112 Saxon nobles personally invited to the Dresden wedding of the electoral prince and the Habsburg princess Maria Josephine in 1719, only 52 were initially willing to attend. The other 60 offered a wide range of excuses from poverty to ill health; some later succumbed to pressure from Augustus and did appear.45 Court festivities demanded participation (often costly) on the terms set by the prince as host and affirmed the sovereign’s image as displayed – but subjects could and did refuse the pleasures and spectacles offered at court. The fact that nocturnal pleasures and spectacles were deployed by every prince of this age – successfully or not – is further evidence of the belief in their power.46