Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [13]
I have known fogs so thick that you could not see the flame in [the] lamps; so thick that the coachmen have had to get down from their boxes and feel their way along the walls. Passers-by, unwilling and unwitting, collided in the tenebrous streets; and you marched in at your neighbour's door under the impression that it was your own.... One year the fogs were so dense, that a new expedient was tried; which was, to engage blind men, pensioners, as guides ... for they know Paris better than those who have made our maps.... You took hold of the skirt of the blind man's coat, and off he started, stepping firmly, while you more dubiously followed, towards your destination.
Perhaps no city had a more complex relationship with street lighting than Paris. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, lantern smashing—once simply a rogue's pastime—became not only a symbol of defiance but also a strategy in the rebellion against the state. "The darkness that spread as lanterns were smashed created an area in which government forces could not operate," notes historian Wolfgang Schivelbush. "Lantern smashing erected a wall of darkness, so to speak." Or returned the streets to their old dark.
And streetlights took on even greater significance in the days after the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. Before the revolutionists adopted the guillotine for retribution—"the clanking of its huge axe, rising and falling there, in horrid systole-diastole"—they chose not signposts or trees on which to hang French officials, but the lanterns. "In the summer of 1789, the meaning of the French verb lanterner changed," notes Schivelbush. "Originally, this word meant 'to do nothing' or 'to waste one's time.' At the beginning of the Revolution, it meant 'to hang a man from a lantern.'"
Charles Dickens suggested that "the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long as to conceive the idea of improving upon his method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition." Lantern cables were meant to carry the weight of one small light. During the hangings, "not infrequently, the hapless offender had to be taken to four or even six réverbères before a rope strong enough to survive this treatment was found." Hangings were not confined to the lanterns strung across the streets on cables. Those in the city's squares, which could not be spanned by a rope, were affixed to the walls, and it was in such a square that Joseph-François Foulon de Doué, controller general of finances under Louis XVI, was hung. Foulon—who had suggested that if the people were hungry, they could browse on grass—was "whirled across the Place de Grève, to the 'Lanterne' ... pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded) can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds ... from a grass-eating people."
The verb lanterner must have meant little to those in the French countryside, who endured in darkness the same hunger and want as the poor of Paris. Once the night had been the same for all; now light began to separate more fully country from city. Little by little, the city night began to influence the rhythms of its day. The privileged and wealthy, who had always been profligate with light—the more their parties and dances were brilliantly illuminated, the greater seemed their position and power—now habitually rose late in the day, so that rising late, too, became a mark of prestige. One of their contemporaries complained that the courtiers altered "the order of nature by making the day into night and the night into day, namely when they stay awake