ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Stars & Contested Nights: Astronomers, Police, and Streetlighting Engineers in Late 18th-Century - 19th-Century Paris

• In Event: Public Health and Governance in the 19th and Early 20th Century

English Abstract

How did the night-streetlighting-society problem and its vocabulary emerge? What images and imaginaries did they produce? How did the framing of the problem hierarchize, canonize, or erase different types of knowledge, together with their actors? How did they finally define (un)legitimate, (un)necessary uses of the night?
This communication will historicize the defense of the Parisian night sky by studying the regimes of rationality specific to the police, astronomers and industrialists of street lighting when they put in balance the starry sky and useful science on the one hand, security, modernity and urban comfort on the other.
The investigation will show that the night became a node of conflicts, an occasion of competition between increasingly specialized knowledge of the actors involved: astronomical knowledge, behavioral sciences, or knowledge of government (engineering, statistics, inventories, etc.)

As an analytical "thermometer," the paper probes the presence of pro-night advocates in debates over light nuisance, focusing on astronomers’ opposition to monumental lighting projects (like “Sun-Tower” urban lighthouses) that periodically surfaced and symbolized the zenith of networked city ambitions. A second approach uses nineteenth-century balloon flights to construct a visual history of light pollution, situating aeronauts as privileged nighttime observers of urban transformation. This dual perspective will reveal how nocturnal cityscapes became sites of contested knowledge and shifting public imaginaries.

Author

• Benjamin BOTHEREAU