This book offers an unprecedented history of the beginnings of street lighting in 18th-century France. Read More
How do you explain the fact that in the collective memory, street lighting remains associated with the invention of gas and electricity, rather than with the obligation imposed on the main provincial cities to use candlelit lanterns by the edict of June 1697? Perhaps because cultural revolutions are more discreet than technical ones. Based on the archives of sixteen cities, this book offers a first mapping of the beginnings of street lighting in France and an archaeology of a vanished artifact that continued to evolve until the adoption of the reverberator. Through the study of an unusual piece of street furniture that was initially resisted, before the emergence of petitions in its favor on the eve of the revolution, the aim is to grasp the mechanisms of a slow process of appropriation over the course of the 18th century, and to show how this technical innovation transformed the landscape, economy and urban society of the modern era.