2096719

Affichomanie et Catalogues: Representations of women

in fin-de-siècle Parisian department store advertising

Supervisors: Dr Jackie Clarke & Dr Michael Rapport

Submitted for MLitt

Department of History

University of Glasgow

September 2014

Figure i: Louis Carrier-Beleuse, L'etameur, 1882, Les Arts Décoratifs <http://www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr/> [accessed 1 May 2014].

Abstract

The Parisian department store embodied social and cultural

changes and had a key role in nineteenth-century modernity. The

department store is among the most often studied topics and has

been exploited by scholars of gender, urban life, economics and

consumption. Although shopping as spectacle was central to this

new consumerist modernity there remain gaps in the study of

visual culture. Posters in particular were ubiquitous in fin-de-siècle

Parisian visual culture, yet have remained on the margins of

historical scholarship. This dissertation proposes that by

analysing department store poster and catalogue images in their

wider historical context it is possible to gain new insights into

the relationships between women, consumerism and mobility.

Focusing on a cross-section of poster and catalogue images, this

work demonstrates that women were represented as objects of

anxiety and conflict and were placed at the centre of debates

over urban life, modernity and consumerism.

i

Preface

This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfilment of the

requirements for the MLitt in History. It contains work done from

March 2014 until September 2014. My supervisors on the project

have been Dr Michael Rapport (School of Humanities, History) and

Dr Jackie Clarke (School of Modern Languages and Cultures,

French).

ii

Acknowledgements

The dissertation was conceived in early March 2014. Dr Maud

Bracke’s Gender and Text course provided me with the opportunity

to study Gender, Text, Consumption and Mass Culture (seminar

taught by Jackie Clarke), which piqued my interest in the rise of

the department store, the ideology of separate spheres, and the

gendering of consumerism in late nineteenth-century France.

I would like to thank my supervisors Michael Rapport and Jackie

Clarke for the patient support they have given me throughout my

research. They have been understanding and their input has been

invaluable.

Many thanks also to the staff at the Archives Nationales du Monde

du Travail in Roubaix. Thanks also to H Hazel Hahn and Ruth Iskin

for replying to several questions on late nineteenth-century

department store advertising; and to Mathilde Mazet at the Bon

Marché for sending me information on the store.

Last, but certainly by no means least, thanks to my husband

Philip for his support and also to my parents who generously

funded the MLitt. It has given me the impetus to continue my

studies at PhD level.

iii

Author’s Declaration

I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the

contribution of others, that this dissertation is the result of

my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at

the University of Glasgow or any other institution.

iv

Abbreviations

ANMT Archives Nationales du Monde du

Travail

v

Table of Contents

Abstract i

Preface ii

Acknowledgements iii

Author’s Declaration iv

Abbreviations v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 9

Chapter 2 27

Chapter 3 42

Conclusion 48

vi

Bibliography 50

vii

Introduction

This dissertation concerns representations of women in fin-de-

siècle Parisian department store advertising, specifically large-

scale colour posters and department store catalogues. Its aim is

to place poster and catalogue images of women in the urban

environment in wider nineteenth-century discourses, utilising

visual and literary sources to interpret varied and conflicting

representations of la femme and to place these within their

historical context. The proliferation of images of women in

posters and catalogues which department stores sent out to their

customers formed new images of consumption, urban spectacle and

corresponded to women’s new identities as independent and active.

As this dissertation concerns representations of women in

visual culture, it is first of all necessary to consider their

position in nineteenth-century French society. The Code Napoleon,

established in 1804, legally considered women as a minor and it

was difficult for women to make their own way in economic or

social terms without some sort of protection from a husband,

father, institutions like schools or convents, or employer. In La

Femme, published in 1859, the French historian Jules Michelet

wrote ‘The worst destiny for a woman is to live alone’, citing

the high number of women’s bodies that were never reclaimed from

public hospitals as support for his argument that women could not

survive outside of the supportive construct of the family.1 After

1860 pressure on Parisian industry made the employment of lower-

paid women attractive and the new department stores, with their

ready to wear clothing, offered an opportunity for well-presented

women within a paternalistic system of control. 1 Jules Michelet, ‘La Femme’, 10th edition, (1879), Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5596481c/f11.zoom.r=la%20femme%20michelet%201859.langEN> [accessed 24 August 2014].

1

After an 1869 commerce workers strike employers relied more

heavily on women’s labour. Furthermore, reforms in education such

as the creation of lycées and colleges for girls under the Sée Law

of December 1880, alongside a general expansion in industry and

commerce from the time of the Second Empire, resulted in middle-

class women entering the labour market in greater numbers in the

late nineteenth-century. Advances such as the invention of the

typewriter and telephone, alongside the complexity of the

industrial economy, converged to bring women into all sorts of

employment. The increased diversity of forms of employment open

to some working-class and lower-middle-class women, at least

before marriage, included: clerical and retailing opportunities

in new services such as the post office; banking; finance;

telephone exchanges; primary teaching, as well as cashiers and

shop assistants in stores such as the Louvre and Printemps. These

also tended to be urban, which is the milieu where young,

unmarried women would have been exposed to the posters and images

that are analysed in this dissertation, certainly fuelling

interest in what products the stores had to offer. However, the

extent of the progress made in women’s employment before 1914

should not be overstated. A law of August 1908 permitted only

males to take the examinations to become a senior civil servant

and, in railway companies, preference was given to the wives,

sisters and daughters of men on their staff.2 Many female

department store assistants, the demoiselles de magasin, were denied

the right to answer customer complaints, worked on average

thirteen hours a day and some were made to sell goods on the

street. Some were housed in a mansarde, a cramped and

uncomfortable attic with no washing facilities where they were

2 James F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870-1940, (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd), p.57.

2

forbidden to have visitors. In the daytime these women were

smiling, elegant demoiselles of the store. At night they were the

lonely women of the mansarde.3

The role of women in fin-de-siècle Paris was revolutionised by

the separation of spheres, the increasing constraints on their

access to public life, and the amplified chaos of urban life.

Bourgeois women were the managers of the household, managing

servants and accounts and James McMillan states that their

discipline over the organisation of the household ‘can be viewed

as a controlled response to the perceived disorder that reigned

both in the streets and marketplace.’4 Yet as consumers they

played a vital role in consumer culture and displayed goods as

spectacle. Women also had a role as educator and bourgeois

reformers such as Jules Simon and Victor Duruy believed social

progress depended on a more thorough and liberal education of

women of all social classes. They aimed to reduce Church

influence over the family – in other words daughters and future

mothers - by providing secular education for women.5

The Third Republic was an era of comparative constancy,

affluence and qualified democracy. This new regime survived both

the conflict of the Commune and opposition from monarchists to

restore national pride and consolidate a democratic republic.

This political stability was accompanied by economic growth and

imperialist expansion between 1880 and 1895 resulted in the

French colonial empire growing from one to 9.5 million square

kilometres.6 The exoticism that featured at the Paris Expositions,3 Ibid,p.173.4 Ibid,p.43.5 Duruy fell from power because he could not challenge the Church’s gripon secondary education for girls.6 Diana Holmes, Carrie Tarr, ‘New Republic, New Women? Feminism and Modernity at the Belle Époque’, in A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in French Society and

3

or World Fairs, in 1878, 1889 and 1900 came from a mood of

national self-confidence and the 1889 Exposition featured a

reproduction of an Arab street with fountains and belly dancers.

However, the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité did not apply to

women. By 1906 women counted for more than one third of France’s

workforce yet were paid lower salaries and a married woman’s

earnings were the property of her husband. From 1878 to 1903 over

eleven feminist congresses occurred and provided a forum for

discussion of issues such as employment and pay; suffrage; reform

of the Civil Code; equality in education and the reform of laws

on prostitution.7 However, women who worked in domestic labour and

the fashion trade were absent from protests as their isolation

made the development of a sense of collective identity difficult.

This can be contrasted to women-only strikes such as those of

textile, sugar and tobacco workers. Although feminism in this era

was a minority activity, it was nonetheless vocal and attracted

the attention of the press.

How did department stores advertise themselves? Smaller

independent retailers who were used to small adverts in the local

newspaper and leaflets were faced with the department stores’

immense regional and national advertising. Mail order catalogues

carried stores such as A La Belle Jardinière and Aux Trois Quartiers beyond

the boundaries of Paris. In winter 1884 the Bon Marché in Paris

distributed 1.5 million catalogues, with 740,000 going to

provincial addresses and 260,000 abroad. It was estimated by

Georges d’Avenel in 1894 that the Louvre received 4,000 orders per

day and he estimated that between 25% and 40% of the sales of the

Culture 1890-1914, ed. D. Holmes and C. Tarr (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books Ltd, 2006), p.11.7 Holmes & Tarr, ‘New Republic, New Women? Feminism and Modernity at theBelle Époque’, p.12.

4

larger Parisian stores were made by correspondence.8 Department

stores learned from each other and became international, such as

the Bon Marché store that opened in Liverpool after David Lewis

was so impressed by what he learned on a trip to Paris in the

1870s.9 This internationalisation of the department store is

something which is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but

what this work does provide is a study of the conflicting

representations of women in fin-de-siècle Parisian department store

posters and catalogues, with a view to developing this more

substantially in a future PhD that will compare Paris,

Brussels/Ghent and Glasgow. The aim of this dissertation,

therefore, is to demonstrate how women were represented as

objects of anxiety and conflict in posters and catalogues, and

the necessity of placing these images within their wider

historical context.

Literature Review

There is a long tradition of work that sees Paris as the

capital of nineteenth-century modernity and sees consumer culture

as central to this. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in particular,

remains the most significant work on this as it interprets urban

renewal as a creative phase of capitalism which gave rise to the

birth of consumerist spectacle on Haussmann’s boulevards. Other

works in this category include David Harvey’s Paris, Capital of

8 Georges d’Avenel, ‘Le Mécanisme de la Vie Moderne: la Publicité’, Revuedes deux mondes, Tome 124, Les grands magasins, (July-August 1894), p.354. Also published in volumes (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1896) five volumes and some volumes have six editions (i.e. volume 1).9 J. H. Porter, 'The development of a provincial department store 1870-1939, Business History, 13, (1971), p.66. Quoted in ‘The world of the department store: distribution, culture and social change’ in Cathedrals of Consumption The European Department Store 1850-1939 ed. G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999), pp 1 – 45.

5

Modernity10, which follows a similar line to that of Benjamin and

agrees with his thesis that the July Monarchy saw the genesis of

cultural and commercial modernity. Georges d’Avenel’s Mécanisme de

la Vie Moderne11 offers a contrasting viewpoint on modernity. A great

moralist of the nineteenth-century, d’Avenel had strong reactions

against facets of modern life such as department stores and mass-

produced goods and their negative effect on people.

There also exist studies specifically concerning the grands

magasins in Paris and various national contexts. Bernard Marrey’s

Les grands magasins des origines à 193912 is a book that focuses on the

architecture of the department store, among other topics.

Business histories of the department store appear in Michael

Miller’s The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store13and

Historique des magasins du Bon Marché14. Studies that deal with economic

issues are Philip Nord’s Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of

Resentment15which discusses issues such as how the department store

was targeted as a threat to the stability of family life and the

politics of small-scale shopkeepers and their need to defend

their rights in the late 1800s as a result of Haussmannisation.

Social histories of the store also appear in works on department

store employees such as Françoise Parent-Lardeur’s Les demoiselles de

magasin and André Lainé’s Les demoiselles de magasin à Paris16, as well as

10 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, (London, New York: Routledge, 2003).11 d’Avenel, Le Mécanisme de la Vie Moderne.12 Bernard Marrey, Les grands magasins des origines à 1939, (Paris: Picard, 1979).13Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).14 No author, Historique des magasins du Bon Marché Plan de Paris, (Paris: 1900). Available at ANMT, Roubaix, ref. IND 740 / 1998 007 301.15 Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment, (Princeton, NewJersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).16 André Lainé, Les demoiselles de magasin à Paris, (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1911).

6

works on kleptomania in contemporary journals such as Roger

Dupouy’s De la kleptomanie and, more recently, in Patricia O’Brien’s

The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century

France.17

There are also studies of gender and consumption, some of

which are focus more on textual material, such as Lisa Tiersten’s

Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France,18 which

draws on sources such as the feminine press, advertising

materials, etiquette books, novels and decorating handbooks, as

well as Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and

Zola19. Works that look at visual culture include H. Hazel Hahn’s

Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century20 in

which she utilises department store posters to explore the

tension between art and industry and between culture and

commerce, a dynamic that significantly marked urban commercial

modernity that spread a new imaginary about consumption.

Likewise, Ruth E. Iskin has made several important contributions

to an analysis of late nineteenth-century visual culture in

articles such as The Pan-European Flâneuse in Fin-de-Siècle Posters: Advertising

Modern Women in the City21 and in contributions to books on gender and

17 Patricia O’Brien, ‘The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Women and Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Social History 17, no. 1 (1983).18 Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France, (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 2001).19 Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola, (New York:Methuen, 1985).20H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).21 Ruth E. Iskin, ‘The Pan-European Flâneuse in Fin-de-Siècle Posters: Advertising Modern Women in the City’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 25 (4), (2003), pp. 333–356.

7

visual culture such as her chapter entitled The flâneuse in French fin-de-

siècle posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris.22 

However, there are still gaps in the treatment of visual

culture, despite the fact that the visual, such as shopping as

spectacle, has long been seen as a central feature of this new

consumerist and urban culture. The study of representations of la

femme in department store advertising remains a largely neglected

topic in the study of the nineteenth-century Parisian department

store. Although the French illustrated poster is the branch of

advertising that has been studied extensively in terms of its

artistic merits, its commercial aspect has been rather neglected.

Works that have studied images have not fully developed the

social, cultural, political and economic contexts of both the

French illustrated poster and department store catalogues. To

understand late nineteenth-century posters it is, as Iskin

states, ‘crucial to consider their overall advertising role and

specific goal of addressing targeted consumers, which has been

largely absent from historical studies that tend to focus on

posters as art.’23 There have also been few dissertations entirely

devoted to the topic of commercial posters, and this is the gap

this dissertation seeks to fill.

Chapter Summaries

The placing of the bourgeois woman between the Republic and

the marketplace will be considered in the first chapter. That

chapter discusses contemporary debates and controversies over the

female consumer and the department store, leading into an22 Ruth E. Iskin, ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris’, in The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. A. d'Souza and T McDonough, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 113-128.23 Ruth E. Iskin, ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris’, p. 116.

8

analysis of the posters and attempts made by the stores to

counter the charge of selfish female consumption such as poster

advertisements for the annual exposition de blanc. The theme of

narcissism is a key part of this chapter and a subsidiary point

to this is the way in which women were portrayed as losing

control over their rational faculties in the face of sales and

crowds, applying Gustave LeBon’s crowd theory to female

consumption.

The second chapter concerns images of the flâneuse in posters

and catalogues and asks if the figure of the flâneuse existed as a

social representation – did the marketplace and society as a

whole provide the necessary conditions for women’s participation

in public? This question will be answered through depictions of

women’s walking in the city and an analysis of debates on public

and private spheres. This chapter also concerns debates on

modernity and the conditions necessary both for the flâneur and the

posting of large-scale posters on the streets of Paris. The

coding of the shopping experience as inherently female and the

concomitant comic trope in literary and visual culture are also

explored, along with masculine anxieties over what was occurring

in the private spaces of the department stores.

The third chapter deals with representations of la femme

nouvelle – the New Woman – in catalogues and posters. This develops

themes from chapter two such as women’s participation in the city

and the dominant culture’s opposition to la femme nouvelle, which was

expressed in contemporary literature and caricatures. It also

explores representations of women’s desire for mobility and

travel. The association of mobility is linked to la femme nouvelle

and this chapter then reads the poster and catalogue

advertisements in light of this. Jules Chéret’s representation of

9

La Parisienne in his department store posters depict her as a

distinctly modern and Parisian woman.

Methodology

Department store posters and catalogues portray women in new

images of consumption, urban spectacle and corresponded to their

new identities. Analysing these reveals how women were portrayed

as mobile, outdoors, urban and active consumers. Contemporary

discourses placed women at the centre of debates over the

marketplace and the Republic, with critics arguing that female

identities were corrupted by the marketplace, and defenders of

the marketplace arguing that women became dutiful citizens. The

poster and catalogue images which are presented in the following

chapters therefore reveal more than just a study of aesthetics –

they reveal ways in which women were juxtaposed as manipulated,

narcissistic consumers on one hand, and as allegories of France

and the nation on the other.

Many of the images used were located via web searches,

notably on the Gallica website, which is the digital library of

the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Digitisation of these posters has

made access to images so much easier, which was a challenge to

earlier scholars. Also, the Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail (ANMT)

at Roubaix have four original department store posters for A La

Belle Jardinière store in Rennes, which demonstrate the sheer size and

colour of the posters. The ANMT was also exceptionally useful for

finding catalogue images and a great deal of time was spent in

the microfilm viewing room looking at images of A La Belle Jardinière

and Aux Trois Quartiers. The ANMT also house several rare books on

department stores which were useful in providing background

reading on the subject of the development and expansion of

10

different department stores. Images from some of these books are

contained in subsequent chapters.

Footnotes and bibliographies from secondary reading were

scoured and titles found through this method were stored in a

Microsoft Access database and then consulted by visiting the

relevant library or online. Relevant posters found were also

placed in a database with relevant information about their dates,

illustrators, contexts and sources. This database is to be

developed with the aim of making it an available resource,

thereby hopefully removing one obstacle to the further

development of this field by others. Between this, and the fact

that many of the catalogues which are used in this dissertation

are presented together in their historical context for the first

time, it is hoped that the act of collection will be a valuable

contribution.

The merits and ramifications of using posters and catalogues

as a source for representations of women leads to the more

general debate over the use of visual sources in historical

scholarship. One of the criticisms made of visual sources

concerns how they are viewed and are not reflections but

interpretations of the past. They can be viewed as trivial and as

less ‘weighty’ than documents and printed materials. The

historian can contort images from an advert or a catalogue to

suit their research question, and careful attention must be paid

to what these sources do, and do not, reveal. Yet this is true of

any source. The method of analysis was to build up a detailed

description of each image, and to review the images regularly,

noting new features so that new questions emerged.

11

Chapter 1: ‘Selling Dreams and Mobilising

Fantasies’ 24 Representations of Female Consumption

1.1 Debates and Controversy ov er the Female Consumer and the

Department Store

On the Grands Boulevards of Haussmann itinerant hawkers and

entertainers were increasingly replaced by modern commerce.

Boulevard culture celebrated changing, pleasing scenes and

resonated with the French advertising strategy of provoking

curiosity, being entertaining, and generating more publicity

through press coverage. The rage for posters meant that for the

first time it was possible to consume both goods and images of

consumption, and the increased number of posters on Parisian

streets was an important aspect of the modernity of this culture.

By the 1880s posters were being collected and 'poster mania'

reached its peak between 1895 and 1900, propelling a side

industry with journals, exhibitions and black markets.25 Dubbed

affichomanie by the bourgeois journalist and bibliophile Octave

Uzanne in La Nouvelle bibliopolis in 189126, this rage for posters

developed as a result of the 29 July 1881 law on the freedom of

the press that allowed for posting bills everywhere. Using images

that targeted the consumer's imagining capability, the poster

transformed how goods were advertised and was at the centre of

debates on art, technology, commerce and political ideologies.

These political ideologies also converged on the female consumer.

24A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in French Society and Culture 1890-1914, eds. D. Holmes and C.Tarr (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books Ltd 2006), p.17.25 See the journal L’Estampe et l’Affiche on Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k124509q/f3.highres> [accessed 28 August 2014].26 Octave Uzanne, La Nouvelle bibliopolis, (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897), pp.85-179. 

12

The emergence of consumption and fashion phenomena was

started by progressive urbanisation at the start of the

industrial era and has drawn the interest of classic sociologists

such as Gustave LeBon, Gabriel Tarde, Thorstein Veblen and Georg

Simmel. The climate of modernity was often signalled by: the

behaviour of the masses; by loss of traditions; by crowds; by

artifice; or by rapid changes of fashion, and these authors have

attempted to explain this climate through conceptions of

imitation and contagion. Sociological conceptions of fashion and

consumption corresponded to the debate over modernity, with

fashion and modernity illustrating the search for the new. The

perceived rapacious consumption of women was in contrast to men

who earned the money that was being spent in the department

stores. An analysis of Veblen’s and Simmel’s works frames

specific issues for this chapter to explore such as narcissism;

the female self; individualism; crowd psychology; and the

republicanisation of the marketplace.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class An Economic Study of Institutions27 Veblen

reinforces the stereotype of woman as consumer, man as producer,

and the wife who used to be ‘the drudge and chattel of the man…

the producer of goods for him to consume, has become the

ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces.’28 For Veblen,

women’s consumption was vicarious as they did not seek to attain

their own social status but sought to sustain the reputation of

their husbands who made money but lacked time to display it.

Veblen's 'vicarious consumption' can be contrasted to department

store fashion posters which prompted potential consumers to

establish their classed and gendered identity by converting the

27 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Vanguard Press, 1899).28 Ibid, p. 179.

13

vicarious experience of looking into purchasing material goods.

Had he recognised the significance of media images, Veblen may

have found that those who lived in the modern city found models

for imitation in the advertisements which stimulated their

conspicuous consumption29. Rejecting Veblen’s theory, Leora

Auslander30 argues that women consumed to establish their status

and identity, a view held by Georg Simmel.

One of the major theorists to emerge in German philosophy

and social science around the turn of the century, Georg Simmel

was an anomalous figure among his contemporaries. His 1905 essay

Fashion31 discusses fashion in a sociological sense, expressing the

idea that fashion is a social creation which serves as an

indication of social class. Simmel discusses how clothing

simultaneously individualises and groups women, and suggested

that women consume fashion to create their own identity and

status. Simmel’s efforts to establish why women placed priority

on fashion considered their social standing and psychological

demands, stating that fashion offered ‘a sphere of general

imitation, the individual floating in the broadest social

current.’32 Simmel’s theory meant women could belong to a gendered

and classed collectivity in an era in which they had little

social, professional and political status. Here, the theme of the29 Conspicuous consumption can be defined as spending money on and the acquisition of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power – either the buyer’s income or accumulated wealth. Source: ‘Terms & Concepts’, Grow Wealthy < http://www.growwealthy.net/category/terms-concepts/> [accessed 28 August 2014].30 Leora Auslander, ‘The Gendering of Consumer Practices’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V. De Grazia and E. Furlough, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.89.31 Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, Mode Theorie.de <http://www.modetheorie.de/fileadmin/Texte/s/Simmel-Fashion_1904.pdf> [accessed 16 June 2014].32 Ibid, p.196.

14

female self is framed in terms of identity construction and women

having a degree of autonomy from men. The depiction of their

social status does not appear negative and is more related to the

social or the collective.

For critics of commerce the department store ushered in a

change in the structure of commercial life. In the political

world critics included Le Playists, Opportunists and Radical

Republicans who were concerned about individualism that arose as

a result of the marketplace. The Le Playist movement is an

interesting case. For Le Playists, as well as Social Catholics,

liberal individualism was supplanted by that of cooperation and

social interdependence. Attempting to apply data on consumption

to reveal the concerns of modern life, as the historian Georges

d’Avenel also did, Le Play concluded that family life was the

foundation of social morality and consumer habits especially. For

the Le Playists the concept of needs was familial and therefore

social, rather than individual, as economic liberals had thought.

In La Femme et la mode, Octave Uzanne wrote that ‘Politeness…is

dead, it is disappearing more every day in our little

egotistical, Americanised world, in which everybody thinks only

of himself, his own pleasure, his own feelings…’33 Individualism,

defined as ‘the idea that freedom of thought and action for each

person is the most important quality of a society, rather than

shared effort and responsibility’,34 was seen to have a

destructive impact. Bourgeois women who used consumer culture to

stake out their independence and own identities were also seen as

narcissistic and as clashing with the Republican ideal of the

virtuous public self.

33 Uzanne, La Femme et la mode, p.226.34 Cambridge Dictionaries Online <http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/individualism_1?q=individualism>[accessed 12 July 2014].

15

In contrast to Simmel, the female self is framed negatively

in accusations of narcissism and there is a narrative at play

regarding excessive individualism as a threat to Republican civic

values. The strengthening of Republicanism in the decade after

1871 resulted in ‘the consolidation of the French nation, French

state and French empire.’35 The relation of consumption to

politics and society shows contradictions and paradoxes inherent

in the economy, society and politics of the Third Republic. For

example, in the political world the stability of the French state

depended on ‘Frenchness’ and strong class distinction through

commodities. In the social world, bourgeois women were to consume

for the family and nation, yet by the end of the nineteenth-

century they were to consume through the ‘expression of their

individuality.’36 Both supporters and critics of the French

Republic were greatly concerned about female consumers and their

arguments reveal contradictions between the Republic and the

marketplace that arose as a result of efforts to negotiate the

relationship between state and capitalism under the new régime.

Female consumers were at the epicentre of these attempts.

According to Republican definitions of the public the marketplace

was a public domain in which women lost control over their

rational senses. To contemporaries it was unclear what type of

self operated in the department store and what the relationship

was between that self and a private self, with posters and

consumption being viewed as a narcissistic experience. For the

English observer William Marshall, the problem of the female

consumer was a Parisian one that was rooted in a love of shopping

which was only increased by the development of the department

store:

35 Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.258.36 Ibid, p.258.

16

That some of these [Parisiennes] really like their husbands andhave a sort of fondness for their children is not at allimpossible, but as it is extremely difficult to associateindoor love with outdoor vanities, the former are pretty oftenabandoned in order to be better able to attend to the latter37

In addition to demonstrating the public and private dichotomy

that existed in the nineteenth-century this quotation also

contains the concepts of narcissism and vanity associated with

women in the public space – ‘it is extremely difficult to

associate indoor love with outdoor vanities’, and it also reveals

the identification between pubic space and consumption in this

period ‘the former are pretty often abandoned in order to be

better able to attend to the latter’. Likewise, several of Zola’s

works express the theme of narcissism. In La Faute de l'abbée Mouret38

one of the main characters Albine is a narcissistic woman as she

understands her sexuality without the help of a man and is

disinclined to reveal the secret to Serge, the village priest.

Likewise, Nana39 also contains the theme of narcissism and

develops this with the use of mirrors and reflections. She gazes

at herself in the mirror, swaying erotically, kissing and

stroking her body whilst being watched by Muffat who is at once

desirous and fearful. Her adventures are rooted in her relentless

zest for one person – herself. Contemporaries saw elements of

this narcissism in fin-de-siècle society and advertising posters

promoted excessive individualism, a direct threat to Republican

civic values.

Contemporary critics feared that private passions were

beginning to usurp Republican virtue but they were not

37 William Marshall, French Home Life, (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1883).38 Émile Zola, La Faute de l'abbée Mouret, (Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 2001). 39 Émile Zola, Nana, (London: Penguin Classics, 1972).

17

necessarily correct in their perceptions, something which is

difficult to prove when dealing with contemporary discourses. In

1896 the French conservative critic Maurice Talmeyr saw the

advertising poster as symbolic of the erosion of traditional

values in favour of selfish consumption. In L’Age de l’Affiche he

criticised the poster for promising the satisfaction of desires

and the poster ‘speaks only about us, our pleasures, our tastes,

our interests’ and was ‘a degenerate art’.40 The poster was the

embodiment of traditional values such as morality into artificial

and modern ones. Likewise, the French writer and politician Henry

Berenger’s campaign against ‘indecent’ images that were sweeping

the French nation was also part of the Third Republic’s criticism

of moral decadence and related mass culture to social decay.41

However, what is clear is that the female consumer was placed in

between the Republic and the marketplace. From the 1880s there

appeared images of women in posters as mothers; as partaking in

leisure; in the domestic space; and as discerning consumers whose

taste and aesthetics were the target of the expanding

marketplace.42 Yet female shoppers’ individualism was seen as

corroding modern French life, with Social Catholics targeting the

department store as a threat to the stability of the family.

Developing this criticism, contemporary literature and

caricatures also expressed what H Hazel Hahn refers to as

‘anxious visions’.43

40 Maurice Talmeyr, ‘L’age de l’affiche’, Revue des deux mondes, (1 September 1896), pp. 201-216.41 On mass culture, see Patrick Brantlinger, Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983).42 Since at least the eighteenth-century, women had been seen as the primary shoppers of household goods, an idea that was strengthened in the nineteenth-century.43 Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, p.155.

18

These ‘anxious visions’ are seen in contemporary literature

and caricatures. Some writers and caricaturists perceived posters

to be a dark side of modernity that threatened the senses and

rationality, as opposed to catalogues, which appealed to

judgement. Contemporary literature and caricatures expressed a

critique of advertising and in their visions there is no room for

individual autonomy. Dinah Samuel 44 (1881), a novel based on the

life of Sarah Bernhardt, features the theme of celestial

advertising. A failed journalist has an ambitious plan to turn

stars in the sky into advertisements and the author Champseur

perceives advertising as a manipulation of the senses. Zola’s

short story Une victime de la réclame45 criticises advertising as

encouraging inessential consumption but also as endorsing

substandard goods. In this story, Pierre Landry represents the

first generation of Parisians who grew up surrounded by

advertising and he purchases the newest creations. Yet his house

wobbles in the wind, his clothes tear open in the street and he

swallows drugs and lots of chocolate, dying when he consumes a

drug meant to revive him. Portraying advertising as encouraging

charlatanism and useless items, this story also operates on a

class level and shows the working class as being vulnerable to

the power of advertising. Albert Robida’s caricatures depicted

Zola as a hypocrite, for Zola was a supporter of publicity and

was successful for publicity for his novels. Figure 1.1

interprets Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames as a story about women

overrunning the department store being served by pampering men.

The store devours women who cannot control themselves and the

poster portrays the crazed state of the clientele. Along with the

mass press, the Universal Exposition and the department store,

44Felicien Champseur, Dinah Samuel, (Paris: Pierre Douville, 1881).45 Émile Zola, ‘Une victim de la réclame’, L’Illustration, (17 November 1866).

19

advertising was regarded as a modern force that was placed on the

side of disorder as excessive and as drawing women away from the

family.

Figure 1.1: Au Bonheur des dames, coupe du roman de M. Émile Zola par A.Robida. Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57004143/f4.highres>[accessed 7 May 2014].

The manipulations of consumer culture through advertising

were also identified by contemporaries as having a negative

impact on women. The Social Catholic economist Georges Blondel

stated that ‘these department stores … serve to alter the customs

of the population … Amongst certain persons they provoke a sort

of hysteria for shopping’46 and fears about the moral consequences

of modernity came to focus on the department store. Criticism of

the female shopper strengthened in the early years of the

twentieth-century with what the painter Léon-Jules Lemaître in

1910 termed ‘unhealthy advertisements’47 responsible for making

women purchase costly and unnecessary items and the annual

46Cathedrals of Consumption The European department Store 1850-1939, ed. G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999), p.30.47 Léon Jules, ‘Romans-Revue’, La Publicité, (April 1910), pp.141-142.

20

exposition de blanc sale formed part of this criticism. These sales

resulted in an unseemly scramble for merchandise and a loss of

reason and women became part of an uncontrollable ‘crowd’. The

first modern account of crowd psychology was provided by the

philosopher and historian Hippolyte Taine in the wake of the 1871

Franco Prussian War in his 1875 Les Origines de la France Contemporarine.

Further developed by Gustave Le Bon in Psychologie des Foules in 1895,

this theory proposed that nineteenth-century French crowds were

excitable, irrational mobs. For Le Bon, crowds existed in three

stages: submergence, where the individuals in a crowd lose their

personal responsibility and sense of self; contagion, where

individuals follow the emotions and ideas of the crowd; and

suggestion, which is the period in which the ideas and emotions

of the crowd come from a shared unconscious, writing that:

Under certain given circumstances, and only under thosecircumstances, an agglomeration of men presents newcharacteristics very different from those of the individualscomposing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons inthe gathering take one and the same direction, and theirconscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed,doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly definedcharacteristics.48

This behaviour was uncivilised and Le Bon believed that crowds

were a powerful force only for destruction. Poster

advertisements, both for the stores and also for the exposition de

blanc, took up public spaces in order to ‘suggest up to obsession,

in order to create in the person a desire and even a need.’49

Sales had long been part of the retailing calendar but it was not

48 Gustave Le Bon, ‘The Crowd. The Mind of Crowds, Chapter 1: General Characteristics of Crowds—Psychological Law of Their Mental Unity’, brocku.ca<http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Lebon/LeBon_1895/LeBon_1895_02.html> [accessed 20 June 2014].49 Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, pp.12-13.

21

until the 1880s that men associated sales with the irrational

female shopper.

1.2 The Posters and Catalogues

For advocates of poster art, technology and commerce were

essential in the democratisation of art, and in such a society

art, industry and commerce would form a social harmony. For the

historian and art critic Marius Vachon, poster art was the most

realistic art because it was done for commerce and was the

expression of the new society itself, for it 'dissolved the

antagonism between science and art.'50 Yet he was ambivalent about

the capitalist associations of the poster and the commercial role

of the poster was a tricky question for journals promoting the

poster.51 When the subject arose it did so indirectly. The critic

Louis Morin stated the raison d’être of a poster is to attract their

attention on the product it proposes to sell to them.52 The

commercial role of the poster and its impact on consumption were

side-stepped by promoters of poster art because of the

vilification of advertising as puffism.53 What is clear, however, is

that the department stores who commissioned the posters would be

aware of the public debate and wanted to appeal to people. They

did so by depicting women’s collective identity, the stable

structure of the family, shopping for others and women’s desire

50Marius Vachon, ‘Les Arts et les industries du papier 1871-1894’, (Paris: May & Motteroz, 1894), p.200, p.202. Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6549552r.r=.langEN> [accessed 24 June 2014].51 Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, p.199.52 Louis Morin, 'Murailles', L'Estampe et l'affiche (1898), p.133.53A ‘puff piece’ is a news story with editorialised, complimentary statements. ‘Journalism and publishing terms – jargon buster’, journalism.co.uk <http://www.journalism.co.uk/terms-definitions-dictionary-terminology-words/s54/#p> [accessed 24 June 2014].

22

for a bargain in the annual exposition de blanc to counter the charge

of narcissism.

Posters exploited the need for collectivity of which Simmel

spoke. The poster diffused an image of a ‘type’ - the middle-

class consumer of department store fashion. Although he did not

discuss department stores, Simmel’s ideas are apposite to the

changed conditions brought about by the availability of low-

priced ready to wear department store fashions and the increased

pace of fashion change. Even before the development of the

department store poster, fashion plates were used to advertise

fashions in France and the U.S., encouraging emulation, with

Baudelaire writing ‘many people force themselves into the

likeness of fashion-plates.’54 Posters that advertised department

stores began to flourish during the 1880s and reached a high

point in the 1890s. Posters, along with other department store

advertising such as catalogues, encouraged women to consume mass

produced fashion and constructed a woman dressed entirely in

department store goods. The fashion poster provided this picture

of a collective identity to which women who could purchase mass

produced clothing in the stores, could aspire. For example, in

Chéret's circa 1881 Aux Buttes Chaumont the woman's dress is 25

francs and the girl's is 3 francs 75 centimes (Figure 1.2).

Almost a decade later Alfred Choubrac's circa 1890 poster for the

store Aux Travailleurs (Figure 1.3), whose name indicates its appeal

to working-class consumers, announces relatively low prices that

remain close to those in the 1881 poster, with 27 francs for the

woman's dress and 2 francs 95 centimes for the girl's.

54 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Some French Caricaturists’, The Painter of Modern Life,ed. and trans. J. Mayne, (London: Phaidon, 1965), pp.166-168, at p.183.

23

Figure 1.2: Aux Buttes Chaumont, Jules Chéret, c. 1881. Source:Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9010619r/f1.highres>[accessed 11 June 2014].

Figure1.3: Aux Travailleurs, Alfred Choubrac, c. 1890. Source: AllPosters<http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Aux-Travailleurs-Posters_i2914953_.htm> [accessed 11 June 2014].

Posters appealed to women to consume fashion on the basis of

social and psychological needs, which Simmel's theory identifies

as wishing to part of a collective identity. However, women were

perceived by contemporaries as a force for immense impulse

24

spending on luxuries and the excitement of shopping threatened

the very nature of Republic virtue.

How did department stores counter the charge of narcissistic

female indulgence and seek to align the marketplace with the

Republic? Managers and publicists developed policies that

characterised the store as a public-minded civic organisation,

seeking to pinpoint the act of consumption within the stable

structure of the family, calling to mind the Le Playists’ views

on consumption. Aristide Boucicaut of the Au Bon Marché and Alfred

Chauchard of the Louvre were known for their philanthropic efforts

and for looking after the well-being of their employees.

Boucicaut provided his employees with a free canteen, lodgings

and various social clubs such as a choir for female employees

(Figure 1.4)

Figure 1.4: Chorale des Dames. Source: Historique des Magasins du BonMarché (Paris, c.1906). ANMT IND 1998 007 0301 [accessed 6 June2014].

His paternalistic approach placed the store as an extension of

the domestic interior for female consumers and represented

25

shopping as a family activity, including play areas for children

and reading rooms for men to pass the time. Posters and

catalogues depicted department stores as family-orientated and

frequently featured children in an attempt to counter the charge

that shopping corrupted women and therefore society. The

republicanisation of the marketplace can be seen in an 1878

poster by Chéret advertising the Aux Buttes Chaumont store (Figure

1.5). A Marianne with the word Étrennes (New Year’s gifts) above her

head like the Republican headdress offers consumer goods such as

dolls, puppets and a ball to five small children. Marianne was a

mother, a consumer and a citizen. She was both the mother who saw

to the material indulgences of her children and the consumer

defending French aesthetic capital.

Figure 1.5: Aux Buttes Chaumont, Jules Chéret, 1878, Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9015356j> [accessed 13July 2014].

Aux Buttes Chaumont sent out catalogues devoted to children’s toys,

and another poster by Chéret advertised toys as New Year’s gifts,

featuring a woman with a group of children (Figure 1.6).

26

Figure 1.6: Aux Buttes Chaumont, Jules Chéret, 1888, Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9015609x.r=aux+buttes+chaumont.langEN> [accessed 7 May2014].

Shopping at Christmas and New Year was a way of countering the

charge that shopping was indicative of the all-consuming power of

female vanity. Women were shopping for others and as a

consequence they could use their knowledge of consumer culture to

their advantage. Christmas and New Year were not just about the

giving of gifts but the acquisition of gifts, and women had a

legitimate role as consumers who were not tainted by the charges

of narcissism and irrationality, for they endured the queues, the

crowds and the elements to provide for their family.

The poster in Figure 1.7 corresponds to discourses on women

as primary consumers in Paris during the second half of the

nineteenth-century and is one of a plethora of examples that

features mother and daughter.

27

Figure 1.7: Halle aux Chapeaux, Jules Chéret, c. 1892. Source: Jules-Chéret.org, ‘Jules Chéret The Complete Works’ <http://www.jules-cheret.org/Halle-Aux-Chapeaux.html> [accessed 7 May 2014].

This poster is a rare example of one that features the father

along with mother and daughters, although he is a marginal figure

whose faded clothes can be contrasted to those of mother and

daughter. The females are enthusiastic consumers who display the

goods they are wearing and the mother is introducing her daughter

into the world of consumption. This poster visualises the message

that the store caters to consumers of both genders through the

prominent display of hats for both men and women in the

foreground. This poster agrees with Veblen’s theory of women’s

vicarious consumption and Rachel Bowlby suggests that the

creation of willing consumers also promoted women’s seduction by

a male dominated advertising, fashion and retailing community, so

that by ‘just looking’ into the shop windows women were

reinforcing their narcissism.55 Yet the proliferation of posters

of women and children show that there existed no real conflict

between feminine vanity, the tenderness of the mother and the

bourgeois citizen. Women’s role as consumer was linked to the55 Bowlby, Just Looking, pp.20-32.

28

aesthetic mission to cultivate French taste, a theme which will

be explored in greater detail in Chapter 3.

The ‘unique whiteness’ which Zola described in Au Bonheur des

dames formed part of the department store’s white goods sales

season each January56 and this continues to today. Zola describes

this annual event as:

Ce qui arrêtait ces dames, c’était le spectacle prodigieux dela grande exposition de blanc … Rien que du blanc, tous lesarticles blancs de chaque rayon, une débauche du blanc, unaster blanc don’t le rayonnement fixe aveuglait d’abord, sansqu’on pût distinguer les details, au milieu de cette blancheurunique.57

Aristide Boucicaut, the manager of Au Bon Marché, was inspired by

the heavy snow in the city and started the exposition de blanc in

January 1873. Seasonal sales at the store also included: the sale

of lace and gloves in February; coats and day wear in March;

summer clothes in May; and floor coverings in September. These

sales also occurred in English stores such as Keddie’s of

Southend which designed a model of St Paul’s Cathedral made from

white handkerchiefs and a ship constructed from white towels.58

Advertising was vital for the stores as they had to attract a

large number of customers for their mass produced goods and

depended on a high turnover. Georges d'Avenel estimated that

between 15,000 and 18,000 shoppers entered the two largest stores

in Paris, Au Bon Marché and Louvre, each day.59 Special sales enticed

even bigger crowds. Zola's research shows that 70,000 people came

56 Huge clearances of women’s fashion items which the trade said had to be sold to make way for new goods. Yet managers bought stock specifically for the sales.57 Émile Zola, ‘La grande exposition du blanc’, expositions.bnf.fr <http://expositions.bnf.fr/zola/bonheur/pedago/antho/f.htm>[accessed 11 July 2014].58 Crossick and Jaumain, ‘The world of the department store’, pp.1-45.59 d'Avenel, p.534.

29

to the special sale days at the Louvre store and according to

Zola's novel nearly 100,000 shoppers constituted 'the afternoon

crush' on the opening day of an exposition of white goods. Aswell as posters, stores also advertised their seasonal sales

through catalogues that they sent out to customers. Figure 1.8 is

a publicity letter from Boucicaut that invites the female shopper

to the opening of a new store, as well as to a public exhibition

of new seasonal goods. Marketing techniques such as this were

intended to appeal to the female consumer through the use of

Madame and the handwritten style of the letter.

Figure 1.8: Catalogue letter from Aristide Boucicaut of the Au BonMarché to customers. Source: ANMT, 16AQ1 (1876 – 1902), Aux TroisQuartiers Microfilm [accessed 28 May 2014].

In many posters for the exposition de blanc women are presented

as playing an active role in the process of consumption. This is

relatively rare in the department store fashion posters, which

usually show a woman displaying her outfit against a blank

background amid fixed prices, see Figure 1.9.

30

Figure 1.9: A La Place Clichy, Jules Chéret. Source: Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9010544g.r=grand+magasin.langEN> [accessed 10 May 2014].

The act of women purchasing items in the sale can also be

perceived as more acceptable than purchasing non-sale items, as

this undercuts any associations with extravagance and ‘vanities’.

Also, she cannot be seen wearing the items as they were either

household linens or lingerie. A woman who was shown in her

lingerie would be seen as a prostitute and would support the

charge that shopping was a narcissistic, seductive experience for

the female self. This can be contrasted to the rather more erotic

advertisements from the 1920s as depicted in Figure 1.10.

Figure 1.10: Exposition de Blanc et la Rose, Fontan, n.d. Source:Le Sourire

31

< http://mogadonia.tumblr.com/post/370779744/drakecaperton-exposition-de-blanc-et-la-rose-by> [accessed 22 July 2014].

The poster advertising the exposition de blanc in the A La Place Clichy

store (Figure 1.11) is an example of one in which the customer

and the employee participate in what Simmel termed the

‘collectivity’ of late 1890s feminine fashion. Although both

women wear similar dresses with puffed sleeves, the consumer is

distinguished by her hat and purse and is represented as an

individual distinguished by taste and a contemplative attitude

towards the merchandise.

Figure 1.11: Exposition de blanc A La Place Clichy, Henri Thiriet, 1900.Source: lordprice.co.uk <http://www.lordprice.co.uk/SEAN1013-Exposition-de-Blanc.html> [accessed 20 June 2014].

Figure 1.12 is a 1900 poster by Georges Redon and is interesting

as it contains the image of an androgynous Pierrot clown. A

character in postmodern popular culture such as poetry; fiction;

the visual arts; as well as works for the stage, screen, and

concert hall, Pierrot was an alter-ego of the alienated artist of

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and his image also

features in several of Chéret’s posters. Again, the customer and

department store employee engage in consumption and, like the

32

previous poster, the customer is distinguished by her large hat,

elaborate dress and parasol.

Figure 1.12: A La Place Clichy, Georges Redon , 1900. Source: Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9011629f/f1.highres>[accessed 10 June 2014].

Some posters reminded the viewer of women’s place in the

interior such as the 1898 poster in Figure 1.13 that shows a sale

of linens at Au Bon Marché. In this poster a respectable woman is

shopping not for fashion but for table cloths, a more suitable

image of femininity. The goods on sale are not for her appearance

but for her household, serving to counter the charge of

narcissism inherent in female shopping.

Figure 1.13: Au Bon Marché Grande Mise en Vente de Blanc, GeorgesMeunier, 1898. Source: Gallica

33

<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90163526/f1.highres>[accessed 10 June 2014].

The catalogue cover in Figure 1.14 also depicts a woman engaging

with household goods with her maid who is helping her with the

table cloth and her daughter who is also present in the domestic

scene. Contradictions and paradoxes surrounded the female

consumer and the terms ‘narcissism’ and selfishness that were

used to describe the female consumer are not as clear as they

first appear.

Figure 1.14: Au Bon Marché Grande Mise en Vente deBlanc, January 1909. Source: ‘Le Magazine’,Magazine le Bon Marché<http://magazine.lebonmarche.com/4923_le-blanc.html> [accessed 2 June 2014].

Men were also provoked to desire by

commodities. For Maurice Talmeyr, the entire urban crowd was

vulnerable to the dangers of advertising, not just women and the

working classes. The 1875 poster for Au Bon Marché, for instance,

depicts a crowd of men, not women (Figure 1.15).

Figure 1.15: Où Courent ils?? Poster for Au Bon Marché, JulesChéret, 1875. Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90040684/f1.highres>[accessed 20 May 2014].

34

Moreover, the A La Belle Jardinière store started out by catering to men

and children (Figure 1.16) and between 1847 - 1860 masculine

clothing increased its sales by 64%. The development of the

textile industry and the sale of masculine clothing were based on

three key principles: popular consumption; selling of uniforms

and military items; and the development of transport that enabled

home delivery and expansion.

Figure 1.16: A La Belle Jardinière Catalogue Cover Summer 1892 Source:ANMT, 1996 103M0001, microfilm 66AQ1, 1996 103M0001, pièce 19 –sommaire, été [accessed 28 May 2014].

Balzac was a compulsive buyer of luxury goods, furniture and

antiques and in a three year period he spent 100,000 francs as a

consumer and collector.60 However, the stores still reinforced

images of gender within consumption and criticism of female

spending and behaviour in the stores was a familiar story. There

are two important points to be made. Consumption encouraged by

advertising may have given women, as opposed to men, agency

within the home, which corresponds to the idea of the home as the

sphere for wives and mothers. Secondly, choosing goods for60 Kat, ‘Balzac’s Cousin Pons’mirabeledictu.org <http://mirabiledictu.org/2013/03/16/balzacs-cousin-pons/> [accessed 20 June 2014].Balzac stated ‘Never become a collector.  You would be selling yourself to a demon as jealous and demanding as the demon of gambling.’ Balzac’s Correspondence, V 93.

35

others, including the domestic environment, gave women agency in

the public place of the department store. However, anxieties

expressed here were about the alleged impact that runaway

consumption might have had in the domestic sphere. The portrayal

of crowds of women as irrational creatures who took no

responsibility in literature such as Au Bonheur des dames may have

helped to calm masculine anxieties about the magnitudes of

increased urbanisation and modernisation. By constructing the

female shopper as irrational and lacking in self-control, men

could identify her with the manipulations of consumer culture

whereas they, as flâneurs, were rational and detached.

Chapter 2: The Flâneuse and Women’s Mobility in the

City

2.1 Debates on the Flâneur and Modernity

The focus of this chapter is the gendering of urban space

and the flâneur is used as a means of teasing out the concept of

the flâneuse. The figure of the flâneur has been used to explain

modern, urban experience, to explain the class tensions and

gender divisions of the nineteenth-century city, to describe

modern alienation and to explain the sources of mass culture. The

flâneur is the person who strolls aimlessly in the city, observing

people and events, maybe with a view to reporting these in word

or image. The prime exponent of urban living, his prominence in

the literature of modernity dates from Baudelaire’s mid

nineteenth-century essays on modern life, especially ‘The Painter

36

of Modern Life’ (1859).0 In this, the flâneur is the ‘modern hero’

whose experience epitomises the anonymous nature of life in the

modern city. He observes ephemeral aspects of urban existence and

Baudelaire’s flâneur stood in contrast to the new city emerging out

of the Haussmannian transformation of Paris. In Figure 2.1

Gustave Doré depicts the radical transformation of Paris, with

Haussmann looking at a map of Paris from above and carters

removing the medieval structures below to the cheers of the

workers.

Figure 2.1: Le Nouveau Paris, Gustave Doré, 1857. Source: Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b2000069v/f1.highres>[accessed 16 May 2014].

This transformation wrought upon Paris by Haussmann opened up the

city, making the boulevards more visible and they were seen as a

modern street of animation.0 In the Second Empire the idea of the

0 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Some French Caricaturists’, in The Painter of Modern Life, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965).

0 The idea of the boulevards as a place for the public to gather and wander goes back to at least the eighteenth century - the original grandsboulevards were created when Louis XIV’s wall was demolished as Paris

37

Grands Boulevards as the centre of the world began to take shape.

There were five expositions universelles, or World Fairs, in Paris in

the nineteenth-century, designed to assert France’s role in the

world and to showcase all things French.0 Likewise, department

stores also marketed themselves as tourist sites and Figure 2.2

shows all of the train and metro lines that led to the Au Bon

Marché store, thereby placing the store at the epicentre of the

metropolis.

Figure 2.2: ‘Au Bon Marché par le Nord-Sud et le Métropolitain’.No Author, Historique des magasins du Bon Marché Plan de Paris,(Paris: 1900). Source: ANMT, IND 740 / 1998 007 301[accessed 6 June 2014].

The journalist and writer Alfred Delvau stated ‘Paris without

the boulevards would make for a universe in mourning’0 and the

boulevards provided the collective sense of being the heart and

soul of Paris. Debates on street space and aesthetics reflected

two different senses of modernity. On one hand was the Second

expanded. The concept of the flâneur was a later nineteenth-century phenomenon, being particularly associated the boulevards.0 The five World Fairs in Paris occurred in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900. See Pauline de Tholozany, ‘The Expositions Universelles in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship <http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/worldfairs.html> [accessed 8 August 2014].0 Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, p.131.

38

Empire’s vision of modernity as rationalisation, and on the other

hand there was the sense of modernity as surface sensations.

During the Third Republic the boulevards were increasingly seen as

pleasurable, yet also excessive and disorderly. Commercial

elements were seen as especially excessive, with the journalist

Georges Montorgueil writing in 1896 that ‘The movement of

advertising and journalism towards the Boulevard was inevitable.’0 The boulevards were the prime site of potential consumers, and

goods that were advertised were available just around the corner.

Looking at debates on the flâneur and modernity is an attempt to

understand the existence of the flâneuse.

The figure of the flâneur features heavily in theories of

modernity. For Baudelaire, the illustrator Constantin Guys was

the archetypal flâneur and for Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was the

flâneur of the nineteenth-century. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin

established the connections between flânerie and the urban landscape

of modernity, stressing the link between flânerie and consumer

culture. For Benjamin the decline of the Paris arcades, brought

about by the Haussmannisation of the city, signalled the end of

flânerie, with the department store epitomising this transformation:

‘If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how

the flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form of

the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout of the flâneur.’0

The previously aimless experience of wandering in the arcades

became instead an activity with a specific aim – namely shopping

and consumption. Benjamin and Baudelaire’s shared ambivalence

about the impermanence of modernity was epitomised in the figure

of the flâneur. This characterisation of modernity has a lot in0 Georges Montorgueil, La Vie des boulevards: Madeleine-Bastille, (Paris: Quantin, 1896), p.42.0 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), p.54.

39

common with descriptions offered by sociologists at the fin-de-siècle,

namely Georg Simmel. His 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental

Life’ explored the subjective aspects of urban existence, in

particular its frenetic pace and cultivation of a detached

attitude.0

However, the flâneur is necessarily male and women were unable

to pass unnoticed in the city. The account of urban experience is

seen through the eyes of the flâneur and makes women marginal or

invisible. Flânerie took centre stage in the sociological discourse

on modernity from the mid-1980s0 and feminist critics such as Mica

Nava have challenged this way of gendering modernity. The

responses to the recognition of the privileging of male

experience in the literature of modernity have been varied. Some

writers have insisted that women’s absence from the public sphere

has been overstated and there have always been women in the urban

arena. For example, Nava0 has pointed out that ‘women’s

appropriation of public spaces, in both symbolic and material

ways, was growing rapidly’ in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries, confirmed by Peter Fritzsche in his study of

Berlin in 19000. Furthermore, Anne Friedberg has argued that not

only do women appear in the urban landscape, but they do so in

0 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, available at Esperdy <http://www.esperdy.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Simmel_21.pdf> [accessed 30 August 2014].0 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1988). In this, he wrote of the thrilling yet near incomprehensible sensation of seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, ‘Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea…a wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested byvision. A gigantic mass is immobilized before our eyes.’ (p. 91).0 Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. M. Nava and A. O’Shea (London: Routledge, 1995).0 Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998).

40

the later period as flâneuse. The emphasis here has been on cinema

going and shopping as activities suited to flânerie. Friedberg

focuses on new opportunities for women in public, writing ‘As the

department store supplanted the arcade, the mobilized gaze

entered the service of consumption, and space opened for a female

flâneur – a flâneuse– whose gendered gaze became a key element of

consumer address.’0 The shifting of focus from women’s exclusion

to studies about women in the city has resulted in debates about

women’s role in the formation of modernity in the city and has

opened up debates on the flâneuse.

2.2 Flâneuse, kleptomaniac or prostitute?

Was the flâneuse able to exist, or did the ideology of

separate spheres, together with the architecture and organisation

of public space, make female flânerie impossible? Janet Wolff states

that the role of flâneuse remained impossible despite the expansion

of women’s public activities such as shopping and cinema-going

and states that women in public, especially those wandering

without aim, were branded as prostitutes, asking is it an

accident that the prostitute appears as a key female trope in the

discourse of modernity?0 Yet posters and catalogues depict women

in the city either alone or with other women playing an active

role in urban space. Moreover, the flâneuse was not invisible in

nineteenth-century discourses and appeared in the title for the

entry of the 1866-79 edition of the Larousse Grand Dictionnaire,

'Flâneur, euse'. The definition personne qui flâne, qui a l'habitude de flâne ('a

0 Anne Friedberg, ‘Les flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 106, no.3, (1991), p.240.0 Janet Wolff, ‘Gender and the haunting of cities (or, the retirement ofthe flaneur)’, in The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. A. d'Souza and T. McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp.18 – 31.

41

person who strolls, or has the habit of strolling') is gender

neutral, while the rest of the text refers to the flâneur.0 In 1845

Balzac noted that les femmes comme il faut (respectable women)

promenade on the boulevard' but s'amusent à marchander (muse

themselves by shopping).0 Shopping and walking quickly were

identified by Balzac as two strategies that women used to retain

their respectability in the city. Catering mainly to women, the

department store materialised women’s consumerist fantasies.

As with women and consumption there also appeared criticisms of

the flâneuse. In La vie à Paris: 1880-1885 the French writer and dramatist

Jules Clarétie recognised that the department store was the

flâneuse's milieu, yet refers to flâneuses as 'hysterics' who are

kleptomaniacs, writing:

la police surveille également les flâneurs… et les flâneuses,les hystériques, — des femmes du monde parfois, — qui volentpar manie, pour la joie de voler. Leur maladie a un nomscientifique: la Kleptomanie.0

Clarétie’s use of the phrase 'femme[s] du monde' is revealing, as it

is a euphemism for prostitute. The semantic field of the flâneuse

depicts female mobility linked to sexual, mental and medical

disorders and the joy of stealing. This interpretation of flâneuse

as hysterical reflects nineteenth-century discourses on women's

lack of self-control in the face of aggressive retailing

strategies and may be part of a 'modernist denigration of0 Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. P. Larousse, 17 vols, (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982), facsimile reprint of Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 15 vols (Paris: Administration du grand dictionnaire universel, 1866-79). 1st supplement 1877, 2nd supplement 1890, p.436.0Honoré de Balzac, 'Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris' in Traite de la vie élégante, preface and notes by L. Lumet (Paris: Bibliopolis, 1922), p.244.0Jules Clarétie, La Vie à Paris, (Paris: Victor Harvard, 1882), p.492. Available also at Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4058647.r=jules+claretie+la+vie+a+paris.langEN> [accessed 24 May 2014].

42

consumption.'0 Commentators spoke of the degeneration of the

nation and shopping became part of an emerging medical paradigm

of social decline that found its way into definitions of the

flâneuse as a kleptomaniac or prostitute. The kleptomania diagnosis

was supported by the legal and medical professions, explained

firstly by biological factors, then later to needs brought about

by the new institution of the department store and the ‘cult of

consumption’. The psychological perversion of kleptomania was a

way to redefine female selfishness and by the 1880s the term

‘kleptomania’ had become well-accepted and found its way into

popular usage in trials, ballads, articles, plays and literature

in which women were portrayed as greedy consumers. The variant

term for kleptomania, magazinitiis, was derived from the grand magasin

and suggested that display and advertising techniques were to

blame. In 1896 the alienist0 Alexandre Laccasagne wrote that the

department store’s ‘display-case provocations are one of the

factors of theft. They exist in order to arouse desire…They

fascinate the client, dazzle her with their disturbing

exhibition…stir up the social order and can be called the

apértifs of crime.’0

The flâneuse was also depicted as a prostitute. She could

continue her urban promenade through the huge spaces of the store

with no obligation to make a purchase or speak to anyone and was

a spectator rather than a participant. Etiquette experts worried

about confusion of the consumer with the 'public woman' and

0 Mark Poster, 'Culture and History: The Cases of Leisure, Art, and Technology', French Historical Studies 18, no.1 (Spring 1993), pp. 131-135.0 An alienist specialised in the legal aspects of psychiatry. ‘Alienist’, merriem-webster.com <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alienist> [accessed 24 May 2014].0 Alexandre Lacassagne, ‘Les vols à l’étalage et dans les grands magasins’, Revue de l’Hypnotisme et de la Psychologie Physiologique (September 1896).

43

warned the solitary shopper could easily be mistaken for a

loitering prostitute by a zealous store inspector.0Prostitution

and kleptomania were crimes committed largely by women and they

were the source of concern among contemporaries, who linked both

of these deviant crimes to the department store, whose

advertising techniques lured women into their murky world. It

can be argued that the flâneur and flâneuse differ greatly in the

kinds of connotations that the terms mobilise. The former has

creative freedom and agency and the latter is associated with

social, medical and sexual disorders. The flâneur’s unrestricted

movement had positive yet subversive connotations for men, yet

seems to have no real parallel in the flâneuse. However, images of

women in posters and catalogues, although commodified, do possess

some of the qualities of the flâneur, depicting women as

independent and active in the public sphere, which will be seen

in Section 2.4. The portrayal of active women in the city was

less threatening in a commercial poster advertising a department

store than in a political context.

2.3 Shifting the Boundaries of Gendered Space? Public and Private

Spheres

For women to be able to practice flânerie they had to renegotiate

where the boundaries of gendered space were drawn. The notion of

the home as a feminine space still dominated in late nineteenth-

century conservative ideology on the interior, as seen in the

etiquette expert Louise d’Alq’s broad conclusion that ‘a woman’s

vocation naturally suggests itself to the interior, whereas a man

has to seek his life outside.’0 Medieval didactic treatises such

0See Marianna Valverde, 'Fashion and the fallen women in nineteenth-century social discourse', Victorian Studies, 32, (1989), pp.169-88.0 Louise d’Alq, La Science de la vie: conseils et réflexions à l’usage de tous, (Paris: Ebhardt, 1890), p.24.

44

as The Goodman of Paris (circa 1393) held that women should

cultivate the home as a shelter from the strife of the outside

world.0 Motherhood was identified as a key battleground in the

struggle between republican and anti-clericals and the Catholic

Church from the days of the French Revolution. Leaders of the

French labour movement also championed motherhood and the home.

In March 1888, the socialist writer and playwright August Chirac

asked in La Revue Socialiste should not the wife of the proletarian

remain at home just as much as the wife of the aristocrat? In an

article in Le Mouvement Socialiste in 1909, Edmond Berth admitted that

while capitalism had served to bring women into the workforce,

Proudhon was right to see no valid role for women outside the

home. In 1893 Felix Vallotton produced a series of woodcuts and

panel paintings of department stores and these were unusual in

that he depicted male sales clerks serving female customers. The

woodcut Le Bon Marché (Figure 2.3) has swathes of linens, fawning

salesmen and interested female consumers, depicting the

department store as a series of intimate encounters between men

and women.

0 Le Ménagier de Paris, ed. and trans. E. Power as The Goodman of Paris (Brooklyn, New York: BOYE6, 2006).

45

Figure 2.3: Felix Vallotton, Le Bon Marché, 1893. Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b69516708/f1.highres>[accessed 10 June 2014].

Vallotton represented the store for what it represented in the

masculine imagination: a site where the separation of spheres was

not respected.

The blurring of public and private and women’s increased

participation in the public sphere resulted in the emergence of a

comic trope in popular literary and visual culture of the period,

as depicted by Vallotton in the image above. This expressed a

deep-seated masculine anxiety over what was occurring in the off-

limit spaces of the department store, exacerbated by the

configuration of space in the store. Menswear was placed on the

street level, often with access via a separate entrance, or

women’s lace and lingerie departments were placed on a higher

floor to minimise men’s potential embarrassment at having to mix

with the female clientele. The precursors to the department

stores, the magasins de nouveautés of the 1840s and 50s, depicted men

as much as women as customers, but later images of department

stores published as part of the store’s marketing campaigns in

46

magazines such as L’Illustration and Le Monde Illustré tended to depict

males not as consumers but as patrons of the more intellectual

pursuits offered by the business such as reading rooms and

painting galleries in the Au Bon Marché and the Grands Magasins du

Louvre, which proposed ways to pass the time for those not

interested in shopping.

Stores could sell themselves as ‘safe’ spaces for proper

women to go out alone or with other women in public. Figure 2.4

depicts an advert for Le Printemps which capitalised on both the

privacy this arrangement afforded women shoppers and the fantasy

of social advancement. Composed of fourteen vignettes, the

encounters which take place in the store are overseen by

mythological personifications of Le Printemps. In the peoples’ wonder

at this new institution, with its lift and selection of

merchandise, there is a story involving a young woman and her

solicitor. This advertisement plays on many fantasies and

anxieties, not least of which is the anxiety over women's entry

to public space, something that the stores depended upon for

their very existence. While the man is banned from the lingerie

floor, the reader is meant to read that exclusion as one of the

attractive features of the shopping experience.

47

Figure 2.4: Les Grands Magasins du Printemps, Le Monde Illustré, 4November 1874. Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/RequestHighlightingMask?docIDArk=bpt6k63794535&f=12&r=grands+magasins&zoom=D> [accessed24 May 2014].

The exclusion of men from some floors of the store is in contrast

to earlier forms of shopping which occurred in the Paris arcades.

The arcades of the 1820s and 30s offered gas lighting and heated

spaces to the public and provided a refuge from the weather and

appalling conditions on the city streets. The spaces of the

arcades were not demarcated and men and women could mix with each

other, which can be seen in Figure 2.5, an 1855 image of the

Passage Jouffroy. In this sense, the fin-de-siècle exclusion of men from

some areas of the department store constituted a break with the

past.

48

Figure 2.5: Passage Jouffroy in Paris, 1855, Doves Today, <http://doves2day.blogspot.be/2010/02/american-arcades.html> [accessed 4 September 2014].

The demarcation of space in the department store is an attempt to

regulate the space because of the link between consumption and

sexuality. A fictional account of a department store called Les

Magasins du Mauvais Marché appeared in La Vie Parisienne in 1876.0 This

told the story of a young man called Lionnel who places a bet

with his friend to prove there is no such thing as an honest

woman. Madame de Martoy, whose husband drops her off at the store

believing it is trustworthy, spurns his advances. Lionnel

pretends to be a salesman and eventually seduces her in a private

meeting room that he has filled with goods taken from the store.

The goods he steals sound like an advertisement, with:

a double-thick carpet, into which one literally sank…In acorner, a slightly inclined sofa…covered, as if attached byfour pins, by a shawl in pink crepe de Chine with blue flowers

0 Quoted in Aruna d’Souza, ‘Why the Impressionists Never Painted the Department Store’, in The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. A. d'Souza and T. McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp.129-147.

49

and green leaves…you have a sort of ceremonial bed on which aprincess would sleep, fully clothed, in ancient times.0

In utilising the idea of goods as seduction, this story links

consumption and sexuality, with the shop becoming Lionnel’s

boudoir. The features of this story: the corrupting male; the

innocent provincial husband; the naïve but not unwilling wife;

and the department store, which provides the chance for a secret

fling and the merchandise Lionnel needs, are commonplace in

popular culture from the period.0 Lionnel transformed a corner of

the public space of the department store into a private one,

taking advantage of goods on offer.

2.4 Identifications Offered by Posters and Catalogues

Shopping provided an acceptable context for respectable

women’s flânerie and women’s relationship to the city went beyond

purchasing goods. Images in posters and catalogues depicted

independent women engaging in flânerie in crowded streets and they

were often depicted alone in public settings in sites of high and

popular culture such as galleries, exhibitions and concerts.

Women were also featured with children but often men were not

present. Women’s walking in the city, the transgression of

separate spheres, and the comic trope in visual and literary

culture that expressed men’s anxieties over what was occurring in

the private spaces of the stores mean that department stores can

be identified as liminal spaces of modernity. They were urban

sites caught between public and private spheres.

Posters had a specialised role in the advertising strategies

of the department stores that included store catalogues, agendas,0 Ibid, pp.129-147.0 See Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (London: Penguin, 2007). Also see Émile Zola, Au Bonheur des dames (London: Penguin, 2006).

50

illustrated cards, press advertisements and self-promotional

articles. Iconicity, which refers to ‘a natural resemblance or

analogy between the form of a sign and the object or concept it

refers to in the world or rather in our perception of the world’0,

differentiated late nineteenth-century posters from advertising

in catalogues, which featured heavy descriptions of the goods

alongside images (Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6: A La Belle Jardiniére Summer 1896. Source: ANMT, 1996103M0001, microfilm 66AQ1 1996 103M0001, pièce 32 - général, été[accessed 4 June 2014].

This image can be contrasted to the image in Figure 2.7 with its

large bold coloured images proclaiming prices and no description

of the goods on offer.

0 ‘Iconicity: Definition’, ccat.sas.upenn.edu <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/indexical/icondef.html> [accessed 10 August 2014].

51

Figure 2.7: Aux Buttes Chaumont, Jules Chéret, 1885. Source:Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9010576f/f1.highres>[accessed 23 August 2014].

Posters may have been influenced by these sales catalogues which

were published in small, slim book formats and developed around

the same time. Although both used prices, catalogues had a

clearer division of text and image, and prices and descriptive

information were kept separate from images, unlike posters which

included large price statements integrated into image space. The

highlighting of prices in posters promoted affordability whereas

catalogues had a more practical and informative function. During

the 1890s many posters were commissioned by Parisian department

stores to promote women’s mass-produced ready to wear clothing

and new representations of women in the city featured in these

posters. Posters depicted women as looking while walking and as

enjoying new forms of mobility, such as riding a bicycle. They

developed modern fashion advertising both by using a distinctive

formula and through their public urban presence. The iconicity of

the posters enabled passers-by to apprehend them while walking,

52

which was vital in an era in which walking, and flânerie especially,

were central to urban life.

In 1901 Georges d’Avenal noted the impact of posters was

tied to their iconicity, writing ‘The ideal poster necessitates

no reading, one takes it in at a single glance ‘despite oneself’,

‘merely by letting one’s gaze fall upon it.’0 The posters

addressed a walking public, specifically a female one, and in an

era in which their walking in the city constituted a

transgression. Walking and flânerie in the late nineteenth-century

city were a necessary condition for advertising posters. While

Veblen’s analysis stated that women consume primarily to display

their husbands’ wealth, some posters often portray women’s

consumer role as an urban experience that mixes shopping with

city visits, depicting her agency. Figure 2.8 depicts a woman and

her children as enjoying consumption and shopping forms part of a

broader urban experience that includes walking in the city.

Figure 2.8: Mère sortant d'un grand magasin avec ses deux enfantschargés de paquets, Misti, (Ferdinand Mifliez), 1905. Source:0 Georges d’Avenal, ‘Le mécanisme de la vie moderne: la publicité’, Revuedes deux mondes 2 (January-February 1901), p.649.

53

Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9011343p.r=grand+magasin+affiche.langEN> [accessed 23 May2014].

When analysing late nineteenth-century poster icons of women

in the city it is important to consider that women were taking up

urban space and they were among the key targets for poster

advertising. Posters were generally commissioned by those who

were able to invest in the promotion of their products and

establishments, such as department stores. Unfortunately,

advertising agencies were in their infancy at this stage and

records that reveal an agency’s or artist’s aims in reaching a

specific audience through an advertisement are not yet available.0

Some posters highlighted women’s urban presence by depicting them

walking in the city, usually near the department store that was

being advertised (Figure 2.9).

0 From 1880-1914 there were 4 major billposting agencies: the Société Anonyme d'Entreprise d'Affichage et de Distribution d'Imprimes (still referred to as Bonnard-Bidault), Dufayel, Riche and Company, and the Société Universelle d'Affichage. Dufayel, founded in 1887 by Georges Dufayel and also a department store, controlled a significant sector of billposting and distribution (La Publicité, July 1906). The poet Apollinaire criticised and satirised Dufayel in his journal Tabarin, depicting the Dufayel establishment as the ultimate model of capitalist exploitation. Private walls could be a source of income for property owners and one large construction wall generated up to 100,000 francs of advertising revenue per year by 1906, and the surface for posters cost 'almost as much as the land' (La Publicité, July 1906, p.5). See Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, p.127.

54

Figure 2.9: A Pygmalion, Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez). Source: PostersPlease<http://www.postersplease.com/gallery/contemporary-posters/item/9160>[accessed 10 June 2014].

It is interesting to note that posters featuring mothers and

daughters did not depict them inside the home, as many earlier

fashion plates did. Women’s bourgeois, married, and motherhood

status outside the home were portrayed, thus focusing more on the

status of the woman than on the absent husband or household. This

also applies to sales catalogues which the stores sent to their

customers, such as the image of groups of women in Figure 2.10.

Figure 2.10: A La Belle Jardiniére, Summer 1898. Source: ANMT,microfilm 66AQ1 1996 103M0001, pièce 37 – general, été [accessed28 May 2014].

These catalogues also feature women unaccompanied in the city and

depict women’s increased presence in the metropolitan street.

55

Figure 2.11 advertises a named outfit and is one example among

many of a catalogue image that portrays women as independent,

confident flâneuses.

Figure 2.11: A La Belle Jardinière, Summer 1902. Source: ANMT, 66AQ2,microfilm 1996 103 M 0002, pièce 3 - dames et fillettes [accessed5 June 2014].

Women’s ability to walk alone or in each others’ company without

compromising their respectability made female flânerie possible.

Many posters associated bourgeois women with a lifestyle that

entailed access to public spaces and new methods of advertising

played a vital role in forming new icons of modern women, with

posters visualising attractive icons of modern women in the city.

The image of the flâneuse is still relevant as it represents women's

increased access to urban life and the public sphere.

Chapter 3: Mobility and La Femme Nouvelle Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it

has done more to emancipate woman than any one thing in theworld. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on awheel. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and

56

independence the moment she takes her seat; and away shegoes, the picture of untrammelled womanhood.0

In the 1890s and early 1900s posters in particular

helped to reshape women’s identities and the popularity of

icons of modern women in posters and catalogues overlap with

the rise of la femme nouvelle, or the New Woman. She might be a

suffragette or a young woman with more aspirations than

previous generations and this new female assertiveness was

identified with the manufacture of the bicycle. In visual

culture, many catalogue and poster images depict women as

mobile and active in public, as well as implying their

agency and autonomy. Poster images which convey female

mobility concern advertisements for cycling as opposed to

the department store per se, and are used here to convey

women’s agency and active lifestyles. The objective of this

chapter is to study the association of mobility to la femme

nouvelle and then to read the advertisement in this light,

comparing them with discourses in caricatures that appeared

in the satirical press.

As bicycles became safer and cheaper more women had

access to the personal freedom that these machines embodied,

linking cycling to feminism. The bicycle came to symbolise

the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle, occurring also in Britain

and the United States0 and posters depicted advertisements

for female cycling lessons, as seen in Figure 3.1.

0 Susan B. Anthony, ‘Champion of Her Sex’, New York Sunday World, (2 February 1896), p.10. She was an American social reformer who played a key role in the women's suffrage movement.0

57

Figure 3.1: Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez), 1899, Poster Corner <http://www.postercorner.com/v/vspfiles/photos/00269-2.jpg>[accessed 23 August 2014].Feminists and suffragists saw the bicycle as a symbol of women’s

emancipation, and in 1896 the President of the feminist congress,

Maira Poigno, stated the ‘egalitarian, liberating bicycle’ would

liberate women.0 Advertising posters and catalogues depicted women

as integral to consumer culture and fashionable participants in

modern life. Her image was that of an active consumer of a wide

range of products and activities. The bicycle took off in the

1880s and marked a breakthrough for women, since it was available

to both sexes and encouraged fantasies of emancipation.

Department store catalogues contain images of women cycling alone

or in a group and Figure 3.2, for example, depicts a group of

women cycling in practical clothing such as trousers and they are

presented as confident on their bicycles.

0 Eugen Weber, France: Fin-de-Siècle, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.203.

58

Figure 3.2: A La Belle Jardinière Summer 1896. ANMT. Source: ANMT,1996 103 M0001, microfilm 66AQ1, pièce 32 – general, été[accessed 4 June 2014].

The clothing advertised in this catalogue image is telling. The

bicycle craze of the 1890s led to a movement for rational

clothing, helping to liberate women from restrictive corsets and

ankle-length skirts substituting culottes, divided skirts and

masculine tailoring (the tailleur) seen in Figure 3.3 which depicts

a lady called Lucie who competed in a cycling event in 1894-95.

Figure 3.3: Collection Jules Beau. Photographie sportive, années1894 et 1895. F. 13v. Lucie. Source: Gallica<http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433329b/f30.highres>[accessed 24 August 2014].

Representations of women as outdoors and mobile also featured in

catalogues that were entirely devoted to cycling and driving

59

clothes, as seen in Figure 3.4 which is a catalogue cover from

the A La Belle Jardinière store.

Figure 3.4: A La Belle Jardinière Cyclistes & Automobiles Special1902. Source: ANMT, 1996 103 M 0002, microfilm 66AQ2, pièce 2 –cycle et automobile [accessed 5 June 2014].

As with consumerism and the flâneuse, there was also

criticism of women riding bicycles. There were many medical

discussions over the possibility of masturbation,

defloration, or damage to women's internal organs by the

bicycle. In 1896 Sarah Bernhardt, a New Woman herself, said

'The bicycle is on the way to transforming our way of life

more deeply than you might think. All these young women and

girls who are devouring space are refusing domestic family

life.0 Figure 3.5, a cartoon from the satirical newspaper Le

Grelot, depicts the New Woman as abandoning her family to

cycle to feminist congresses and forcing her harassed

husband into domestic servitude and chaos. Here, the bicycle

is a symbol of female emancipation and gender roles have

been reversed.

0 Christopher Thompson, 'Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeois et la bicyclette dans la France fin-de-siècle', Le Mouvement social, (2000) pp. 9-40.

60

Figure 3.5: Le Grelot, 19 April 1896. Source:Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg <http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/grelot1896/0065>[accessed 11 June 2014].

Images of women hunting and riding horses also helped

to shape the image of the New Woman as independent and

confident participants in sports and leisure. Figure 3.6

shows women out hunting with men and their position at the

front of the picture focuses attention on them.

Figure 3.6: A La Belle Jardinière, Winter 1897-1898. Source: ANMT,1996 103 M0001, microfilm 66AQ1, pièce 36 – general, hiver[accessed 5 June 2014].

Consider also Figure 3.7, which features a woman riding a horse.

All eyes are on her and she is watched by a family and a man to

the left of the picture. She appears self-assured and enjoying

the attention. Studies of advertising have focussed primarily on

the objectification and sexualisation of women and on their

61

representation as passive objects of the male gaze. Yet women

were the ones looking at these images, not merely being look at.

An important aspect of advertising which is overlooked is the

extent to which it addresses modern women as agents in its

attempt to attract them to the products they advertise.

Advertisements influenced the subjects they represented the

modern woman could identify with these images. Depicting women as

mobile on bicycles, hunting and horse riding was a way for

advertisers to attract women to the advertised products.

Figure 3.7: A La Belle Jardinière, Summer 1888. Source: ANMT, 1996 103M0001, microfilm 66AQ1, pièce 1 – sommaire, été [accessed 4 June2014].

While the New Woman was a figure to be celebrated, she was often

made fun of in the press and her image featured in articles and

cartoons on the pages of the satirical journals La Plume, La Revue

and Le Charivari. The backlash towards early feminism reflects fears

that la femme nouvelle had arrived in France. Henri Marion, professor

of education at the Sorbonne, devoted a lecture series from 1892

to 1894 and a book in 1900, to the ‘Psychology of Woman’, arguing

that science has shown women to be ill-suited to rational thought

and firm gender boundaries were the hallmark of an advanced

civilisation. Likewise, in 1880 Alexandre Dumas fils wrote an

essay called ‘Les femmes qui tuent les femmes qui votent’ and in

62

1891 stated ‘Ce sera bientôt nous, mes amis,

qui serons obligés de faire les confitures

et d’allaiter les enfants’.0 This crisis in

intellectual male identity was a

reaction to modernity that they

perceived as empowering for women but

destructive of virility. Consider, for

example, the image in Figure 3.8, an 1880 caricature by Alfred Le

Petit that featured in Le Charivari.

Figure 3.8: Alfred Le Petit, caricature, Le Charivari, 1880. Source:Iskin, ‘Popularising New Women in Belle Époque AdvertisingPosters’, p.100.

The feminist is depicted as a menacing figure that looms over her

audience of young girls. Her words are in the caption below and

state: ‘Citizens, since men persist in refusing us our civic

rights, let us refuse them our (sexual) favours!’ Her audience

0 Ibid,p.15. ‘Soon it will be us, my friends, who will have to make the jam and suckle the children.’

63

find the idea shocking and the depiction of the feminist’s old

body and facial features are in stark contrast to images of the

New Woman that featured in advertising posters and catalogues.

The image of la femme nouvelle was a widely exported

commodity and thought to be the world's most feminine, with

the symbolist poet Gustave Kahn arguing that the Parisienne

became the emblem of the fin de siècle.0 Although she was

sometimes a figure of fun in the press, she was at once

stylish, playful and attractive. These qualities are

epitomised in Figure 3.9, a poster that advertises the Cycles

Gladiator company and portrays the New Woman’s independence

and enjoyment at cycling away from the soldier who is

chasing her and her companion.

Figure 3.9: Cycles Gladiator, Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez), 1895. Source: Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9016316b/f1.highres> [accessed 23 August 2014].Conclusion

The modern, public woman reached her apotheosis in the 1900

Paris Exposition in the figure of La Parisienne which stood atop the

porte monumentale on the Place de la Concorde.0 Crowning the

0 Gustave Kahn, La Femme dans la caricature française, (Paris: Merciant, 1907).0 See the image of La Parisienne atop the Porte Monumentale in 1900 at ‘UneFamille d’Artistes bourronnaise, Les Moreau-Vauthier’, apophtegme.com

64

exposition like a new kind Marianne who was used to bolster the

national image, she was a triumphant figure who loomed over the

exposition. The ‘New Woman’ who featured in posters and catalogues

partook in consumer culture, engaged in flânerie and was active and

mobile, represented a modern form of femininity that embodied the

shimmering surfaces and dangers of the modern city. A counter-

foil to La Parisienne is the statue on Place Montholon of Les Ouvrières

Parisiennes (Parisienne Workers) which shows some excitable working-

class women who are wearing some of the clothing that are

advertised in the posters and catalogues.0

This dissertation has sought to extend existing scholarship

by accounting for the social, cultural, political and economic

contexts of the posters and catalogues, seeking to reveal the

specific goal of addressing targeted consumers. Although

advertising is viewed as exploitative, department store posters

and catalogues portrayed women as central to consumer culture and

stylish participants in modern life. Poster and catalogue images

encouraged women to play a key role in fin-de-siècle consumer culture

and to gain a new mobility and presence on the city street.

Wider discourses represented ‘public’ women as objects of

anxiety, transgression, vanity and narcissism, and reveal the

identification between public space and consumption in this era.

Urban space and movement through it were gendered, and both

mobile women and mixed spaces were seen as transgressive. The

literary and artistic depictions of the female consumer that

appeared in the printed press were merciless and stigmatised her.

However, posters in particular, validated and disseminated her,

<http://www.apophtegme.com/ALBUM/images/1900-parisienne.jpg> [accessed 13 June 2014].0 For an image of this statue, see < http://a-french-education.blogspot.be/2010/11/working-women-of-pigalle-by-pb-lecron.html> (accessed 4 September 2014).

65

presenting more positive and aspirational images of the female

consumer in which she is supposed to see herself. In the twenty-

first century, advertising images influence audience identities

and this can be traced back to the nineteenth-century. Some

posters and catalogues that propagated new identities of modern

women helped shape them, and attractive images were acceptable to

fin-de-siècle French society. These images embraced women's desires

for new freedoms and roles and often depicted the type of woman

they aimed to win over as consumer. This is to be expected, since

the stores wished to make a profit by appealing to their key

audience. However, these images can be seen as representations

that offered a different kind of agency. While the posters offer

more consensual reassuring images used for marketing purposes,

such as images of women with children and purchasing linens in

the annual sales at the exposition de blanc, they can be viewed as

offering some kind of autonomy for women. Posters are of course

aimed at women walking in the city, who then see themselves

reflected back in these images and evoke what Iskin terms

‘associations and identifications.’0 The act of looking, rather

than being looked at, is an active one.

However, posters and catalogues consulted for this

dissertation are not comprehensive and although many hours were

spent squinting at microfilm images at the ANMT, more time would

have to be spent on this in future research. Some findings from

Chapter 3 were not anticipated from the outset, such as the

strong link between feminism and bicycling and this opens up

entirely new avenues to explore in future studies. These studies

would also discuss women’s mobility linked to other forms of

transport such as trains, trams and cars. One of the few studies

of women and the automobile in France reports that during the0 Iskin, Popularising New Women, in A Belle Époque? p.96.

66

early period they were more likely to be passengers than drivers.

The theme of women and the automobile, for example, would be

extremely interesting to explore in future research, and there

have been very few studies of women and the automobile in France.0

It would also be interesting to research La Parisienne at the 1900

exposition and to link this to allegorical representations of

women in art and statues.

In the Introduction it was stated that there have been very

few dissertations devoted to the topic of commercial posters and

catalogues and that it was the aim of this dissertation to

utilise visual and literary sources to interpret varied and

conflicting representations of la femme and to place these within

their historical context. Images contained in this work are

representative of scenes of consumption, female flânerie and la femme

nouvelle. They help to demonstrate different, and often

conflicting, representations of women in advertising and provide

analyses of contemporary debates over consumption, citizenship

and women’s place in Parisian society at the fin-de-siècle.

Bibliography

Archival Materials

ANMT, Roubaix, No Author, Historique des magasins du Bon Marché Plan deParis, (Paris: 1900). IND 740 / 1998 007 301.

16AQ1, microfilm 1996 103 M 0001

66AQ2, microfilm 1996 103 M 0002

Primary Sources0 Alexandre Buisseret has surveyed 200 posters advertising cars, concluding that two thirds had a picture of a woman passenger. See Alexandre Buisseret, 'Les femmes et l'automobile à la Belle Époque', Le Mouvement Social (2000), 192, 41-64

67

Alq, Louise d’, La Science de la vie: conseils et réflexions à l’usage de tous(Paris: Ebhardt, 1890)

Anthony, Susan B., ‘Champion of Her Sex’, New York Sunday World (2February 1896)

Avenal, Georges d’ ‘Le mécanisme de la vie moderne: lapublicité’, Revue des deux mondes 2 (January - February 1901)

Balzac, Honoré de, 'Histoire et physiologie des boulevards deParis', Traite de la vie élégante, preface and notes by L. Lumet(Paris: Bibliopolis, 1922)

Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Some French Caricaturists’, in The Painter ofModern Life, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon,1965)

Bon, Gustave Le, ‘A Mead Project Source Page’,brocku.ca<http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Lebon/LeBon_1895/

LeBon_1895_02.html> [accessed 20 June 2014]

Champseur, Felicien, Dinah Samuel (Paris: Pierre Douville, 1881)

Clarétie, Jules, La Vie à Paris (Paris: Victor Harvard, 1882)

Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary (London: Penguin, 2007)

Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN> [accessed 26 August 2014]

Jules, Léon, ‘Romans-Revue’, La Publicité (April 1910)

Kahn, Gustave, La Femme dans la caricature française (Paris: Merciant,1907)

Lacassagne, Alexandre ‘Les vols à l’étalage et dans les grandsmagasins’, Revue de l’Hypnotisme et de la Psychologie Physiologique(September 1896)

Lainé, André, Les demoiselles de magasin à Paris (Paris: Arthur Rousseau,1911)

Larousse, Pierre, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, ed. P.Larousse, 15 vols (Paris: Administration du granddictionnaire universel, 1866-79)

Marshall, William, French Home Life (London: William Blackwood andSons, 1883)

68

Michelet, Jules, La Femme (1879, 10th edition), Gallica< http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5596481c > [accessed 23

August 2014]

Montorgueil, Georges, La Vie des boulevards: Madeleine-Bastille (Paris: Quantin, 1896)

Morin, Louis, 'Murailles', L'Estampe et l'affiche (1898)

Simmel, Georg, ‘Fashion’, Mode Theorie.de <http://www.modetheorie.de/fileadmin/Texte/s/Simmel-

Fashion_1904.pdf> [accessed 16 June 2014]

Taine, Hippolyte, Les Origines de le France Contemporaine. Available on Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206154k.r=hippolyte+taine+les+origines.langEN> [accessed 28 August 2014]

Talmeyr, Maurice, ‘L’age de l’affiche’, Revue des deux mondes (1 September 1896)

Uzanne, Octave, La Nouvelle bibliopolis (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897)

Vachon, Marius, Les Arts et les industries du papier 1871-1894 (Paris: May & Motteroz, 1894)

Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Vanguard Press, 1899)

Zola, Émile, Au Bonheur des dames (London: Penguin, 2006)

Zola, Émile, La Faute de l'abbée Mouret (Boston: Adamant MediaCorporation, 2001)

Zola, Émile, Nana (London: Penguin Classics, 1972)

Zola, Émile, ‘Une victim de la réclame’, L’Illustration (17 November1866)

Secondary Sources

All Posters, <http://www.allposters.com/> [accessed 24 August 2014]

Apophtegme,

69

<http://www.apophtegme.com/> [accessed 24 August 2014]

Auslander, Leora, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1996)

Benjamin, Walter, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006

Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (NewYork:

Methuen, 1985)

Brantlinger, Patrick, Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983)

Brown Library <http://library.brown.edul> [accessed 8 August 2014]

Buisseret, Alexandre, 'Les femmes et l'automobile à la BelleÉpoque', Le Mouvement Social (2000), 192, 41-64

Cambridge Dictionaries Online <http://dictionary.cambridge.org/>[accessed 12 July 2014]

Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1988)

Crossick, G, and S. Jaumain, eds, Cathedrals of Consumption The EuropeanDepartment Store 1850-1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate PublishingLimited, 1999)

Doves Today < http://doves2day.blogspot.be/> [accessed 4 September2014]

Esperdy <www.esperdy.net> [accessed 30 August 2014]

Friedberg, Anne, ‘Les flâneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the PostmodernCondition’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America106, no.3, (1991), 419-431

Fritzsche, Peter, Reading Berlin 1900 (Harvard: Harvard UniversityPress, 1998)

Grazia, V de., and E. Furlough, eds, The Sex of Things: Gender andConsumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996)

Grow Wealthy < http://www.growwealthy.net> [accessed 28 August 2014]

70

Hahn, H. Hazel, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in theNineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Harvey, David, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London, New York: Routledge,2003)

‘Heidelberher historiche Bestände’, Universitatsbibliothek Heidelberg <http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/grelot1896/0065>

[accessed 24 August 2014]

Holmes, D., and C. Tarr, eds, A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in French Society andCulture 1890-1914 (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books Ltd 2006)

‘Iconicity: Definition’, ccat.sas.upenn.edu

<http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/indexical/icondef.html> [accessed 10 August 2014]

‘Individualism’, journalism.co.uk <http://www.journalism.co.uk/terms-definitions-dictionary-terminology-words/s54/#p> [accessed 24 June 2014]

Iskin, Ruth E., ‘Popularising New Women in Belle ÉpoqueAdvertising Posters’, in A ‘Belle Époque’? Women in French Society andCulture 1890-1914 ed. D. Holmes and C. Tarr (Oxford, New York:Berghahn Books Ltd 2006), pp.95-112

Iskin, Ruth E., ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters:advertising images of modern women in Paris’, in The invisibleflâneuse? Gender, public space, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris,ed. A. d'Souza and T McDonough, (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2006)

Iskin, Ruth E., ‘The Pan-European Flâneuse in Fin-de-SièclePosters: Advertising Modern Women in the City’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 25 (4), (2003), 333-356

Marrey, Bernard, Les grands magasins des origines à 1939 (Paris: Picard, 1979)

McMillan, James F., Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society1870-1940, (Brighton: The Harvester Press Ltd)

merriem-webster.com <http://www.merriam-webster.com > [accessed 24May 2014]

71

Miller, Michael B., The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the DepartmentStore, 1869-1920 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UniversityPress, 1994)

‘Mirabile Dictu’, mirabeledictu.org<http://mirabiledictu.org/2013/03/16/balzacs-cousin-pons/>

[accessed 20 June 2014]

Nava, M., and A. O’Shea, eds, Modern Times: Reflections on a Century ofEnglish Modernity (London: Routledge, 1995)

Nord, Philip G., Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton,New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986)

O’Brien, Patricia, ‘The Kleptomania Diagnosis: Bourgeois Womenand Theft in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of SocialHistory 17, no. 1 (1983), 65-77

Porter, J. H., 'The development of a provincial department store1870-1939, Business History, 13, (1971)

Poster, Mark, 'Culture and History: The Cases of Leisure, Art,and Technology', French Historical Studies 18, no.1 (Spring 1993),173-210

Posters Please < http://www.postersplease.com/> [accessed 24 August2014]

No author, The Goodman of Paris, ed. and trans. E. Power (Brooklyn,New York: BOYE6, 2006)

Souza, A d’., and T. McDonough, eds, The invisible flâneuse? Gender, publicspace, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2006)

Souza, A d’., ‘Why the Impressionists Never Painted theDepartment Store’, in The invisible flâneuse? Gender, public space, andvisual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. A. d'Souza and T.McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)

Thompson, Christopher, 'Un troisième sexe? Les bourgeois et labicyclette dans la France fin-de-siècle', Le Mouvement social,9-40 (2000)

Tiersten, Lisa, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, London: University of CaliforniaPress, 2001)

Valverde, Marianna, 'Fashion and the fallen women in nineteenth-century social discourse', Victorian Studies, 32, (1989)

72

Weber, Eugen, France: Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, Mass: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988)

Wolff, Janet, ‘Gender and the haunting of cities (or, theretirement of the flaneur)’, in The invisible flâneuse? Gender, publicspace, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Paris, ed. A. d'Souza andT. McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006)

73