The Birth of a Modern Consumer Society?

Dr Chris Pearson

Lecture questions:

• How and why did a consumer society emerge in France over the course of the nineteenth century?

• What were the meanings given to consumerism?

Lecture outline

•Emergence of a consumer society

•Gender and consumerism•Reactions to consumerism

Society of mass consumption:

‘a radical division between the activities of production and of consumption, the prevalence of standardized merchandise sold in large volume, the ceaseless introduction of new products, widespread reliance on money and credit, and ubiquitous publicity.’

Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds (1982), 3

‘Once people glimpse the vision of commodities in profusion, they do not easily return to traditional modes of consumption… We who have tasted the fruits of the consumer revolution have lost our innocence.’

Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds (1982), 3

Consumer Society

• Desire for and consumption of mass-produced goods

• Consumer choice targeted by marketing and publicity

• Individual and social identities (partly) based on consumption

• Cultural as well as economic aspects

The roots of French consumer society (1)

• Last decades of the ancien régime, Parisians became part of a consumer society – bed linen, plates, mirrors

• Changes in clothing – servants and artisans aping upper classes – aspiration for higher standard of living

• Daniel Roche, People of Paris (1987)

The roots of French consumer society (2)

• 1840s (final decade of July Monarchy)• Economic changes: expansion of

railways, new industries, mechanisation of textiles

• Social changes: increased education• Market for cheap publications and

clothing• David Pinkney, The Decisive Years in

France (1986)

Balzac on the grocer:

‘He is civilization in a shop, society in a paper bag. His is Enlightenment in action, life itself distributed in bottles, packets and jars.’

Symbol of consumer

society during the

Second Empire : Le Bon marché

department store

The roots of French consumer society (3)

Louvre department store, opened 1855

Universal Exposition 1855

The economics behind the rise of the mass consumer

society• Development of mass produced

goods and falling labour costs• Rising wages and falling food prices• A Parisian worker who had 100 francs

to spend in 1850 had the equivalent of 165 francs by the early years of the twentieth century

Main features of the mass consumer society

• ‘Democratization of luxury’?• No - different model of consumption,

complete with advertising, mass entertainment (cinema, cafes etc), parks, and new mass-produced goods

• Consumption based in central Paris, production pushed to the outskirts

The Printemps department store, est. 1865

‘From the ceiling were suspended rugs from Smyrna with complicated patterns that stood out from the red background. Then, from the four sides, curtains were hung….and still more rugs, which could serve as wall hangings, strange flowering of peonies and palms, fantasy released in a garden of dreams.’

Zola, Au bonheur des dames, 122-3

Department stores and identity

• Late 19C Paris: population united by shared experience of visual spectacle (Schwartz, Spectacular Realities [1999])

• Bon marché reflected and shaped middle class identities – being bourgeois meant having the right clothes, furnishings etc (Miller, The Bon marché [1981])

Site of the former Dufayel store in the 18th arrondissement (now a bank)

The aims of advertising:

‘To inform, to create need and desire, and to convince consumers that the advertiser could best meet those needs.’

Leora Auslander, Taste and Power, p.354

‘Advertising absolutely should modify its language and style according to the class of society that it intends to affect. Advertisers must learn to speak differently to the financier than to the secondhand shoe salesmen’

La Publicité moderne (1906)

Gender and Consumerism (1)

• Female department store clerks – image of them as sexually and morally suspect

• Pierre Giffard (1882): they were a ‘group of women who inevitably became depraved or deprave others.’

• Not quite working class, not quite bourgeois

Gender and consumerism (2)

• Bourgeois female shoppers caused anxiety

• Blurred boundaries between public and private spheres

• Fearless female shopper vs. dutiful and passive housewife

• Female shoppers created bourgeois class identity

• Walton, France at the Crystal Palace (1992)

Gender and consumption (3)

• Ligue sociale d’achetuers (or Social league of consumers)

• Run by Catholic women aiming to bring Catholic morality to the market place

• Educate elite shoppers to better the lot of the working classes

• M.-E. Chessel, ‘Women and the Ethics of Consumption in France’ in F. Trentmann (ed). The Making of the Consumer (2005)

Criticizing consumerism

• Traditionalists lamented cult of individual and other facets of the modern consumer society

• Supposed aesthetic decline of France – mass produced goods replaced luxury items

• Sociologists such as Pierre Maroussem – lamented decline of artisan workshops and exploitative practices of department stores

Taming consumerism

‘The love of fashion, when it is regulated by reason… and guided by a sure and delicate taste, becomes a lovely form of art, the most feminine of the arts. And it is also a social good.’ Marcelle Tinayre in Femina (1910)

The importance of taste

‘In the vision of market representatives, taste fundamentally transformed consumption from a social hazard into a social good through the subordination of self-interest to higher aesthetic and moral goals. Taste, in short, not only civilized the market by creating civic-minded consumers, but conferred on the market the power to civilize: to further refine French taste.’

Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Marketplace (2001), 233