The Ladies' Paradise (BBC tie-in) (Oxford World's Classics) (2 page)

The Ladies’ Paradise
is an important text, for, whereas
Pot-Bouille
had concentrated on the private lives of the bourgeoisie, its sequel marks Zola’s desire to broaden his social perspective
and embrace the whole of socio-economic reality through his representation of the world of the department store. The model for Mouret’s store is the Bon Marché, Paris’s first department store and the largest single department store in the world before 1914.
¹
Aristide Boucicaut took over the Bon Marché, a large drapery shop, in 1852 and quickly transformed it into a much larger shop. In 1852 it boasted four departments, twelve employees, and a turnover of 450,000 francs a year. Its turnover rose to 5 million in 1860, 7 million in 1863, 21 million in 1869, 77 million in 1877, more than 80 million in 1882, 123 million in 1888, and over 200 million in 1906. The physical expansion of the store was equally impressive. When Boucicaut stopped building in 1887, it occupied a whole city block. The establishment of the Bon Marché as a
grand magasin
was followed by that of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville in 1854, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre (usually just called Le Louvre) in 1855, Au Coin de la Rue in 1864, Au Printemps in 1865, La Belle Jardinière in 1866–7, La Samaritaine in 1869, and Les Galeries Lafayette in 1895. There were parallel developments of course in the United States and England—Macy’s in New York, Marshall Field in Chicago, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Selfridge’s in London. In his preparation for the novel Zola visited the Bon Marché and Le Louvre, took notes, and consulted with various authorities, including former employees of department stores and the architect Frantz Jourdain, a pioneer designer of this sort of establishment. ‘What I want to do in
The Ladies’ Paradise’,
Zola wrote in his notes, ‘is write the poem of modern activity. Hence, a complete shift of philosophy: no more pessimism, first of all. Don’t conclude with the stupidity and sadness of life. Instead, conclude with its continual labour, the power and gaiety that comes from its productivity. In a word, go along with the century, express the century, which is a century of action and conquest, of effort in every direction.’
²
Despite the destruction of many of the traditional little family shops,
The Ladies’ Paradise
is a hymn to modern business, a celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit.

In spite of his scientific attitude Zola’s writing is highly romantic: the giant symbols he uses to represent modern society—the city, the market, the machine, the prostitute, the theatre, the stock exchange, the department store—are the visions of a romantic imagination. Everywhere he sees allegories and symbols. Thé department store in
The Ladies’ Paradise
is a symbol of capitalism, the Second Empire, the experience of the city, and the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of commodity culture and new systems of fashion; and it is the site of nineteenth-century sexual attitudes and class relations. The physical space of the store is also social and cultural space. Zola’s representation of the illusions that define consumer culture is as subversive as that offered by the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his ‘Arcades Project’, an uncompleted but seminal study of the ‘phantasmagoria’ of urban experience and modern consumerism.
³
This project is as striking and poetic in its images as it is sophisticated and challenging in its analyses. Benjamin’s dominant image is the shopping arcade itself, the
passages
built in Paris during the Restoration (1814–30) and the reign of Louis-Philippe (1830–48). The arcades, with their iron and glass roofs, were places for the display and sale of commodities, which they illuminated and enshrined in visions of abundance and luxury which gave the crowds that strolled by no clue as to the conditions of their production. These elegant centres of bourgeois life were like cities, little worlds, in miniature. They housed cafés, brothels, luxury stores, apartments, displays of food, fashion, and furniture, art galleries, bookstores, dioramas, theatres, baths, news-stands, gambling houses, and private clubs. For Benjamin they represented an extraordinary historical stage, illuminated by gaslight (first used in the arcades), through which
paraded the figures of the crowd: financiers, gamblers, bohemians,
flâneurs,
political conspirators, dandies, prostitutes, criminals, rag-pickers. They were an image of the bourgeois world, a montage of its realities and fantasies, a stage set for an allegorical representation of the origins of modern mass culture.

The development during the Second Empire of the department stores (which made use of the same iron and glass construction as the arcades) marked a further development. If commodities had first promised to fulfil human desires, now they created them: dreams themselves became commodities. In the 1850s the Boucicauts developed a new retailing policy. They realized that, whereas they could make a living from supplying a conscious need on the part of their customers, they could make an infinitely better living by supplying a desire the customer did not know she had until she entered the shop. In this way, the Boucicauts pioneered the idea of the department store as a building purposely designed for fashionable public assembly and which, by the use of display techniques, eye-catching design, and other ploys, replaced the commercial principle of supply with that of consumer seduction.

The mechanisms of seduction, all of which are described in
The Ladies’ Paradise,
were multiple. They included advertising (a novel practice in the nineteenth century); the policy of ‘free entry’ (the freedom to enter the shop and browse without being obliged to buy, by which shopping came to be seen for the first time as a leisure activity); the establishment of fixed prices, which fostered speed and impersonality of purchase; and the system of ‘returns’—the easy exchangeability of purchases that failed to satisfy, for other objects of fantasy and desire. In addition, there was the manipulation of space—the creation of deliberate disorder, disconnection, in the layout of the different departments within the store. This obliged the shoppers to travel the length and breadth of the shop to find the items they had come to purchase; as they walked through the shop, they were exposed to the display of other items they had not initially thought to acquire. Above all, there was the seduction of pure spectacle, the seduction of the eye through an almost orgiastic display of visual pleasures enticingly encased in their wrappings and sealed by the surrounding womb of warmth and light. The
introduction of sheet glass and electric lighting for the ground-floor window displays not only enticed potential customers (mainly women) into the store; it made window-shopping along the boulevards a standard form of Parisian
flânerie.
To adapt a favourite Benjamin metaphor, based on his awareness that the origin of the arcades was the Eastern bazaar, department stores offered a kind of Arabian Nights world of limitless gratification in time and space. The term ‘window-shopping’ in French is, of course, suggestively sensual: ‘lèche-vitrines’—literally, licking windows. The department store sold not just commodities, but the very process of consumption, transforming the mundane activity of shopping into a sensuous and enjoyable experience. In Zola’s novel, Octave Mouret is presented as the Great Seducer. The best window-dresser in Paris, it is he who arouses and orchestrates consumer desire: ‘Mouret’s sole passion was the conquest of Woman. He wanted her to be queen in his shop; he had built this temple for her in order to hold her at his mercy. His tactics were to intoxicate her with amorous attentions, to trade on her desires’ (p. 234).

Mouret’s store is a model of the new capitalism, of an economic system based on the principle of circulation, movement, turnover, the constant and increasingly rapid renewal of capital in the form of commodities. Mouret’s success is due not only to his refined understanding of the capitalist system (the principles of which he clearly expounds himself), but also to his exploitation of another new system, namely, the integrated transportation network which facilitated travel and the rapid circulation of goods both within the city and between Paris and the rest of the world. The two basic elements of the new transportation system were the railway and the new urban network of wide, straight boulevards. Each plays a role in determining both the conception and the operation of Mouret’s department store.

The railway, with its speed and its far-flung network of track, promoted the economic circulation of goods, feeding Mouret’s store with an endless supply of fabric from the French provinces and elsewhere. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his remarkable study of railway travel in the nineteenth century, has shown how the
emergence of new modes of transport, together with the development of commodity culture and the concomitant replacement of use value by exchange value, produced new modes of perception.
⁴
The relationship between subject and object is no longer stable but evanescent and detached. In a railway journey the speed of the train blurs all foreground objects, often to such an extent that the foreground seems to disappear entirely. Near space is lost and the viewing subject on the train has the sensation of being totally detached from the distant space which contains the objects he can see. And even these distant objects are perceived only evanescently and in a dispersed manner, since the train traveller is unable either to fix the objects as he speeds by or to organize them perceptually.

The perceptions of the railway traveller can be compared with those of the shopper in the department store, in that the physical motion of the shopper, the symbolic motion of the goods (through accelerated turnover), and the presentation of these goods via their commodity (or exchange) value all combine to produce a relationship between subject and object which is analogous to that of the train traveller and the landscape that zooms past his window.
⁵
The descriptions of the sales in
The Ladies’ Paradise,
with their swirling movement and their frenetic circulation of money, goods, and bodies, are the perfect expression of commodity culture, which, as Benjamin and others have pointed out, is a culture of speed, movement, dislocation, disorientation:
⁶

The great afternoon rush-hour had arrived, when the overheated machine led the dance of customers, extracting money from their very flesh. In the silk department especially there was a sense of madness … In the still air, where the stifling central heating brought out the smell of the materials, the hubbub was increasing, made up of all
sorts of noises—the continuous trampling of feet, the same phrases repeated a hundred times at the counters, gold clinking on the brass of the cash-desks, besieged by a mass of purses, the baskets on wheels with their loads of parcels falling endlessly into the gaping cellars, (pp. 108–9)

Technological change and the accelerated circulation of commodities not only affected man’s perceptions of the world but also influenced the way he organized the space in which he lived. Urban planning was informed partly by a desire to accommodate the increasingly rapid circulation of goods and their consumers. Under Napoleon III in the 1850s Baron Haussmann (1809–91), the Prefect of the Seine, launched his massive plan of urban redevelopment for Paris. His modernization of the city by means of broad, straight, strategically placed boulevards which facilitated the movement of troops reflected the counter-revolutionary political needs of the Emperor, providing a fundamental nineteenth-century example of the links between spatial planning and the institutionalization of state power; but its purpose was also to advance the bourgeoisie’s business interests by creating a more efficient transport network. Mouret longs to expand his operation so that the Ladies’ Paradise will have its entrance and a palatial new façade on one of the grand new boulevards, the Rue du Dix-Décembre. He thus curries favour with the man in charge of the redevelopment, the wealthy and influential Baron Hartmann, whose name, with its phonetic resemblance to Haussmann, is clearly no coincidence. Mouret tries to convince the Baron to develop a section of the new boulevard with an extension of the department store. If he could have found a way, the narrator tells us, he would have made the street run right through his shop (p. 236). And he succeeds in a sense in doing this by the visual openness created by his use of sheet glass and electric lighting for his ground-floor window displays, and by his system of interior traffic circulation which is modelled on Haussmann’s network of boulevards.

The department store, the Second Empire, and the modernization of Paris by Haussmann all form part of the same general economy. Just as Mouret is able to provide a ‘healthy’ retail environment (in both physical and commercial terms) by opening up the space of the store, in contrast to the cramped darkness
of the old drapery shops, so Haussmann’s opening up of Paris with his network of wide, bright, efficient arteries improved the physical and commercial ‘health’ of the city. In the modern city, the capital of the world of work, everyone is busy, everything has its function, an organic justification. For Zola, who always identified laziness and idleness with waste, the modern city’s beauty comes from its being a space in which whatever has no use has no place. The sight of the city—and by the same token its microcosm the department store—at work is for Zola a beautiful spectacle.

For Michel Serres it is Mouret’s understanding of imperialism as shown in his mastery over space, in his ability to use the interior space of his store to his own advantage (creating an environment where he can easily dominate his female subjects), and his ability to draw together under one roof products from all over the world (exploiting the productive capacity of far-flung regions) that accounts for his success: ‘Space is necessary—and, I believe, sufficient—for control: kings, tyrants, those who have power, the ruling class, have understood, I think, that they can give up certain things, even the means of production, even energy,
provided that
they keep and maintain complete control over space.’
⁷
Both Mouret and Louis-Napoleon are masters at controlling space, and thereby at controlling crowds.