Marianne in the market envisioning consumer society in fin de siecle

Marianne in the Market


The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous contribution to this book provided by
the General Endowment Fund of the Associates
of the University of California Press


Marianne
in the Market
Envisioning Consumer Society
in Fin-de-Siècle France

Lisa Tiersten

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley . Los Angeles . London


University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2001
by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tiersten, Lisa.
Marianne in the market : envisioning consumer

society in fin-de-siècle France / Lisa Tiersten.
p.
cm .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-520-22529-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Women consumers—France—History—19th
century. 2. Consumption (Economics)—France—
History—19th century. 3. Middle class—France—
History—19th century. 4. Aesthetics—History—
19th century. i. Title.
hc280 . c6 t54 2001
339.4Ј7Ј0820944—dc21

00-066629

Manufactured in the United States of America
09

08

10

9 8 7 6 5 4

07

06

05

04

03

02

3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39 0.48-1992
(r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).


To Ingmar and Erik



Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

part i. the problem of the marketplace
1. Marianne in the Department Store: Commercial Paris
and the Civic Vision of the Republic
2. “The Mercantile Spirit of Our Epoch”: The Aesthetic
Crisis of the Republic

15
55

part ii. civilizing consumption
3. Being Bourgeois: The Rise of Aesthetic Individuality
4. Marketplace Modernism: Reinventing the
Chic Parisienne
5. The Chic Interior: Marketplace Modernism
in the Bourgeois Home
6. Consumer Citizenship and the Republicanization
of the Market

89
121
150
185

Conclusion

231

Notes

237

Bibliography

287

Index

311



Illustrations

1. Poster for Aux Phares de la Bastille Department Store,
c. 1900
2. “Ah! M’ame Chopin!” La Mode, 1841
3. “The Department Head.” Mlle X, Commis et demoiselles
de magasins, 1868
4. Henry Gerbault, “The Turkey of the Farce.”
L’Art et la mode, 1885
5. “Honey, will you give me a kiss?” Alfred Grévin,
Almanach des Parisiennes, 1871–72
6. “The Unfortunate Woman.” Femina, 1905
7. Toothpaste advertisement. Octave-Jacques Gérin and
C. Espinadel, La Publicité suggestive, 1911
8. Corn medicine advertisement. La Publicité, 1903
9. Fashion plate. La Mode illustrée, 1864
10. Fashion plate. La Revue de la mode, 1902
11. Fashion plate. Le Moniteur de la mode, 1882

12. Yves Barzy, “Art Preventing Fashion from Following
Madness.” L’Art de la mode, 1882
13. Fashion plate. L’Illustration, 1890
14. The petit salon of Madame B. Le Figaro-modes, 1903
15. The petit salon of Madame F. Le Figaro-modes, 1903
16. Countess Anna de Noailles in her living room.
L’Illustration, 1913
17. Diary cover. Maison des Magasins Réunis Department
Store, 1913
18. Advertisement. Pygmalion Department Store, 1913
19. Diary cover. Maison des Magasins Réunis Department
Store, 1913
20. Advertisement. Galeries Lafayette Department Store, 1912

27
28
31
44
45
51
74
75
98
100
115
133
140
163
174
181

193
196
197
222
ix



Acknowledgments

From this project’s inception, many different scholars, colleagues, and
friends have helped to shape it. My dissertation advisor, Peter Gay,
sparked my interest in the bourgeoisie and served as a model of productive, engaged scholarship. John Merriman demystified the French
archives and offered sage advice, and Keith Luria provided me with essential perspectives on the Ancien Régime. Robert Herbert inspired me
as a scholar and guided me as a mentor, for which I offer him my deepest thanks.
I have been enormously fortunate in my colleagues at Barnard College and in the congenial, intellectually lively atmosphere they create.
In particular, I extend heartfelt thanks to Mark Carnes, Robert McCaughey, Rosalind Rosenberg, Herbert Sloan, Deborah Valenze, and
Nancy Woloch for indispensable professional guidance and moral sustenance. I am indebted to them for their many kindnesses. At Columbia
University across the street, Isser Woloch and Volker Berghahn have
been immensely sympathetic and supportive colleagues. I owe special
thanks to Victoria De Grazia, who has been extraordinarily generous
and helpful, and whose scholarship on consumption has been an instrumental model for me.
I could not have finished this book without the many colleagues and
friends who helped me to conceptualize and write it. Amy Barasch,
Thomas Bender, David Farber, Lisa Gordis, Kathryn Johnson, Joel Kaye,
Pascale Montadert, Martin Tiersten, Lars Trägårdh, Deborah Valenze,
xi


xii

Acknowledgments

and Cecile Whiting offered advice or read portions of the manuscript.
Lars Trägårdh’s insights into political culture helped me to better understand the French Republic, and Joel Kaye not only provided invaluable
editorial suggestions but motivated me throughout the long writing process. I have benefited enormously from discussing the late nineteenth
century with Geoffrey Crossick, and I have greatly appreciated his interest in my work. My deepest gratitude goes to those who read the manuscript in its entirety, in some cases more than once. Perry Friedman and
Kathleen Nilan supplied insightful and judicious comments. James Herbert helped me to sharpen my prose and clarify my ideas, while Ruth BenGhiat managed to offer astute criticisms and cheer me on at the same
time. Erika Rappaport’s own work on late-nineteenth-century British
consumer culture inspired me to think deeply about cultural history and
consider the specificities of the French case. I owe a special debt to Beth
Bailey, who read and re-read the chapters, offering superb commentary
and essential encouragement at every stage. The discernment and unstinting attention of these people made this a better book. I also thank
Sheila Levine, editor at the University of California Press, who has been
a model of patience and understanding, and the anonymous readers of
the manuscript, who made many fruitful suggestions for revision. Dore
Brown, who oversaw every aspect of the production process, and Evan
Camfield, who copyedited the manuscript, both improved the book immeasurably and have earned my sincerest appreciation.
The research and writing of this book has received financial support
from Yale University, the French Government through a Châteaubriand
Fellowship, Wellesley College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the French Historical Studies Society, the Getty Center for the
Study of the History of Art and the Humanities, Barnard College, and
the Gilder Foundation. Some of the work on the project was done while
I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Center, and I thank the Center
for providing a productive work environment. I also extend thanks to
the research staffs of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Archives de Paris, the Archives
Nationales, the Musée Carnavalet, and the Fashion Institute of Technology for their assistance in the research process.
Some of the material in Chapters 1 and 6 appeared in my essay “Marianne in the Department Store: Gender and the Politics of Consumption
in Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, eds., Geoffrey Crossick and Serge
Jaumin (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1999). Some of the material in

Acknowledgments

xiii

Chapter 5 also appeared in my essay “The Chic Interior and the Feminine
Modern: Home Decorating as High Art in Turn-of-the-Century Paris,” in
Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).
My parents, Martin and Judith Tiersten, and my sister, Amy Tiersten,
have helped me more than they will ever know. I have been sustained by
their generosity, enthusiasm, and love over the years of this project. Finally, words can not begin to capture the contribution of my husband,
Ingmar Nyman, to this book. He has worked tirelessly with me on every
facet of it and his intelligence, sensibility, and editorial judgment have
fundamentally shaped it. My debt to him is beyond measure—I dedicate
this book to him and to our son, Erik, with love.



Introduction
Paris! What was Paris like? What a titanic name!
She repeated it to herself softly, for the pleasure of hearing it;
it resounded in her ears like the bell of a cathedral. . . . She
bought herself a map of Paris; following the streets with her
fingertip, she traveled all over the capital. She walked along
the boulevards, stopping at every corner. . . . [S]he was
interested in . . . the opening of every new shop. She knew the
latest fashions, the addresses of the best tailors. . . . She
studied the descriptions of furniture in the works of Eugène
Sue . . . seeking the imaginary gratification of her desires. . . .

In her longing she confused the pleasures of luxury with the
joys of the heart, elegant customs with refined feelings.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

If Madame Bovary had lived in Paris instead of Yonville, she would
have led a profoundly different life. Stifled by bourgeois boredom and
bad taste, Emma Bovary imagined herself flourishing in the French
capital. “Walking along the boulevards, stopping at every corner,” she
would have been a flâneuse, luxuriating in the freedom to observe and
admire the spectacle of modern Paris and to be observed and admired
herself, like other Parisiennes of taste and sensibility. With her dreams
of beautiful possessions and social recognition instantly gratified, moreover, she might never have embarked on ill-fated love affairs or plunged
her husband into bankruptcy through her extravagance. If Madame Bovary’s reveries indicted both the emotional stinginess and aesthetic insensibility of provincial bourgeois society, they did so by implicitly measuring that society against a mythic vision of Paris as the capital of chic.
Nineteenth-century Paris signified much more, however, than taste and
refinement. Where Emma Bovary pictured a fantasy world of sophistication, her upright bourgeois family and neighbors saw a modern Babylon.
From their perspective, Madame Bovary’s quest for Parisian pleasure and
1


2

Introduction

frivolity brought the corrupting vices of the modern metropolis into the
French countryside and, most dangerously, into the bourgeois home.
Flaubert’s narrative thus enacts the conflict between uncontrolled feminine desire and the sanctity of the bourgeois family. The novel concerns
much more, however, than the question of proper female character. The
tensions between individual will and social restraint that propel Emma
Bovary’s story lay at the heart of bourgeois culture: the rapacious economic self-interest necessary for the growth of the capitalist market
clashed with the civic and domestic virtues needed to safeguard the social

fabric. Madame Bovary presents a peril to her family, her gender, and society because her craving for self-gratification is insatiable, unchecked by
reason or concern for others. Moreover, where the self-interest of her
male counterpart might be construed as a socially constructive force producing goods or profits, Flaubert depicts Emma’s individualistic drives as
particularly hazardous because they take the form of consuming appetites, parasitic and wasteful rather than productive.
Yet Emma Bovary is not simply the villain of the piece; she is very
much the victim of the utilitarian bourgeois society against which she
rebels. Her hapless husband, the drab and respectable doctor Charles
Bovary, and his pharmacist crony, the caricatural positivist Monsieur
Homais, are, for Flaubert, equally appalling bourgeois types. Exemplars of civic responsibility and rationality, they are grossly deficient in
Emma Bovary’s qualities of energy, imagination, and aesthetic refinement. As much as Emma’s untrammeled individualism requires the regulating force of social conscience and rational will, these bourgeois
characters urgently need the elevating and humanizing qualities of sensibility and culture. Each without the other is not only incomplete but
destructive: Emma Bovary bent on a dramatic demise, the righteous citizens of Yonville on a process of slow suffocation.
By the late nineteenth century, two crucial developments raised the
contradictions illustrated by Bovary’s tale to the level of national concern. The phenomenal growth of a consumer marketplace catapulted
the bourgeoisie to new heights of economic power and fanned the flames
of marketplace individualism.1 During the same period, bourgeois society attained political authority through the establishment of the Third
Republic, a polity built on bonds of civic and domestic virtue. The increasingly feminine character of the consumer public, moreover, heightened the discord between the social duties of the republican citizen and
the private prerogatives of the marketplace individual. Contemporaries
feared not only that the efflorescence of the market posed a menace to


Introduction

3

the establishment of a civic public, but that the bourgeois woman consumer now threatened to contaminate the domestic interior, the last and
most sacred sanctuary from brute individualism, with the taint of selfinterest. In short, the economic vitality of the new regime, inseparable
from the expansion of the bourgeois marketplace, was said to imperil
its moral well-being in a fundamental manner.
A pivotal dimension of the clash between the commercial culture of

marketplace individualism and the political culture of the new republic
was aesthetic in nature. Just as self-interest was said to corrupt the moral
fiber of the republican citizen, it was also seen as compromising his or
her capacity to make aesthetic discriminations. In contrast to the noble,
known for his or her disinterested discernment of beauty, the bourgeois
was historically typed as a materialist, whose motives of personal gain
necessarily informed his or her aesthetic judgments. Bad taste, it was believed, was the natural and inevitable consequence of such self-interest.
In a nation deeply invested in its reputation for aesthetic refinement,
this presumption of bourgeois vulgarity sparked concern in diverse
quarters. Middle-class elites and their critics alike thus feared that the
entrenchment of a bourgeois republic in 1877 had put France’s aesthetic
patrimony in jeopardy by launching the presumably tasteless bourgeoisie into a position of political power from which it threatened to
squander that inheritance.
Controversy over the social ramifications of the burgeoning marketplace beset the industrialized nations of the West in the late nineteenth
century, France among them. This book explores the particularities of
the French case, and the ways in which republican political culture and
the nation’s aesthetic patrimony inflected the debates over commercial
capitalism. It also examines the particularly French efforts at resolving
these conflicts through the moral and aesthetic management of the bourgeois woman consumer. The civilizing influence of taste, I argue, was
said to regulate the unrestrained individualism and dangerous desires
ascribed to the female consumer, turning her on the one hand into a virtuous citizen, and on the other into a refined connoisseur of goods.2
Taste did so, moreover, in the very consumer marketplace designated as
the source of the problem, thus offering a way to reconcile the conflicting strands of French bourgeois culture.
The antagonism between the marketplace and the republic, powerfully articulated by eighteenth-century republicans such as Rousseau,
was visible in the uneasy, shifting compound of liberal individualism and


4

Introduction

civic values characteristic of French republican ideology throughout the
nineteenth century. Indeed, France’s political culture differed significantly from that of Britain and the United States, where liberalism as
both an economic and a social doctrine was more widely accepted, as
well as from Germany, where an authoritarian state precluded the triumph of laissez-faire. In the French setting, the persistence of corporatist
and communitarian currents in republican ideology complicated the nation’s relationship to liberal thought and practice. Born of these tensions,
the republican vision of the civic public was itself in many ways an unstable construct. Unlike liberal conceptions of the public sphere, it was a
notion of political community tinged by nostalgia for a classical past and
characterized by ambivalence about the marketplace and values of liberal individualism.3 By the late nineteenth century, persistent republican
anxieties about the impact of commercial activity on civic culture surged
as new, putatively less fit participants—both working-class men and
bourgeois women—began to play a more visible role in public life.
If republican conceptions of public and private life collided with the
liberal ethos of laissez-faire and self-interest enshrined in the market,
they did so with particular force as the consumer marketplace developed into a controversial new arena for bourgeois women. Indeed, as
consumerism seemed to transform Paris into a female city of chic and
fashion, a realm of individual and private pleasure, anxieties about the
female consumer intensified. In the accounts of various commentators,
the new consumer marketplace seduced women away from the moral
sanctuary of the home and, by cultivating their baser instincts of egotism, vanity, and pleasure-seeking, inured them to maternal and wifely
sentiment and rendered them indifferent to the concept of social duty.
Critics across a broad political spectrum saw the modern marketplace
as dangerous precisely because it provided women with the kind of financial and psychological independence that undermined their supporting, dependent roles within the family.
Like the predatory capitalist whose self-interestedness was said to
threaten the public good in both moral and aesthetic terms, bourgeois
women who supposedly used the consumer arena to articulate independent identities were frequently the target of a critique of the destructive
impact of individualism. That critique reflected widespread uncertainty
about whether the expansion of the commercial public signaled the decline of public life or the rise of a new public forum. It was not clear to
contemporaries what kind of self operated in the consumer arena, and
whether that self differed fundamentally from an anterior “private”

Introduction

5

self. On the one hand, the self-interestedness of shopping behavior
seemed to unleash the private persona in the public domain: women lost
control over their socially correct façades and reverted to their “true”
uncivil and irrational selves. On the other hand, the spaces, rituals, and
commodities of modern consumer culture offered a whole new range of
possibilities for theatrical self-display and feminine posing. Either way,
the visibility of bourgeois housewives in this arena not only posed challenges to male authority, but called into question the meaning of republican citizenship. Bourgeois controversies about female individuality
thus converged with debates about urban life and the boundaries between public and private.
By the 1890s, social strife and economic dislocation sparked a crisis
of liberal individualism that sharpened the critique of marketplace individualism. Opposition was most pronounced outside of the republican
mainstream, in conservative movements such as Social Catholicism and
in progressive Catholic Le Playist circles, both of which repudiated the
rhetoric of liberal individualism in favor of social interdependence and
cooperation. But anxieties gripped the ranks of republicans as well.
Under the aegis of the Solidarist movement of the mid-1890s, republican reformers such as Léon Bourgeois charted a middle course between
the collectivism of the socialists and the unchecked individualism of the
liberals, seeking to accept capitalism but to regulate its abuses. In its attempt to anchor the individual more firmly in social context, without
ever denying the importance of the individual self, the Solidarist movement constituted a kind of republican reckoning with what were perceived
as the political failures of liberal individualism, and an attempt to infuse
the republic with the moral vigor of the civic humanism privileged by
Rousseau and other “backward-looking” Enlightenment republicans.4
Radical republican reformers thus agreed with centrist republicans, conservative Social Catholics, and progressive Catholics of the Le Playist
school that the affective bonds forged within the family were among the
key remedies for the rampant individualism fomented by the market

and said to corrode modern French life.
Just as republican political culture informed responses to the urban
commercial public, the historical importance of its aesthetic capital definitively shaped France’s encounter with commercial capitalism. Since
at least the seventeenth century, the French state had derived political
power through its international aesthetic prestige. That prestige inhered
in the economic success of the French objet de luxe and fashion industry, in the renown of French painting, and in the highly stylized, widely


6

Introduction

emulated aristocratic culture of the court of Louis XIV. In the caste society of the Ancien Régime, however, taste, defined as the connoisseur’s disinterested relation to art and the world of goods, was the
perquisite of aristocracy. According to the cultural logic of the era, the
materially acquisitive bourgeois, immortalized in Molière’s bourgeois
gentilhomme, did not possess taste, nor could he ever acquire it. The archetype of the tasteless bourgeois became an important element of the
French imagination that outlived the Ancien Régime. Indeed, in spite of
the bourgeoisie’s rise to economic power and political rule by the late
nineteenth century, the persistence of that archetype challenged in some
ways the legitimacy of bourgeois authority.
This cultural myth was revitalized by new commercial contexts, as the
extraordinary growth and reconfiguration of the consumer market, in
conjunction with the establishment of the bourgeois Republic, gave rise
to fresh anxieties about the French aesthetic patrimony in the last quarter of the century. In particular, critics deemed the machine-produced imitation luxuries presumably favored by vulgar bourgeois consumers to
pose a threat to the aesthetic prestige of the article de Paris and feared
that the growing market for these cheap goods was jeopardizing the economic survival of the French handicraft sector. Beyond the harm done to
the French artisan and small shopkeeper, the economic upheaval wrought
by market development was said to threaten the nation’s valuable export
trade in handicrafts. The tenuous future of Paris as the capital of chic
was thus a subject fraught not only with intense cultural significance but

with grave economic implications as well, and the bourgeois woman
stood at the center of all such narratives of decline. For many, her lack of
taste threatened to ravage France’s aesthetic reputation and, in so doing,
to drive the nation to the brink of economic ruin.
Although commercial capitalism was predicated on principles that were
in some ways inimical to republican ideals and French aesthetic standards, the growth of the consumer market both enriched and was nourished by the Third Republic. As a consequence, republicans of the late
nineteenth century looked to commerce to bolster the economic and
cultural prestige of the nation, even as they expressed wariness about
the market’s effect on civic life. Historically identified with the market
and committed to the continued growth of the commercial sector, the
very same bourgeois politicians, social reformers, business leaders, cultural critics, and advice experts preoccupied with the conflict between


Introduction

7

the civic and the commercial thus sought to discipline rather than destroy the marketplace and its models of selfhood.
It was through the forging of a new aesthetics of the marketplace
that these actors sought to civilize the commercial public and its unruly
consumers. To do so, however, they could not simply lay claim to the
aristocrat’s aesthetics or connoisseurship of luxury goods, both of
which existed in opposition to the modern market. In contrast to the
neoclassical definition of beauty as an absolute inhering in particular
objects, the nineteenth-century bourgeois came to embrace a popular
version of the modernist notion of beauty as subjective, one which located aesthetic value in the individual’s discernment rather than in external objects. According to this logic, the bourgeois consumer endowed goods with value, combining otherwise banal objects into an
aesthetic assemblage based on her subjective vision. Indeed, what I will
call marketplace modernism defined the exercise of taste in everyday
life as much more than the passive appreciation of beauty, casting the
expression of individual aesthetic sensibility, even in mundane acts of

consumption, as an active, creative, and even artistic enterprise. The
marketplace modernist aesthetic thus gave rise to a conception of the
consumer as an artist, the commodity as an art object, and the marketplace itself as an artistic arena.
Agents of the market—advertisers, department store managers, fashion journalists, self-styled taste experts—played a particularly decisive
role in reinventing consumption as an art form and making the resource
of taste broadly available to the bourgeois consumer public. They did so
in large part by characterizing taste as a trait which could not only be
learned but attained in the marketplace itself. Far from a threat to the
bourgeois order, commercial media imagined the marketplace as an
arena for both the acquisition and the expression of the individual’s
unique aesthetic sensibility. Provided that the bourgeois woman’s desire
for goods was governed by taste, they suggested, she was converted
from an irrational, egotistical, and aesthetically inept consumer to a disinterested artist guided by lofty goals and interests. Her individualism
was not to be squelched but rather channeled in socially constructive
directions. The marketplace, in this scenario, metamorphosed from a
destabilizing social force into one for the social good, a sphere of virtuous citizens and discriminating consumers. Utilizing the cultural resource of taste to regulate the tension in bourgeois culture between selfindulgence and social restraint, agents of the market established the


8

Introduction

management of taste by bourgeois women as a principal discursive
realm for the management of civil society.
To further ensure the disciplining of the consumer, a woman’s artistic self-expression was to be subsumed within her dominant role as
guardian of the domestic interior. Market professionals thus invited the
bourgeois woman to partake of the individual pleasures of the commercial metropolis, and at the same time exhorted her to consume in the
interests of family and nation. In the commercial narrative, however,
these goals did not conflict with one another: far from abandoning the
home to shop, the maîtresse de maison became a better housewife in the

market, learning the useful domestic skills of self-control and aesthetic
refinement. This reinvented market was to serve as the locus of feminine
citizenship: a new kind of civic public in which the morally sound and
aesthetically refined mère de famille acted for the benefit of others. The
new model of consumer citizenship, moreover, extended beyond the
mere promotion of French goods to the cultivation of a unique artistic
vision. Aesthetic self-expression was not only to benefit the individual
consumer, but to enhance family well-being and enrich the collective
aesthetic life of the nation.
In mobilizing the myth of French taste to promote consumption,
market professionals also served the needs of bourgeois elites seeking
cultural distinction. By providing an alternative to older, caste-based
definitions of social distinction and elaborating new, meritocratic notions based on individual ability, market conceptions of taste not only
permitted bourgeois men and women to claim distinction for themselves but to deny it to social inferiors ostensibly lacking in cultural capital. Thus, the consumer market hardened social boundaries at the
lower end of the bourgeois spectrum (and certainly below) while rendering social barriers more permeable for the upper strata of the bourgeoisie. For bourgeois men burdened by the archetype of the grasping
philistine—and, even more, for bourgeois women said to be governed
by their uncontrollable desire for objects—taste, with its connotations
of moral disinterestedness and rationality, was “the mark of the master,” the signifier of cultural, if not hereditary, distinction.5 Indeed, I will
argue throughout the book that the marketplace notion of taste, or
French chic, supported bourgeois claims to status as an aesthetic elite
because it was defined by a posture of disinterestedness vis-à-vis the
world of goods.6 In moral terms, the ability to exercise detached and
impartial aesthetic judgments over the universe of objects formed the
basis of an ethical connection to goods. In social terms, that same de-


Introduction

9

tachment was a sign of distinction, of distance from need. Marketplace
modernism thus discursively transformed the bourgeois from acquisitive materialist to aesthete and artist and established the consumer marketplace as a prime artistic forum.
Much of the historical study of consumption has been heavily influenced by the sociological work of Veblen and Weber. Veblen’s emulative
model of conspicuous consumption frequently has led historians to
posit consumer demand as a historical constant and to privilege socioeconomic factors, income foremost among them, at the expense of cultural influences as the source of changes in consumption patterns.7 As a
consequence, some have defined the bourgeois negatively, as an aristocrat manqué. At the same time, Weber’s influence has tended to polarize
hedonism and rational calculation, consumption and production, a dichotomy which on occasion has led to narratives of consumer culture
that in some ways echo the jeremiads of the late nineteenth century: incipient mass consumption eroded the “tough” producer ethos of the
bourgeoisie, turning its constituents into “soft,” hedonistic consumers.8
Taken together, the impact of Veblen and Weber has been to tie the advent of the modern market to moral decline.
In contrast to this perspective, I argue that the distinctively bourgeois
consumer culture that emerged in late-nineteenth-century France was
neither purely emulative nor simply self-indulgent. Quantitatively and
qualitatively different from the commercial world of the Ancien Régime,
it was a culture based on greater access to goods, but also rooted in new
attitudes and ideas about the redemptive power of commodities and
their uses in self-fashioning. Although the emergence of the modern
market challenged the productivist ethos of bourgeois culture, I contend
that both asceticism and hedonism, “toughness” and “softness,” coexisted in the French bourgeois world-view of the late nineteenth century.
My evidence reveals, moreover, that bourgeois consumption was perceived as expressive as well as emulative, linked to the assertion of individuality, in addition to the display of social and economic status. In
keeping with much recent work on the topic, my research suggests that
consumption was a complex arena of pleasure and self-control, selfdefinition and social display.9
This book seeks to denaturalize and historicize the concept of taste,
so often taken as a universal, through a reading of Parisian consumer
culture in the late nineteenth century. It is not an empirical study of consumption patterns or a social history of the consumer, since it concerns


10

Introduction

neither the material expressions of taste in consumption nor the consumer’s experience per se. Rather, it is intended as a history of the circulation of ideas about taste and the market: a history, that is, of a particular intellectual currency or imagined aesthetic economy. My central
theme is how taste was perceived to act as a regulatory social force. To
uncover the meaning and efficacy assigned to taste, I use sources ranging from the women’s press, etiquette handbooks, decorating handbooks, and taste reform tracts to social scientific analyses, journalistic
polemics, and marketing literature. What emerges from this evidence is
a series of portraits of the modern market revealing, on the one hand, a
host of anxieties and fears about commercial modernity, and, on the
other, wishes and aspirations for a moral market. While the images of
the market and material goods deployed by the female consumer were
certainly important to the cultural construction of taste and consumption, I am primarily concerned with the market as it was imagined by
the professionals who attempted to structure it, rather than as it was
seen by the private individuals who participated in it.10
My work explores the French encounter with consumer culture by
situating fin-de-siècle controversies about taste and the bourgeois Parisienne within a larger struggle over the meaning of the market and the
gendered nature of the bourgeois order. I argue that debates about the
female consumer were about more than gender boundaries: they illuminate the relationship between the market and the republic and, more
broadly, the modern individual and the community. These were relationships fraught with tension for many. It is significant that market
professionals, members of the periodical press, decorative arts reformers, social scientists, and even republican officials did not answer critics
with a triumphal counterdiscourse on the virtues of the market. Instead,
they too voiced doubts about the market, not only in discussions of gender roles but in political debates about republican virtue and individual
autonomy, and even in marketers’ disputes over the nature of selling.
This convergence of concerns shows that conflicts about the marketplace did not simply pit conservative antimodernists against bourgeois
modernists; it suggests that we cannot dismiss even the most venomous
and marginal of critics of the market as irrelevant cranks. Indeed, while
the advent of commercial modernity evoked tension everywhere in the
West at the turn of the twentieth century, I contend that it produced a
particularly complex response in France, where aesthetics was a central
component of national identity and the ethos of liberal individualism
comparatively weak.