Day 9 -- Paris Enters the World of Consumerism

Issues for Today: x

How did patterns of consumption change in Paris in the second half of the 19th century? How did this effect the lives of ordinary Parisians? How did different groups in the population experience this differently?

Task for the Day:

    1. Define the kinds of changes that revolutionized the consumption of goods and services in France in the second half of the 19th century
    2. Indicate some of the ways in which these changes in individuals’ economic and social context affected the ways that they experienced the world

 

Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies Paradise)

Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920.

Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late 19th Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp 279-283.

T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and His Followers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), pp. 55-57.

Examples of Advertising

An 1869 Guide to Shopping in Paris

 

 

 

 

 

Bon Marché Department Store, 1887