... department stores, in France as elsewhere, did not spring up overnight. All the great emporia of the prewar era-the Bon Marche, the Louvre, the Printemps, and others-had either modest or intermediate origins, all passed through a magasin de nouveautes phase, and all were predicated upon new commercial practices and upon new commercial frames of mind that had developed in the decades immediately preceding their founding.

To appreciate the degree to which the magasins de nouveautes departed from traditional merchandising practices in France, it is necessary to recall the conditions of retailing bequeathed by the ancien regime and still predominant at the time of the creation of the July Monarchy. Before the Revolution, most retailing in France was governed by a guild system concerned primarily with maintaining established levels of craftsmanship and with assuring that no merchant or small producer (and most often these were one and the same) encroached on the trade of its neighbor. The guilds regulated and limited entry into the various trades. They insisted that each seller be confined to a single speciality and to a single shop; they set standards of work; and they set conditions for procuring supplies. At times they set a minimum selling price to prevent “unfair” competition. Advertising was effectively restricted to street signs and street cries, listings in almanacs, and, apparently more exceptional than the rule, almanacs by individual proprietors that might also serve as a store prospectus. Thus little leeway was left to entrepreneurial innovation.

This picture is, to some extent, an incomplete one. There were certain "privileged places" of commerce in each major town that were outside the guilds's jurisdiction, as were the colporteurs  or peddlers that thronged the city streets. There were also the great fairs and the merciers, the one group  of merchants  who were permitted  to sell all varieties of merchandise (although  they were prohibited from all forms of manufacture).  Yet none of these represented  much of a break with the prevailing traditions  of the period. The "privileged places" tended to establish their own guild-like regulations, while colporteurs,  who might engage  in  more  competitive trading, were by their verynature anything but the vanguard of a commercial  revolution.  Fairs were but seasonal events among individual sellers, and in no way may these be seen as predecessors  to department  stores.  As for the merciers, their  shops were at best early models of general stores,  while their merchandising habits, covered by  guild restrictions,   remained  the same as those of their less diverse colleagues.

This does not mean that we should discount all possibility of changing attitudes beneath a more visible guild screen. The constant accusations and litigations within the guild communities point to the restlessness of a number of their members. Nor should we doubt that the advances in window display and store decor that were common in London in the eighteenth century were unknown to the Parisians. But if we truly wish to cite examples of a shift from the governing norms of the times' we must wait until the end of the eighteenth century, when new stores calling themselves magasins appeared on the Parisian scene. One of these, the Petit Dunkerque, is known to have sold at fixed prices rather than abiding by the ritual of bargaining over each item. Characteristic of the period, however, these stories did not make much immediate headway, nor did they differ signficantly from the merciers out of which they had evolved.

It might be expected that some greater change would have occurred with the suppression of the guilds [during the French revolution], but few shopkeepers were prepared to abandon either the traditions or the mentality of the past. Again there were exceptions, enterpnsing merchants like Balzac's perfumer, Cesar Birotteau, who did not shrink from pursuing greater sales or from employing ambitious publicity schemes to achieve these ends. Yet it was in the proprietor of the Maison du Chatquipelote that retailers during the opening decades of the new century would undoubtedly have recognized their portrait, and to glimpse behind the centuries-old facades that housed the boutiques of Paris in these years would be to find a way of business that differed little from its pre-Revolutionary predecessors. If stripped of its legal sanctions, the guiding principle for the community of shopkeepers remained the right of each honorable merchant to a set share of the trade, and there was no need of a French Malthus to justify in prose what all shop­keepers already were certain of -- that any increase in sales on the part of one of their number would result in a corresponding decrease for the others. Consequently, the boutiquiers [small shop keepers] persisted in their confinement to traditional specialties and bitterly resented any move toward merchandise diversification by competitors.