Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds

A Consumer Revolution

Although the concept of a consumer revolution is far less familiar than that of the industrial revolution, they are really two facets of a single upheaval that decisively altered the material basis of human life. Mass consumption inevitably accompanied mass production. A transformation of such magnitude cannot be dated precisely, but the tempo of change was at its swiftest in the nineteenth century. In France, the critical period runs from about 1850 to the outbreak of World War I. Between those dates there was for the first time a steady (if not unbroken) increase  in purchasing power-the basic economic fact upon which all the rest depended. 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.  This increase in discretionary income meant that he was able to buy more staples like fuel, fabrics, and, above all, food. Even more significantly, Frenchmen could purchase more nonessentials. For example, they continued to eat about the same amount of potatoes and bread from 1850 to 1914 but consumed far more wine, meat, sugar, coffee, and cheese.

Fernand-Anne Piestre, called Fernand Cormon, The Forge (1893)

Installation of Hall of Industry, Paris Exhibition, 1889

Claude Monet, Unloading Coal (1875)

Claude Monet, La gare SaintLazare (1877)

Furthermore, the percentage of income spent on all foods kept falling, from an average of nearly 80 percent for a working-class family in 1850 to about 60 percent by 1905. As disposable income rose, banking systems were overhauled to facilitate payment greatly, especially by the introduction of the ordinary bank check. The increasing availability of credit was particularly significant in France, where before 1860 credit and deposit banking for individuals and small businesses was almost nonexistent.

These economic transformations are one mainspring of the consumer revolution. The second (and the two are wholly interdependent) consists of a torrent of technological changes that simultaneously lowered the cost of existing consumer goods and provided entirely new ones. The enormous gains in productivity made available both more goods and more money with which to buy them. Steam, the productive force in the early days of industrialization, was supplanted by the internal combustion engine and by electricity, forms of power that could be transported more easily and could be reduced in scale for use by individual consumers. The distinctive inventions of early industrialization were machines of production, especially for the production of textiles, which consequently led the way in the revolution of mass-marketed, cheaper goods.  After 1850 many notable inventions were consumer products themselves-the bicycle, the automobile, chemical dyes, the telephone, electric lighting, photography, the phonograph. Never before or since has there been such a concentration of technological change affecting the ordinary consumer. What he ate, what he ate with , where he lived, what he wore,  how he moved  around-all these daily activities and more were being altered simultaneously.