Chapter One
The world of the department store: distribution, culture and social change1
Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain
The way department stores have been approached by the historian has been transformed in recent years. Although the focus on businesses has not disappeared, department stores have come to engage the interest of historians with quite different agendas. It is, more precisely, the department store that has attracted attention, as if it were a single phenomenon whose meanings are undisputed. Departing from the more traditional business and economic approaches, the stores have come to be studied in relation to issues such as culture, consumption, gender, modernity and social anxiety. One is tempted to conclude that the department store has in recent years been explored less as an object of study in itself, and more for what it reveals about other matters of interest to the historian.
It was not always thus. Until the innovative work of Miller on the Parisian Bon Marché,2 historical approaches to department stores tended to emphasise the dual themes of celebration and modernisation. They have been celebrated as businesses, with a long-established tradition of business biography, at times even business hagiography, concerned with the history of individual stores, and which often glorified the great figures of department store history, such as Aristide Boucicaut, Gordon Selfridge, William Whiteley and Emile Bernheim.3 Other studies have stressed the role of the department store in the modernisation of retailing, introducing new methods into a distribution sector which seemingly lagged behind the pace of industrial change.4
Although these approaches have far from disappeared, the last decade or so has seen studies concerned not only with the internal functioning and commercial strategies of these establishments, but with their relationship to a larger cultural, economic and social environment.5 Beyond such studies, however, a wider agenda has taken shape which is larger than that of even a more socially engaged business history, as historians of culture, consumption and gender have found in the department store a fruitful area of study. The cultural history of consumption, one of the fastest growing fields of historical inquiry, has found a world in which consumers, distributors and producers symbolically came together, and out of whose encounter emerged not only new methods of selling and to some extent production, but also what might for the first time be designated a 'consumer culture', one in which groups constituted by class and gender could find social definition through the acts of buying as much as of consuming. Gender history could hardly ignore the department store, which at the end of the nineteenth century appeared to be a feminine universe par excellence. The highly visible female shop assistant not only seized the attention of contemporary observers, but has attracted historians of female labour who have explained the internal organisation of the store itself, relations between employers and employees, and those between employees and what has been seen as a largely female clientele.6 The department store now appears as not merely a huge sales hall, but as a meeting place, a site for female sociability and arguably also emancipation, where the absence of conventional boundaries engendered the contemporary anxieties which have themselves become an object of study. The study of women shoplifters is but the most explicit expression of the way the anxieties of contemporaries and the interest of historians have reinforced each other.7 At no time did the department store evoke as much contemporary concern as between 1880 and 1914, its symbolic presence allowing it to stand for many of the social fears exercising European societies in these years. In these and other ways, historical research has passed from the celebration of the department store to a wider concern for the ways in which it represented, expressed, and perhaps shaped, changing aspects of the societies in which it appeared.
This research has largely focused on just four countries. The particular attention attracted by the USA mirrors the responses of businessmen themselves, especially during the inter-war period, when American retailing drew the owners and managers of stores from many parts of Europe to tour the major sites in New York and Chicago, seeking ideas which they could carry home. As relatively minor a figure as Frank Chiesman, from the south London suburb of Lewisham, toured US stores after the First World War, and the lessons he learned there strongly influenced the design and management of the store he rebuilt in the ensuing years.8 For Europeans, however, the image of the great department store was born not in these glass palaces, but on the Left Bank of the Seine, for it is the Bon Marché and its successors across the river which have made Paris (rather than France as a whole) the second geographical focus of research. Increasing studies of Britain and Germany complete the picture,9 for studies of the department store elsewhere have been few. Writings have been characterised by limited international comparison, for work has tended to confine itself within national boundaries,10 by few recent syntheses,11 and by a concentration on the period before 1914, to the relative neglect of the subsequent challenges. The heroic era of department stores has prevailed in the literature, when they seemed to announce the advent of modern consumer society, rather than the inter-war period in which they had to struggle for markets and identity in an era of magasins à prix uniques (single-price stores), or the post-war era of supermarkets and retail conglomerates. If historians have been drawn to the heroic era in which an Aristide Boucicaut or a Gordon Selfridge strode on the metropolitan stage, the neglect of the twentieth century detracts from a full appreciation of those founding decades.
Retail distribution constitutes an immediate point of intersection between economy, culture and daily life, and it is these intersections which the chapters in this book seek to explore. Some, drawing on a cultural history influenced by other analytical agendas, examine contemporary anxieties and contemporary representations, while others explore the architectural, business and geographical dimensions of these massive new retail establishments. As a whole, the articles gathered in this book take the department store not as an object of study in itself, but as a phenomenon whose exploration can lead the historian into other dimensions of social, economic and cultural life. In this way it is hoped to move towards a more balanced understanding of what was, for contemporary opinion, a phenomenon at once exciting and disturbing.
The department store as a phenomenon
The innovative role of the later nineteenth-century department store has become a commonplace of historical discussion. Yet the historianâs regard is as liable to be seduced by these 'cathedrals of commerce'12 as was that of the contemporary observer, with their impressive array of goods, and their extravagantly public style of both built architecture and window display. As Chapter 2 by Claire Walsh reminds us, however, we must define more clearly what we mean by the 'newnessâ of the department store. How well founded is the image of the revolutionary grand magasin, transforming commercial practice in a dramatic period of change, or have historians too readily adopted an image constructed by contemporary opinion concerned primarily to laud or to deplore what it saw as 'modernity'? Did contemporaries invent this specific phenomenon called the department store just as a section of contemporary Social Catholic opinion invented the classes moyennes?13 Department stores existed, of course, just as the owners of small enterprise existed, but the department store was less novel and less homogeneous than contemporary debates lead us to expect. The parallel with the adoption of small enterprise by strands of late nineteenth-century conservative opinion is appropriate, not simply because those who praised small enterprise stressed the moral contrast between the independent family business and large capitalist retail establishments, but also because the department store became for some a symbol for other forces in contemporary society.
Attempts to unravel this 'phenomenonâ of the department store might begin with the intellectual trajectory through which we ourselves initially encountered it. Our interest in the department store was born in neither business history nor the cultural analysis of consumption and gender. Instead, we separately encountered the department store through our interest in the petite bourgeoisie of small businessmen and women,14 especially through the contemporary debates within which it appeared primarily as a caricature. For many small shopkeepers from the 1880s onwards, above all those organised in trade and political associations, the department store became the most powerful symbol of all that they hated, the forces of organised capital that were crushing independent small enterprise, and which they designated 'unfair competition'.15 In France, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium, independent shopkeepers sought from the state measures to control this new competition, demanding for example that taxation should be proportional to their turnover or to the number of specialist departments, in the hope that penal taxation would constrain further growth.16 It was rare for such demands to elicit more than token responses, such as the limited reforms to the French patente tax in the 1890s, though GyĂĄniâs chapter shows the range of controls imposed in Budapest. Governments were too attached to commercial expansion and the interests of middle-class consumers to interfere with the growth of department stores, though most German states did introduce some kinds of special taxes on them between 1899 and the First World War.17 The first Padlock Law, introduced in Belgium in 1937, was perhaps the most severe restriction. Passed in part as a response to the success of the extreme right-wing Rexist movement in the 1936 elections, the Padlock Law forbade the opening or extension of establishments with multiple retail departments, without specific authorisation. The measure was more symbolic than effective.18
Small shopkeepers were not, however, uniformly hostile. Their awareness of more serious enemies may not have led to toleration but it certainly deflected criticism. An analysis of the evidence given to the Belgian National Commission on the Petite Bourgeoisie between 1902 and 1904 reveals that although 17 per cent of shopkeeper witnesses complained about the competition of department stores, 29 per cent denounced consumer co-operatives and fully 36 per cent the competition of what might seem an archaic target, the itinerant trader.19 Belgian shopkeepers never formed anti-department store associations in the way that they did to oppose consumer co-operatives, moved by the level of competition and the political dimensions of co-operative stores.20 Nevertheless, the principal French retailersâ movement of the 1880s and 1890s, the Ligue syndicale du travail, de lâindustrie et du commerce, took the department store as its main target.21 The strength of anti-department store opinion in fact derived as much from political conjuncture and strategies as from any objective measure of their influence. After ignoring department stores in the 1920s, Belgian petit-bourgeois movements took to vociferously attacking them from 1933, influenced by German discourse as well as by fears that the socialists were seeking to win the support of shopkeepers by attacks on large-scale capital in retailing.22 In any case, a good many of the more successful independent shopkeepers shared an unspoken admiration for department store owners, whom they saw as smaller retailers who had succeeded.23 Unlike many a myth of the rise to wealth from humble beginnings, this one contained a good deal of truth. Most of the first wave of those who created Parisian department stores came from modest and...
