The Politics of Resentment

Shopkeeper Protest in Nineteenth-century Paris

William Kornhauser, Philip G. Nord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351476829
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The establishment of the Third Republicin France in the 1870s swept the nobility from power and established republican government supported by the professional classes, the peasantry, and small businessmen. Paris shopkeepers at fi rst allied themselves with this new republican order but then broke away from it, claiming it favored the rise of large department stores that threatened their livelihood. This work offers a broader interpretation of their protests within the context of general social and cultural developments, providing a colorful and convincing description and analysis of Parisian politics in this critical era of French history.

I
…
THE ORIGINS OF SHOPKEEPER PROTEST

1
…
The Formation of the Ligue Syndicale

THE Ligue syndicale burst onto the Parisian scene with an astonishing suddenness. In July 1888, when it began publication of its own weekly newspaper, La Revendication, the organization counted a membership of not more than 6,000. An energetic recruitment drive, however, produced immediate and gratifying results. The Ligue sponsored formation of local committees throughout Paris and solicited the affiliation of sympathetic retailers’ associations. Membership surged forward, peaking at upwards of 148,000 in 1894 (see Table 1).¹ Membership figures for the Ligue will appear less remarkable if one takes into account that the majority of members belonged only indirectly, as adherents of associated retailers’ groups.² The Ligue also recruited heavily outside Paris, particularly in and around Versailles, Rouen, Dijon, Nancy and Tours. Just over half of the 140,000 members claimed in January 1894 were drawn from the provinces.³ Still, the rapidity of the Ligue’s growth and the extent of Parisian dominance within the movement are unmistakable.

TABLE 1. Growth of the Ligue syndicate, 1888–1894

---

DATE		MEMBERSHIP CLAIMED
July	1888	6,000
April	1889	8,000
June	1889	10,000
March	1890	20,000
July	1891	50,000
November	1891	70,000
December	1893	120,000
January	1894	140,000
June	1894	148,000

SOURCE: La Revendication: “Programme de La Revendication,” 5 July 1888; “Comptes-rendus,” 25 April 1889; “Comptes-rendus,” 6 June 1889; “La réunion à Troyes,” 23 March 1890; “Conférence-concert,” 26 July 1891; “Compte-rendu de la séance du 15 novembre 1891,” 22 November 1891; “Réunion extraordinaire de la Ligue,” 15 December 1893; “Partie officielle,” 31 January 1894; L. Christophe, “A. Mme. Carnot,” 30 June 1894

The Ligue syndicale advertised itself as a nonpartisan defense association of small shopkeepers (petits commerçants). The organization’s rapid and impressive success attests to the formation of a distinctive small-shopkeeper interest, but how is such a prise de conscience to be accounted for? It is tempting to turn straightaway to a discussion of the social and economic context of retailer mobilization, but such an approach is based on two mistaken premises: firstly, that interests are the spontaneous outgrowth of objective circumstances, and secondly, that the conversion of interests into organization is an uncomplicated process, a matter of simple reflex. The constitution of petit commerce as a distinctive group endowed with a coherent set of interests owed as much to state policy, Radical ideology and pressure-group politics as to objective socioeconomic circumstances. Moreover, as labor historians have been at pains to point out, a shared sense of grievance does not suffice to mobilize a group to collective action. Collective protest is spun out of a network of preexisting ties, ties of occupation and neighbourhood that create solidarity and make organization possible.⁴ And so it was with the Ligue syndicale. Social and economic circumstances generated an inchoate retailer discontent, but it was the political conjuncture of the 1880s and preexisting ties of solidarity that transformed discontent into a mass movement committed to the defense of petit commerce.

POLITICS AND THE FORMATION OF A SMALL SHOPKEEPING INTEREST

It was a change in state tax policy that occasioned the first stirrings of retailer revolt. In 1880, the Chamber of Deputies revamped existing legislation on the patente, a business tax levied on all commercial enterprises, large and small. Under the old law, businesses had been required to pay a droit fixe, a fixed sum that varied with the size of the city in which a shop was located, plus a droit proportionnel assessed at ten percent of the rental value of business premises. The legislation of 1880 altered the mode of assessment for clothing and department stores employing more than ten persons. These stores were obliged to pay, in addition to the old droit fixe and droit proportionnel, a per capita tax on every employee above the number of five at a variable rate of 15 to 25 francs, depending on city size.⁵ The reform did not substantially add to the tax burden of the businesses affected, but it did signal official recognition that the department store constituted a special case. The new law, moreover, alerted Parisian retailers to the potential use of patente legislation to single out and punish unwelcome competitors.

A handful of retailer militants, “about a dozen,” organized a Ligue du commerce et de l’industrie to press for a sharp increase in the employee surtax on department stores.⁶ The league invoked the principles of the French Revolution to legitimate its demands for fiscal discrimination. The Revolution had been fought to remove barriers to social mobility, to make it possible for every citizen to become his own master through accession to the ranks of the propertied. With the appearance of gigantic commercial emporia like the Bon Marché and the Grands Magasins du Louvre, a “new feudality” had begun to form that threatened to devour the little man and undo the Revolution’s work. The league’s efforts to agitate the shopkeeper question, however, evoked little response. It published a newspaper Le Commerçant which survived less than a year. Attendance at meetings was sparse at best, and the league faded out of existence in 1882.⁷

A second state initiative brought a sputtering shopkeeper movement momentarily back to life. In 1884, the Chamber of Deputies formed a special parliamentary committee, chaired by the Gambettist Eugène Spuller, to study reports of a deepening business recession in the wake of the Union Générale crash. Retailer militants patched together a Chambre syndicale du commerce de détail et des spécialistes des industries diverses and arranged a hearing before the Spuller Commission.⁸ A Chambre syndicale spokesman, A. Girard, took the occasion to renew shopkeeper demands for antidepartment-store legislation, and he framed his case in language calculated to appeal to a man of Spuller’s staunch republican convictions. Girard blamed the economic slump on department stores. The grand magasin undersold its competition by importing cheap foreign merchandise and with disastrous consequences. Native artisans lost orders to less highly paid foreign workers; the patriotic shopkeeper who shunned manufactures from abroad was driven into bankruptcy for want of customers. Girard detected a monarchist conspiracy in the sharp business practices of the big stores. The “old parties,” in a determined effort to establish a “new feudalism,” had invented the department store to effect the economic ruination of Paris, “the most resolute defender of French Liberties.”⁹ Girard’s performance, however, did not persuade the Spuller Commission, which in fact concluded that the crisis it had been empaneled to investigate did not even exist. As for the Chambre syndicale, it disintegrated as rapidly as it had formed. It had never amounted to more than an ad hoc operation, exciting little grass-roots enthusiasm. Local meetings attracted paltry audiences of twenty to thirty persons, and total membership in the organization never exceeded an unimpressive two hundred.¹⁰

State initiatives had inspired the first manifestations of small-shopkeeper protest. The militants who organized the Ligue du commerce and the Chambre syndicale du commerce de détail characterized themselves as petits commerçants, and it is clear from the political context what they meant. They were small shopkeepers not in terms of shop size or value of turnover but in relation to the grands magasins and clothing stores bracketed for special treatment under the business-tax law of 1880. But as the twin failures of the Ligue d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Abbreviations
• Introduction
• I. The Origins of Shopkeeper Protest
• II. The Politics of Shopkeeper Protest
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index