The Birth of a Consumer Society?

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The Birth of a Consumer Society?

• Dr Chris Pearson

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Lecture questions

• How and why did a consumer society emerge in
  France over the course of the nineteenth century?
• What were the meanings given to consumerism?

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Lecture outline

• Emergence of a consumer society
• Gender and consumerism
• Reactions to consumerism

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Society of mass consumption

• a radical division between the activities of
  production and of consumption, the prevalence of
  standardized merchandise sold in large volume,
  the ceaseless introduction of new products,
  widespread reliance on money and credit, and
  ubiquitous publicity.
• Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds (1982), 3

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• Once people glimpse the vision of commodities
  in profusion, they do not easily return to
  traditional modes of consumption We who have
  tasted the fruits of the consumer revolution have
  lost our innocence.
• Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds (1982), 3

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Consumer Society

• Desire for and consumption of mass-produced goods
• Consumer choice targeted by marketing and
  publicity
• Individual and social identities (partly) based
  on consumption
• Cultural as well as economic aspects

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The roots of French consumer society (1)

• Last decades of the ancien régime, Parisians
  became part of a consumer society bed linen,
  plates, mirrors
• Changes in clothing servants and artisans aping
  upper classes aspiration for higher standard of
  living
• Daniel Roche, People of Paris (1987)

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The roots of French consumer society (2)

• 1840s (final decade of July Monarchy)
• Economic changes expansion of railways, new
  industries, mechanisation of textiles
• Social changes increased education
• Market for cheap publications and clothing
• David Pinkney, The Decisive Years in France (1986)

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Balzac on the grocer He is civilization in a
shop, society in a paper bag. His is
Enlightenment in action, life itself distributed
in bottles, packets and jars.
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The roots of French consumer society (2)
Symbol of consumer society during the Second
Empire Le Bon marché department store
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Louvre department store, opened 1855
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Universal Exposition 1855
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The economics behind the rise of the mass
consumer society

• Development of mass produced goods and falling
  labour costs
• Rising wages and falling food prices
• 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

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Main features of the mass consumer society

• Democratization of luxury?
• No - different model of consumption, complete
  with advertising, mass entertainment (cinema,
  cafes etc), parks, and new mass-produced goods
• Consumption in central Paris, production pushed
  to the outskirts

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The Printemps department store, est. 1865
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• From the ceiling were suspended rugs from
  Smyrna with complicated patterns that stood out
  from the red background. Then, from the four
  sides, curtains were hung.and still more rugs,
  which could serve as wall hangings, strange
  flowering of peonies and palms, fantasy released
  in a garden of dreams.
• Zola, Au bonheur des dames, 122-3

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Department stores and identity

• Late 19C Paris population united by shared
  experience of visual spectacle (Schwartz,
  Spectacular Realities 1999)
• Bon marché reflected and shaped middle class
  identities being bourgeois meant having the
  right clothes, furnishings etc (Miller, The Bon
  marché 1981)

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Site of the former Dufayel store in the 18th
arrondissement (now a bank)
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The aims of advertising

• To inform, to create need and desire, and to
  convince consumers that the advertiser could best
  meet those needs.
• Leora Auslander, Taste and Power, p.354

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• Advertising absolutely should modify its
  language and style according to the class of
  society that it intends to affect. Advertisers
  must learn to speak differently to the financier
  than to the secondhand shoe salesmen
• La Publicité moderne (1906)

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Gender and Consumerism (1)

• Female department store clerks image of them as
  sexually and morally suspect
• Pierre Giffard (1882) they were a group of
  women who inevitably became depraved or deprave
  others.
• Not quite working class, not quite bourgeois

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Gender and consumerism (2)

• Bourgeois female shoppers caused anxiety
• Blurred boundaries between public and private
  spheres
• Fearless female shopper vs. dutiful and passive
  housewife
• Female shoppers created bourgeois class identity
• Walton, France at the Crystal Palace (1992)

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Gender and consumption (3)

• Ligue sociale dactetuers (or Social league of
  consumers)
• Run by Catholic women aiming to bring Catholic
  morality to the market place
• Educate elite shoppers to better the lot of the
  working classes
• M.-E. Chessel, Women and the Ethics of
  Consumption in France in F. Trentmann (ed). The
  Making of the Consumer (2005)

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Criticizing consumerism

• Traditionalists lamenting cult of individual and
  other facets of the modern consumer society
• Supposed aesthetic decline of France mass
  produced goods replaced luxury items
• Sociologists such as Pierre Maroussem lamented
  decline of artisan workshops and exploitative
  practices of department stores

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Taming consumerism

• The love of fashion, when it is regulated by
  reason and guided by a sure and delicate taste,
  becomes a lovely form of art, the most feminine
  of the arts. And it is also a social good.
• Marcelle Tinayre in Femina (1910)

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The importance of taste

• In the vision of market representatives, taste
  fundamentally transformed consumption from a
  social hazard into a social good through the
  subordination of self-interest to higher
  aesthetic and moral goals. Taste, in short, not
  only civilized the market by creating
  civic-minded consumers, but conferred on the
  market the power to civilize to further refine
  French taste.
• Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Marketplace
  (2001), 233