With the assistance of Gustave Eiffel, Le Bon Marché boasted the first metal roof structure in the world, making it a monument of architectural innovation.

New industries in the late 19th century helped expand the market for consumer goods, which brought the economy out of stagnation by the end of the century. Overseas imperialism also opened new markets for European consumer goods. New forms of retailing and marketing appeared—department stores, chain stores, packaging techniques, mail-order catalogs, and advertising—which simultaneously stimulated and fed consumer demand.

A new way in which goods were being consumed was through the development and construction of department stores in the mid-19^th century.  Department stores, such as Le Bon Marché in Paris (apparently the first department store ever) sold a wide selections of consumer goods under one roof. These modern stores increased the economic pressure on small traditional merchants who specialized in selling only one kind of product. In a traditional shop, the retailer (who was also the producer) offered a single product—gloves, for example—in limited quantity at a fairly high price. Oftentimes, this price was not set and the customer would haggle with the shopkeeper until a price was agreed upon. “Browsing” was virtually unheard of— an individual who entered a shop was expected to make a purchase.

Department stores, however, made profits from a quick turnover of a very large volume of goods set at low prices. In order to stimulate sales, department stores sought to make shopping a very pleasant experience by offering well-lit expanses filled with alluring items, well-trained and friendly clerks, in-store reading rooms, and restaurants.

Middle-class women especially were encouraged to patronize these stores even though critics had charged that these stores turned sober housewives into irrational shoppers, who were wasteful of family resources and let their consumer fantasies run wild in a store like Le Bon Marché. Indeed, women were the ones who primarily participated in the vast expansion of consumerism and domestic comfort that marked the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century. Women filled their homes with manufactured items such as clothing, china, furniture, carpets, drapery, wallpaper, and prints. In these decades, women’s pursuit of fashion in their home furnishings seemed to lean towards imperial motifs as Empire began to increasingly invade the domestic spaces of the bourgeois household: Persian-inspired designs were seen on textiles, oriental carpets were laid across floors, wicker furniture was placed in drawing rooms, and Chinese porcelain was used at mealtimes. 

The transept from the Grand Entrance of the Crystal Palace, Souvenir of the Great Exhibition, William Simpson (lithographer), Ackermann & Co. (publisher), 1851.

With the rise and dominance of the bourgeoisie in the late 19th century, the relationship between imperialism, commerce, and consumerism begin to be celebrated in—what I call— “spectacles of Empire,” in which technological advancements and industrial growth were put on display in great exhibitions meant to communicate the “greatness” of Empire. The idea behind such exhibitions is that anyone—but really middle-class families— could buy tickets and “enjoy” the Empire on the weekend.

One of the most famous exhibitions of the 19^th century was the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851, otherwise known as the Crystal Palace exhibition.  A monument of modern iron and glass architecture, the exhibition housed and displayed an abundance of goods from British colonies and other nations. Karl Marx himself even commented on the exhibition, saying that it represented the height of some sort of capitalistic fetishism of commodities.

New inventions were also crucial to the success of this exhibition. The Tempest Prognosticator, for example, was an ingenious little device that utilized leeches to predict storms.

todayinlaborhistory:

Today in labor history, May 12, 1902:  Nearly 150,000 anthracite coal miners go on strike in Eastern Pennsylvania for higher wages, better working conditions, and recognition of their union:  the United Mine Workers of America.  After months of an extreme coal shortage, President Teddy Roosevelt intervened, a commission was set up, and the strike was called off after 163 days.

I would like to know a little bit more about where this cartoon was published. Of note, I think, is the common artistic motif of the laborer looking strong and virile and the bourgeois capitalist looking weak-chinned and ineffectual.

The Industrial Bourgeois - Part I: Whores and Work

As m’colleagues have been discussing bourgeois guilt in their most recent posts, I thought it important to turn for a while to what exactly it means to be bourgeois.  Of course, the answer is not simple, and the encompassing term of “bourgeoisie” varies greatly across time and culture. In the twelfth and thirteenth century, to be a burgess or burgher was to be a man of enough property and reputation to be allowed into the “freedom” or citizenship of a town; in the eighteenth century, the term “bourgeoisie” encompassed a wide range of urbanites, from small-time shopkeepers to the owners of large-scale trading companies. 

Bearing this in mind, I’d like to spend my next several posts exploring what exactly it meant to be bourgeois in a particular culture at a particular moment in time, specifically the Euro-American bourgeoisie during the period of the first Industrial Revolution (c.1750-c.1850).  One could argue that the mechanization of manufacturing (and its accompanying revolution in industry management) had the most historically profound impact on the attitudes and worldview of the bourgeoisie, which before this was simply a moderately-to-disgustingly-wealthy merchant class. With the proliferation of industrialization, the bourgeoisie found themselves in ascendancy as the noble landed classes saw their political and financial power quickly dissipate.

_______________________

When most people think of the Victorian bourgeoisie, “prudish” or “sexually-repressed” will likely be some of the first words that come to mind.  Yet consider this excerpt from Michael Ryan’s Prostitution in London, with a Comparative View of that of Paris and New York (1839):

The chief causes of prostitution deserve attentive reflection. In the space of ten years, not more than three or four presented themselves at the dispensary in Paris for registration, who had not been previously seduced. Seduction is the most common cuase of prostitution in all nations….Laziness may be placed in the first rank; it is the desire of procuring enjoyments without working, that causes many young women to leave their places, or to refrain from seeking others when out of service. The laziness, carelessness, and cowardice of prostitutes have become almost proverbial. … Vanity, and the desire of being finely dressed, is another active cause of prostitution, particularly in Paris, where simplicity in dress is actually a subject of reproach, and shabbiness is still more despised. It is hardly, then, surprising, that so many girls allow themselves to be seduced by the desire to possess a dress, which, while its display would gratify their vanity, would help to remove them from the station in which they were born, and allow them to mingle with a class by whom they consider themselves regarded with hauteur. Those who know the extent to which love of dress and finery exists in some women, will easily judge of the activity of such a cause of prostitution in Paris….

 

But of all the causes of prostitution there is none more active, particularly in Paris, and probably, in all the other great towns, than an insufficiency of wages. Let the profits of the cleverest of our seamstresses, our laundresses, and in general, of all those who live by the use of the needle, be compared with the profits of individuals who possess inferior skill, and it will be seen, that it is scarcely possible for the latter to obtain the barest necessaries of life.

What I find interesting about Ryan’s observations has to do with the assumptions he makes about the nature, not of the sex trade, but of labor itself.  Many women, he suggests, become prostitutes because they don’t want to work in a trade but still want to have a comfortable life, and so prostitution seems like easy money—which he then modifies to say that even those women who are engaged in “honest” work are forced to supplement their incomes by selling their bodies.  In Ryan’s view, then, what a prostitute does cannot be considered real work.  The toils and dangers of being a street walker are not legitimate, whereas the grinding life of a day-laborer or factory worker, since they do not violate social taboos and result in the production of goods and theoretical enrichment of society as a whole, are ennobled with a sense of duty and purpose.

(In Part II of this series, we’ll be looking again at Ryan’s essay and the consumerist nature of bourgeois society.)