Looting and desire

France is now officially a country of malcontents. To make sense of the chaos of conflicting interests and threats, I read and listened to dozens of interpretations, but none added anything meaningful. Black clad men stalked the streets, looters expertly stripped luxury shops, flames burst from buildings: wreckage everywhere and not many peaceful protesters in sight. Through my eyeballs the images flowed into my brain, where they were projected, incongruously, onto and over images of the splendid shop windows of a luxurious nineteenth-century department store. On the same Parisian streets, in 1883, I saw windows and façades being dressed up alongside crumbling shacks. 1883 is the year that Karl Marx died and Émile Zola published Au Bonheur des Dames (to/for the happiness of ladies; translated often as The Ladies’ Paradise), a novel about one of the first Parisian department stores, written when the new world of commodities (Marx’s Warenwelt) was getting serious.

Somehow Zola did help, a little. Au Bonheur des Dames is about a girl from the provinces who works her way up from shop assistant to department head. I enjoyed this book, which I read like a romance novel (I don’t mean that as an insult). Denise has to contend with jealous senior saleswomen, and defend her honour in the attic rooms above the shop, where the female assistants sleep. Meanwhile, the gentlemen at the top grow richer and richer selling ever more clothing and curiosities to the women of Paris. 

Everything revolves around buying and seduction, around money and bitter poverty. Zola takes the side of Denise, who struggles in a society of men who oppress women. The new age, that is, consumer society, sweeps away old businesses and social ties, but women remain playthings in the hands of shrewd businessmen. Though you could say that the success of Denise, who is desired by the owner of the department store, does show women a path to emancipation: she even… oh, no! No spoilers.

What remains after reading is the image of the masses marching to the department store. To buy, buy, buy. Consumer society, making its grand entrance some 150 years ago. Seduction and desire. Looting in 2026, shoplifting in 1883. The power of capital that strangles small shopkeepers and suppliers. A state that just stands there. Newcomers from the countryside, immigrants from other countries. Class. Sometimes it feels as if an era is looking for its ending.