Volume 28, Number 12 · July 16, 1981
The Great Bourgeois Bargain
By Richard Cobb
The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869-1920
by Michael B. Miller
Princeton University Press, 266 pp., $13.50
One should not be put off this fascinating book on the Bon Marché department store in Paris by the litanic style of the introduction, which hammers home again and again the distinction between gemeinschaftlich and gesellschaftlich (I have not the faintest idea what these cumbersome teutonic adjectives mean, nor do I know what possible bearing they can have on good M. and Mme. Boucicaut, the founders of the store, the one a Norman, the other a Burgundian). Nor should one be put off by the author's obsession with the word 'culture' (which makes twelve appearances on page 3 and thirty in the introduction: an awful lot of 'culture' in fact, though not the brand that made Goering reach for his revolver). Moreover, throughout the book, the author refers to the 'bourgeoisie' as if it were a physical being, endowed with an overriding sense of purpose and a great deal of guile. Professor Miller's 'bourgeoisie' is a busy sort of bee, always up to something or another, or merely 'pulling itself into the nineteenth century.'
Review, 6039 words
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