Robert D. Zaretsky is a professor of French history in the Honors College at the University of Houston. His books include “The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas.”
In 1883, the French novelist Émile Zola published a gripping page-turner about an unlikely subject: the creation of the modern department store. The fictional store that gives the novel its title, “Au Bonheur des dames,” or “The Ladies’ Paradise,” is a “cathedral of commerce” that becomes the symbol of the age, one that portrays the painful death of an old world and the wrenching birth of a new world.
Robert D. Zaretsky is a professor of French history in the Honors College at the University of Houston. His books include “The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas.”
In 1883, the French novelist Émile Zola published a gripping page-turner about an unlikely subject: the creation of the modern department store. The fictional store that gives the novel its title, “Au Bonheur des dames,” or “The Ladies’ Paradise,” is a “cathedral of commerce” that becomes the symbol of the age, one that portrays the painful death of an old world and the wrenching birth of a new world.
Nearly one and a half centuries later, Paris has been heaved into a sequel to Zola’s novel — one that is potentially no less seismic, with a lurid modern twist.
Last week, the global e-commerce platform Shein, launched in China more than a decade ago and now based in Singapore, opened its first brick and mortar store. The “fast fashion” company didn’t just choose Paris for this debut, it chose the sixth floor of the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville. The BHV, as it is universally known, is one of the city’s iconic department stores, a block-long pile whose famous window-lined rotunda entrance looms over the chic Rue de Rivoli.
Opened in the mid-19th century — the same era that saw the opening of Le Bon Marché, the similarly iconic store that was Zola’s model for the Ladies’ Paradise — BHV qualifies as a lieu de mémoire. This phrase, coined by the historian Pierre Nora, refers to those places and people that have, over the centuries, acquired a variety of symbolic meanings that both reflect and shape a nation’s understanding of its past.
The problem is that Shein threatens to reduce BHV, quite literally, into a thing of the past. This is the perspective of supporters of traditional French designers, many of whom rent space in BHV; since Shein announced its plans months ago, protesters have regularly gathered across from BHV to protest the Chinese giant’s arrival. Their fear: Shein sells clothing — often knockoffs of brand names — at a fraction of the price of the smaller stores, thus endangering one of the jewels of French culture, the fashion industry.
This success appears to have been achieved with humanitarian and environmental costs. Investigations have concluded that Shein runs sweat shops in China where workers spend 75 hours a week behind sewing machines on low wages, while also employing children and profiting from the forced labor of the Uyghurs, the brutally repressed Muslim community in China’s Xinjiang province. The company denies any rights abuses. Shein has also drawn criticism for the damaging environmental impact of its practices.
As so often happens, history has a way of rhyming: A similar retail revolution, to the alarm of local merchants, occurred in Paris in the 1850s. The rise of department stores like BHV and Bon Marché was fueled, in part, by the invention of the Jacquard loom. Just as the automated loom led to the rapid extinction of skilled weavers, the more readily available and less expensive supply of clothing helped fuel the growth of the grands magasins in Paris. In a journal entry, Zola underscored the implications of mass consumerism, noting how “old commerce was defeated in one shop, then all the others across the same neighborhood.”
Which brings us to the present situation, one suggesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same. After all, as Zola takes pains to mention, the shop clerks at Bon Marché worked 13-hour days through the end of the century. Child labor persisted just as long, as did dangerous working conditions in factories despite the sporadic efforts by governments to eliminate these problems.
Most tellingly, perhaps, is that consumers then and now seem largely indifferent to such matters. On opening day of the Shein store at BHV, the throngs of eager customers far outnumbered the protesters across the street. While one customer told Le Monde that Shein’s “practices are bad for the planet and workers,” she was dazzled by the store because “there are so many different styles, and they are all attractive.”
Denise Baudu would have agreed wholeheartedly. The prescient protagonist in “The Ladies’ Paradise,” she knows that though the commercial revolution is merciless, it will be to the public’s benefit. She makes this clear upon overhearing two small retailers complaining about the big store’s sales and labor practices. Disgusted, one of them blurts, “It’s odious,” prompting Denise to quietly comment, “The customers do not seem to mind.”
Yet, Shein, unlike Bon Marché, was caught doing something the public does seem to mind. A few days before Shein’s Parisian opening, the French consumer protection agency reported that the company was selling childlike pornographic sex dolls on its website. The furor was immediate, and the government threatened legal action; Shein blamed third-party sellers and banned them.
The sex dolls quickly disappeared, but what hasn’t disappeared is the ineluctable sense that commerce is constantly morphing and adapting, across decades and even centuries. Bon Marché is, ironically, the store that invented the mail-order catalogue, thus bringing its goods to those consumers who could not be brought to Paris. Shein (like other e-commerce giants, such as Amazon, founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos) transformed the catalogue concept into a shopping website with staggering reach worldwide. In France alone, more than 23 million people — about one-third of the country’s population — have opened Shein online accounts.
In real life as in the realist novel, there will always be casualties in the creative destruction that comes with the advantages afforded by free markets. In Zola’s novel, the Ladies’ Paradise is portrayed as a “colossal forge shaping the ruin of small merchants … One could hear the oldest establishments giving way.” In real life, Shein this fall announced plans to open stores in five other French cities. If they succeed, it isn’t difficult to imagine, many years from now, lamentations over Shein’s demise as a fresh usurper arrives on the scene.
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