Publisher Description

At a time when the world is contemplating the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, the consumer society is increasingly being called into question. This is nowhere more acutely evident than in France, where since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the consumer revolution, extending market forces into every area of social and private life, has been perceived as a challenge to core elements in French culture, such as traditional artisan crafts and small businesses serving local communities. Cultural historians and sociologists have charted the increasing commercialisation of everyday life over the twentieth century, but few have paid systematic attention to the crucial testimony provided by the authors of narrative fiction. Consumer Chronicles rectifies this omission by means of close readings of a series of novels, selected for their authentic portrayal of consumer behaviour, and analysed in relation to their social, cultural and historical contexts. Walker's study, offering an imaginative interdisciplinary panorama covering the impact of affluence on French shoppers, shopkeepers and society, provides telling new insights into the history and characteristics of the consumer mentality.

Notes

A timely exploration of the economic history of modern France as expressed in the fiction of the time. A critical tour de force: the first full length monograph from the widely-respected and internationally-renowned scholar for 15 years. Explores the work of a number of canonical authors and theorists, including Barthes, Bataille, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Debord.

Author Biography

David H. Walker is Professor of French at the University of Sheffield and was formerly President of the Society for French Studies and President of the Association of University Professors of French. His books include 'Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the 'fait divers''. Oxford, Berg French Studies, 1995 and a number of critical editions of the work of André Gide.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. WAITING FOR THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
• 1. Earning, Yearning and Making Do: Huysmans, 'Les Soeurs Vatard'
• 2. 'Flaneurs and Shoppers: Huysmans, 'En menage'
• 3. From Shopping to Schopenhauer: Huysmans, ' A vau- l'eau'
• II. ECONOMIES OF CONSUMPTION (1)
• 4. Transactions and Value: Gide, 'L'Immoraliste'
• III. SMALL SHOPS
• 5. 'La lente Agonie du petit commerce? Balzac, 'Grandeur et decadence de Cesar Birotteau' and Zola, 'Au bonheur des dames'
• 6. 'Eleve dans le commerce: Celine, 'Mort a credit'
• 7. The Emprium Strikes Back: Dutourd, 'Au Bon Beurre'
• IV. BIG STORES
• 8. The Big Sell
• 9. The 'grand magasin': Zola, 'Au bonheur des dames (2)'
• 10.'Les Venus des comptoirs' : Feminism and Shopping in the 1920's
• 11. Total Retail: Figures of the Dystopian Superstore
• V. ECONOMIES OF COMSUMPTION (2)
• 12. Speculations on Value
• VI. REFLECTIONS ON THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
• 13. Post-wr visions of Paradise: The Dawning of the Consumer Society
• 14. Managing the Consumers (1): Motivational Analysts
• 15. Managing the Consumers (2) Advertisers
• 16. The Consumers Managing 1: Making Do by Instalments
• 17. The Consumers Managing 2: Making Do and Producing
• Conclusion: A Good Buy?
• Bibliography
• Index

Review

It is a work of impeccable scholarship, and possesses the virtues of ample illustration, detailed demonstration, and the relentless, exhaustive pursuit of a single broad topic. With its timely critical perspective and artful combination of cultural historyand literary analysis, Consumer Chronicles makes a major contribution to modern French studies. Innovative and ambitious, it spans the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at once charting the development of consumer culture in France and providing new insights into some familiar literary texts, as well as into a fascinating selection of lesser-known but astutely chosen novels. Offering a comprehensive overview of theories and critiques of consumer society, Walker's Introduction provides a flexible critical framework, which the author then draws on to pull off an ingenious thematic approach. This blends the synchronic and the diachronic, identifying contexts and analysing texts to elucidate the development of French consumer culture from the advent of discretionary income and the democratization of luxe, through the evolution of small and department stores, to late-capitalist branding. While one chapter concentrates on Huysmans, and Walker devotes a further chapter to an intriguing analysis of fluidity and value systems in Gide's L'Immoraliste, other chapters deftly cover broad spectrums. 'Small Shops' spans one hundred years, drawing on Balzac's Grandeur et decadence de Cesar Birrotteau, Zola's Au bonheur des dames, Celine's Mort a credit, and Dutourd's Au Bon Beurre, reminding readers of the tenacity of the French small-shopkeeper. Unsurprisingly, Au bonheur des dames also features in Walker's 'Big Stores' chapter, but in a new light alongside less predictable interwar novels and some more recent representations of surveillance culture and dystopian superstores. The targeting of female consumers is also helpfully teased out, most interestingly when Walker examines the interwar years. His consideration of a more predictable range of 1960s female-authored novels - Les Belles Images, Roses a credit, Elise ou la vraie vie, Les Petits Enfants du siecle - occasionally pathologizes female consumers (Beauvoir's Les Belles Images is described as figuring Laurence's anorexia as an existential response to consumer culture, yet eating disorders remain notoriously resistant to definition and treatment). Although the impact of audiovisual culture is perhaps understated at times, Consumer Chronicles engages with an impressive range of well-and lesser-known texts and writers, including Aragon, Balzac, Beauvoir, Beigbeder, Ce'line, Curtis,Dutourd, Echenoz, Etcherelli, Houellebecq, Huysmans, Flaubert, Gide,Jacques, Le Cle'zio, MacOrlan, Margueritte, Pennac, Perec, Quignard, Rachilde, Rochefort, Roujon,Tournier,Triolet,Valmy-Baysse, and Zola. Innovative perspectives are offered on canonical novels, readers are introduced to or reminded of a range of new texts to discover, and the representation of patterns of consumption emerges as a productive critical tool. With a constant eye to future developments and to contemporary relevance, and its elegant prose (headings include 'The Emporium Strikes Back' and 'Total Retail'), this varied yet coherent work is a pleasure to read. Furthermore, Consumer Chronicles offers scholars and undergraduates alike fresh purchase not only on the development of consumer culture in modern France, and on literary and theoretical engagements with it, but also on their own practices of critical consumption. Consumer Chronicles offers scholars and undergraduates alike fresh purchase not only on the development of consumer culture in modern France, and on literary and theoretical engagements with it, but also on their own practices of critical consumption. It is either tribute to the salience of consumption in French culture over the last two centuries, or commentary on an academic culture much more attuned to consumer matters than, say British historians, who would be more likely to focus on social class or work, that David H.Walker has such a range of novels to choose from. Consumer Chronicles ranges from Balzac's Grandeur et decadence de Cesar Birotteau (1837) to Pascal Quignard's L'occupation americaine (1994) and much in between, although little in content after the early 1960s, which leaves 1968 as a rather latent presence here (one brought to the analysis of texts rather than the content). Still, this is a wider sweep than other literary-historical accounts like those of Rachel Bowlby. Whatever else, the value not only of literature, but of shopping as rich source material for historians is proven. And above all, Walker establishes the plurality of issues contained within consumption and to which it can offer analytical access-ranging deftly across gender, economics, emotions, and memory. Its real strengths are that it does not confine itself to the meaning of goods, but embraces the everyday practices of shopping, its pleasures besides frustrations, advertisers and market researchers (in the 1965 duo of Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images and Georges Perec's Les Choses) and credit regimes through to window shoppers. This empirical quality means Walker's penchant for cross-referencing grand theory is restrained. It involves as much De Certeau and Benjamin as Baudrillard and a clear exposition, notably in the chapter centred on Andre Gide (novelist nephew of economist Charles Gide), of how the discursive economy of desire and marginal utility of image came to outweigh strictly economic labour or use-value. It is at its evocative best mingling with the flaneurs, managers, clerks, shoppers and arrondissements of late nineteenth century Paris, building upon Philip Nord's seminal 1986 study of Paris shopkeepers. Zola's epic Au Bonheur des dames (1883), an unavoidable reference on any academic shopping trip, is subtly analysed as part of what Walker terms the 'time-honoured struggle between the petit commercant and the forces of change' (p.228). Walker traces this forward to the Poujadism of the 1950s in a fascinating discussion based around Jean Dutourd's Au Bon Buerre (1952) of how wartime rationing in occupied France restored traditional ties between stores and shoppers, only to have this rapidly disrupted by American business models which itself exploited the nostalgia for brand names and the thin discursive line between reality and propaganda that the war and shortages had fostered. But he is also conscious of the often strained relations not just between tradition and modernity, but between shoppers and shopkeepers (the dim view shopkeepers had of the 'docile customer' (p.103) as 'his traditional adversary' (p.129) and how 'store displays take advantage of its customers' (p.146). And the threat not only posed by the grand magasins to specialist stores, but the recurring dystopian fears of advertisers and supermarkets colonizing the individual and commercializing everyday life. But there are, for the historian at least, less persuasive aspects. Almost all the novels here are based in Paris-a feature that the author might have reflected on. We learn almost nil about the readership or contemporary impact of these novels-plenty about their authorship, but not about their status in the wider literary canon or their critical or popular reception. This rather diminishes the book as an exercise in literary history or cultural representations of shopping. How and why certain texts have been selected is not always clear. And their relationship to the wider consumer environment is not always sure-footed. For example, Kristin Ross's study of late colonial, affluent French consumers, Fast cars, clean bodies (1995) is widely used, but not De Grazia's interrogation of how America eased aside the bourgeois norms of European retail. And because the chosen novels touch little on them, work on French Co-ops by Gunnar Trumbull or consumer advice/product testing agencies by Alain Chatriot does not feature. It also means often excellent close readings of the texts tend to stand alone rather than forge links with other chapters. The approach might be culprit here. Walker's astute, succinct introduction promises that 'analysis of each text will contextualize it within the socio-economic moment from which it arises' (p.13). But it is not entirely clear this is an apt approach or framework. The novels are not always contemporaneous and throughout, and especially in the later twentieth century, Walker shows shopping behaviour often questioned existing identities and structures rather than arising from them. Perhaps Walker's sheer range and ambition-from micro case studies of individual stores to the various philosophical critiques of global political economy that have seen consumption as a social disease, from Veblen to Klein via Vance Packard-is a limitation? But perhaps that same range is also, surreptitiously, the book's raison d'etre. Jean Valmy-Baysse speculated that in the 1920s, savvy shoppers carried in their minds a topographical plan of Paris comparable to the seventeenth-century Carte de Tendre; an updated mental map, charting not the itinerary of love, but the capital's landmark department stores.[1] In Consumer Chronicles, David H. Walker shows that a similar sort of shoppers' map has been plotted across the pages of modern French novels. In this aptly titled book, Walker chronicles consumers in two ways: first, by offering a comprehensive overview of modern France's commercialization as theorized by sociologists and cultural historians; then by combing through a remarkable corpus of canonical and less studied fiction, to reveal depictions of behavior related to selling, desiring, advertising, acquiring, and even remembering merchandise. Working from the premise that literary texts and historical facts function symbiotically, illuminating one another, Walker examines an impressive number of fictional narratives that "bear witness and give significance to the development of the consumer society" (p. 12). This six-part study, subdivided into seventeen chapters, opens on the gradual awakening of consumer consciousness in late nineteenth-century Paris. From there, Walker blazes a trail to the twentieth century, closing with a contemplative section on the hyper-awareness of product names and slogans evident in a selected compilation of commodity-infused memories from Perec's Je me souviens: "Je me souviens de 'fond dans la bouche et pas dans la main' [...] Je me souviens des 'Juvaquatre'" (p. 306).[2] In his lucid introduction, Walker presents summaries of theories related to consumer culture and consommation. Deftly articulating points of convergence and contention along a rich theoretical trajectory, Walker finds touchstones in Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's 1894 essay on the luxury market, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Herbert Marcuse's blockbuster study on the alienating force of mass consumer society, Jean Baudrillard's code of differential values, and Michel de Certeau's mapping of consumption.[3] This theoretical overview sets the stage for a reading of fiction that highlights references to consumer culture, showing how passages of French fiction harmonize with socio-economic realities of their day, and how they illustrate economic social theory. Part one, "Waiting for Consumer Society," treats works by Joris-Karl Huysmans still largely eclipsed by his more celebrated A Rebours (1884). Walker points out that in these earlier pieces--Les Soeurs Vatard (1870), En Menage (1881), and A vau-l'eau (1882)--stories spring from the era's most commercialized corner of Paris, the 6th arrondissement. Surrounded by shops and goods, Huysmans' characters observe and critique a proliferation of storefronts and transactions, not only in reported conversation, but more compellingly, in subjectively slanted descriptive passages that Walker calls ironic, splendid "prose poems on the everyday" (p. 47). These budding consumers, at first engaged in an unfocused window-shopper's flanerie, gradually demonstrate an inchoate awareness of the relationship between objects and social aspiration. Part two, "Commodities of Consumption," which consists of one chapter on Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste, draws out more complex tensions between desire and value, moral and material worth. Moving back to the sort of shopping venues visited in the Huysmans chapters, part three ("Small Shops") and part four ("Big Stores") challenge exaggerated reports of petits commerces crushed by grands magasins. Drawing on Philip Nord's study of shopkeepers in Third-Republic Paris[5], Walker emphasizes here, and throughout the book, that Zola's Au Bonheur des dames had much to do with the propagation of an urban shopping legend. He advocates a more nuanced view of how small business and super stores coexisted and coevolved. Zola's iconic novel provides a point of reference throughout this section. However, less studied novels, such as Vaymy-Baysse's Les Comptoirs de Venus, Margeuritte's La Garconne, and Le Clezio's Le Geant, justifiably steal the show. Finally, in part five, "Economies of Consumption," we return to the notion of fluctuating value, but this time in relation to gold, coins, speculation and counterfeiting. The path toward consumer (hyper) awareness, and hyper-awareness of the consumer culminates in part six, "Reflections on the Consumer Society," which deals with the Americanization of France (deplored since the nineteenth century), advertising stunts and product placement. On its back cover, Consumer Chronicles proposes close readings of novels. However, this is not the sort of detailed textual analysis that some literary scholars might anticipate. Asserting that works of fiction provide evidence of social and cultural practices, Walker tends to steady his focus away from literary analysis per se. Instead, carefully selected examples from novels create a sort of literary ethnography of consumer attitudes and behaviors. Walker shows many times over, in discussions of nearly fifty primary works, that commercialization and consumer culture serve as a backdrops, major themes, and even preoccupations in a vast number of literary works. The topoi and groupings of texts that emerge from his reading will undoubtedly inspire further studies, from both literary and historical perspectives. Despite its density of examples and documentation, Walker's prose remains clear, readable, even playful. The greatest strength of this book lies in the author's ability to synthesize vast amounts of information from primary and secondary works in order to tell a coherent story. Works of fiction unfold in time and in tandem with a thoroughly documented history of consumer culture in modern France. By placing novels in dialogue with social history and with one another, Walker shows that the books we may sometimes take for granted as being related, such as Balzac's Histoire de la grandeur et de la decadence de Cesar Birotteau and Zola's Au Bonheur des dames or Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles images and Claire Etcherelli's Elise ou la vraie vie, merit re-reading alongside less explored fiction, and in the context of consumer culture. For all of these reasons, although each of Consumer Chronicles' seventeen chapters stands on its own, the shopaholic consumer of fiction may prefer to read the volume cover to cover, pausing at familiar and unfamiliar literary signposts, taking detours, and lingering at all of the storefronts along the way. NOTES [1] Jean Valmy-Baysse, Les Grands magasins (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), pp. 34-35, as quoted in Walker, p. 182. Walker's prose remains clear, readable, even playful. The greatest strength of this book lies in the author's ability to synthesize vast amounts of information from primary and secondary works in order to tell a coherent story. Works of fiction unfold in time and in tandem with a thoroughly documented history of consumer culture in modern France. This book traces the rise of the modern consumer society through French novels published for the most part between the 1830s and the 1960s. David Walker's playfulness concerning his topic is in evidence on the front dust jacket, where the bar code and ISBN are juxtaposed with the title. Nevertheless, he takes seriously what is at stake with his chosen subject of shopping, touching as it does on every aspect of modern life, from personal neuroses to societal structuring. The introduction gives a thorough summary of the issues surrounding the modern culture of consumption. Following his own contention that 'we shop for meaning as well as merchandise' (p. 1), Walker browses through twentieth-century explorations of Marx's commodity fetish. He will bring this postmodern analysis of the self-perpetuating nature of consumer culture to bear on French literary representations of consumerism, proposing that these same literary texts provide evidence of the 'rise of the consumer society in France' (pp. 13-14). Part I consists of three chapters dedicated to Joris-Karl Huysman. Les Soeurs Vatard (1879) shows Huysman's hero Des Esseintes 'buying into the dream that by consuming a branded product one can partake of an otherwise inaccessible reality' (p. 21). Walker's detailed historical scholarship traces the changing face of Paris's cityscape, as luxury manufacturing gave way to mass-produced trinkets. He distinguishes Huysman's concern with working-class income and expenditure from the preoccupations of his writer contemporaries. In En menage (1881) and A vau-l'eau (1882), Walker explores how the artist-flaneur characters find themselves caught in the double-bind of both needing and disdaining the commercialization of art, against a backdrop of a newly emerging consumer credo: that the customer must never be fully satisfied. The importance of restless desire for consumer culture becomes increasingly apparent in Walker's book. In the second part, on Andre Gide's L'Immoraliste, Walker cites Gide's economist uncle, whose Principes d'economie politique (1883) points to desirability, manifested by consumption, as the hitherto neglected 'cause finale' (p. 70) of the whole economic process. Walker returns to 'Economies of Consumption' in the fifth part, via the riches-to-rags story of the French economy around the time of the First World War, when fluctuating monetary value spawned a new sense that 'it was better to spend [cash] than to hold onto it' (p. 204). Walker here traces the degradation of the gold standard, the increase in speculative investment, and the impact of paper money, through novels by Jules Romains, Sacha Guitry, Emile Zola, Louis Aragon, and Gide. In the third section Walker provides early literary confirmation of what the between-wars government in France later sought to enshrine: the petit commerce as 'the very image of Frenchness' (p. 124). This is national emblem of consumption was being crowded out by the arrival of the grands magasins, as Honore de Balzac's Cesar Birotteau (1837) and Zola's Au bonheur des dames (1883) each show from opposing vantage-points. Consequently, claims Walker, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's petit commercant will dread the early twentieth-century 'sovereign shopper' (p. 112) and Jean Dutourd's will become a wartime hoarder of stock. Shops imply sales, and increasingly, saleswomen (Chapter 10); Part IV explores the human drama (Balzac) and narcissism (Rachilde) surrounding 'the sale of a piece of merchandise' (p. 140). Walker also returns to Zola's iconic novel, comparing the fictitious department store to Au Bon Marche (opened in 1852). The department store explicitly creates and manipulates female desire, argues Walker; furthermore, Zola opens important questions about the infinite expansion both of the store (through reinvestment) and of a pathological desire to spend. This expansionist tendency Walker links to a nascent 'totalitarian vision' (p. 186), through a reading of J. M. G. Le Clezio's dystopic Les Geants (1973). The last sections 'trace the rise of the mass consumer society where spending becomes a mode of being' (p. 218). Walker provides close readings of the lure of foreign goods during the trente glorieuses (1946-76) in Pascal Quignard's L'Occupation americaine (1994), and of the taint of commodification that poisons all contact with the world in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images (1965); he also usefully engages Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes to analyse George Perec's 1965 Les Choses. Walker closes the book with two chapters concerning 'the consumers managing'. Calling on Michel de Certeau's notion of 'making do', he explores the empowering/imprisoning potential of credit in Elsa Triolet's Roses a credit (1959), and presents Christine Rochefort's heroines as ironizing and short-circuiting what J. K. Galbraith termed '"The Revised Sequence" at the end of which production produces the kind of consumers it requires' (p. 292). Walker concludes the volume by anticipating the historical status of his own study, contrasting the value-accruing '"Balzacian" object' (p. 303) with the contemporary consumer object whose 'epitaph' (p. 302) is being written by the likes of Le Clezio and Michel Tournier. Walker's clear exposition of the progression of his argument at every stage is helpful, if occasionally repetitive. His work is itself a treasure trove of references to literary and historical texts that discuss the evolution and importance of shopping in the modern period. Readers of modern French literature with an eye for consumer economics will undoubtedly get their money's worth from this volume. Walker's clear exposition of the progression of his argument at every stage is helpful, if occasionally repetitive. His work is itself a treasure trove of references to literary and historical texts that discuss the evolution and importance of shopping in the modern period. Readers of modern French literature with an eye for consumer economics will undoubtedly get their money's worth from this volume.

Promotional

A timely exploration of the economic history of modern France as expressed in the fiction of the time.A critical tour de force: the first full length monograph from the widely-respected and internationally-renowned scholar for 15 years.Explores the work of a number of canonical authors and theorists, including Barthes, Bataille, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Debord.

Review Text

It is either tribute to the salience of consumption in French culture over the last two centuries, or commentary on an academic culture much more attuned to consumer matters than, say British historians, who would be more likely to focus on social class or work, that David H.Walker has such a range of novels to choose from. Consumer Chronicles ranges from Balzac''s Grandeur et d

Review Quote

Walker's prose remains clear, readable, even playful. The greatest strength of this book lies in the author's ability to synthesize vast amounts of information from primary and secondary works in order to tell a coherent story. Works of fiction unfold in time and in tandem with a thoroughly documented history of consumer culture in modern France.

Promotional "Headline"

A timely exploration of the economic history of modern France as expressed in the fiction of the time.A critical tour de force: the first full length monograph from the widely-respected and internationally-renowned scholar for 15 years.Explores the work of a number of canonical authors and theorists, including Barthes, Bataille, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Debord.

Competing Titles

Money and fiction : literary realism in the C19th & early C20th, Ithaca & London, Cornell UP, 1984The New Economic Criticism: studies at the intersection of literature and economics, London, Routledge, 1999

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