6 - Elevé dans le commerce: Céline, Mort à crédit

Summary

The facts do not wholly support the proposition, advanced by Zola in Au bonheur des dames, that having a grand magasin in the neighbourhood spelled the end for the local petits commerçants. Philip Nord has examined the detailed evidence, in a case study of the quartier du Palais- Royal (extending west as far as the rue Saint Roch), and concludes: ‘Proximity to a department store was by no means a sentence of death for the luckless retailer’. In fact, the grand magasin could bring new trade into a neighbourhood, as Francis Ambrière points out: ‘C'est que, par sa publicité, par ses merveilles, par le prestige de son nom, le grand magasin attire une clientèle immense. Les petites boutiques profitent de ce rayonnement’. However, it remains the case that trade in the arrondissements we have been considering did decline in reality, even though Zola's department store was merely a fiction. The truth has to do with the fact that during the economic depression of the 1890s governments responded to the powerful lobbying of the petits commerçants by providing preferential tax régimes favouring them in the competition with the department stores, seeing them as a force for social stability in the face of working-class unrest and militancy. But this proved a mixed blessing, since it enabled the survival of small operations that in fact were barely viable.