5 - La Lente Agonie du petit commerce? Balzac, Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau and Zola, Au bonheur des dames

Summary

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of the department store and the concomitant decline of the small shop. Robert Burnand, in a complaint echoed by many, laments ‘le déclin du petit commerce, sa lente agonie, la désaffection de la clientèle pour le fournisseur, la rupture d'un lien noué souvent depuis plusieurs générations. Fidélité réciproque, tradition, goût de l'ouvrage bien fait disparaissent petit à petit’. But this somewhat nostalgic, even rose-tinted evocation does not tell the full story, and opposition between the two forms of commerce was perhaps not inevitable. Balzac adds nuances to the picture in César Birotteau, a novel dated 1837. The story, situated in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, provides a useful starting point for a consideration of the subsequent fortunes of the small shopkeeper. Birotteau, a parfumier by trade, is a highly successful entrepreneur ultimately brought low by the machinations of rivals who lure him out of the realm of commerce into financial speculation on a dubious land deal that goes badly wrong for him. But, initially, as a petit commerçant on the rue Saint Honoré near the Place Vendôme, and a personality in local politics of the 2^e arrondissement, César Birotteau is presented as a model of the small businessman at the start of the century: in the closing lines of the novel he is famously described as ‘un martyr de la probité commerciale’ (386).