Belle Époque Paris and the creation of French soft power

A lot of France’s soft power relies on the reputation of Paris as a cultural capital, where fashion, historic monuments and elegant theatres and restaurants shape the daily life of its inhabitants. This reputation is largely owed to the changes that Paris underwent after the 1851 coup, when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, first president of the French Second Republic and nephew of Napoleon I, turned the Second Republic into an empire that lasted until the Prussian invasion of 1870 and the debacle of Sedan. The gloomy period that followed the collapse of the Second Empire saw the birth of the Third Republic. Despite the political differences between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the French social landscape is one of strong continuity from one regime to the other. The Second Empire paradoxically resulted from the direct suffrage promoted by Napoleon III, and this was when Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris, piercing large avenues through narrow medieval neighbourhoods, guaranteeing a flow of fresh air and clean water through the city and connecting its outskirts to historical monuments such as the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe and Notre-Dame. These star-shaped intersections granted everyone access to the beauties of Paris and, at the same time, limited the possibility of barricading entire neighbourhoods, as had happened during the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Similarly, Haussmann’s buildings, to this day a key element of Parisian architecture, achieved a high level of social mixing. The first and second floors of the five-storey buildings were for the bourgeoisie, now much wealthier on average than the old aristocracy. The third and fourth floors were divided into smaller flats, for low-income civil servants or working-class families. Finally, the last floor was for the servants or for poorer people. The main staircase of the buildings as well as their inner courtyard were spaces where everyone ran into one another, creating subtle social tensions as well as the desire to emulate, the poorer living under the consumption models of wealthier households. Each social milieu still had its own location. Nevertheless, these worlds became much closer to one another.

Social inequalities were increased by the rapid changes in individual situations. Financial speculation became a profession in its own right. Large banks and private investing companies started to flourish and often collapsed, drawing millions into the orbit of disaster. All the same, Paris was the place to be. Although France was still more rural than Britain, Germany or Italy by 1911, Paris was one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1851, the population was 949,000. By the end of the Second Empire, it was slightly under two million. By 1901, it was 2.7 million, against only 2.1 million in 2019.

This growth was due to the industrial development of the city, which made it attractive to young people of working age, but also to its geographic expansion beyond the ‘faubourgs’, which gave it the shape we know today. The railway system, too, kept growing, connecting the furthest regions of France to Paris and setting it as the model of culture, the city where dreams come true, whose lifestyle should serve as a template for the others. As if in revenge for the defeat of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, France created its image as the country of culture, levity and affordable opulence. While the new urban landscape transformed Paris into a giant market-place, the passer-by, whose attention was now worth real money, became part of the general economic flow. This introduced three essential changes into the city’s commercial culture: the advent of large retail stores, the rise of entertainment culture, and the development of the urban space as a marketing opportunity.

As early as the 18th century, some large shops presented the buyer with a large selection of varied goods. Bennetts of Irongate in Derby is considered the world’s oldest department store. It opened in 1734 and only closed in 2019 (there are plans to reopen). In 1784, a large store named Tapis Rouge occupied three levels of several buildings on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. However, these remained exceptions, and until the middle of the 19th century traders specialised in one specific sort of goods while customers went on errands from one store to the other.

Aristide Boucicaut founded Le Bon Marché in 1852, in the first year of Napoleon III’s reign as emperor of the French. The store is still open to this day. Not only did Boucicaut bring together different categories of retail, he also sold items at a set price while small shops tended to raise their prices depending on the customer. Seasonal sales and massive advertising campaigns also encouraged customers – especially female customers – to buy not what they needed but what was on offer. Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames describes two essential aspects of the consumerist revolution introduced by retail stores. In the novel, the young and entrepreneurial Octave Mouret gradually transforms a fabrics shop into a gigantic retail store, making the most of the Haussmannian constructions and of leisurely ladies’ shopping cravings. Zola’s character, like Boucicaut in real life, bases his success on two inspired ideas: first, a new investment strategy foreshadowing what is nowadays called fast fashion; and, second, a radical change in sales strategies.

Fast fashion is not just the use of low-quality fabrics for clothes that are bound to be replaced quickly – although the decline in quality is also mentioned in Au Bonheur des Dames. Fast fashion is above all based on a quick reinvestment of capital into renewing the goods on offer. This strategy is completely different from that practised by traditional trade, leaning towards fewer financial risks but ultimately failing to make the most of the economic growth brought by the Second Empire. While Mouret’s store grows, it diversifies its offering, driving fabric sellers then shoemakers, fur-sellers and even florists into bankruptcy. Mouret knows how to lower his costs by buying large stocks directly from the producers. Traditional trade, more reluctant to spend too much of its capital at once, cannot compete. Zola, influenced by Darwin, sees the growth of the grands magasins and the decline of traditional trade as an inevitable consequence of progress.

Indeed, Mouret embodies the seduction of novelty, of the new fashions with which he keeps tantalising his customers. He has built a ‘cathedral of modern trade, solid and light, made for a female clientele’ – a place that is not only a convenient meeting point, somewhere between the public and the private world, for the ladies of the bourgeoisie, but also a place where their desires are created and satisfied. While the customers are drawn in, the store seems to expand beyond its walls, covering the city, the country and the whole world with advertisements:

The greatest power above all else was advertising. Mouret ended up spending three hundred thousand francs in catalogues, newspaper adverts, and posters. For his Summer Season sale, he launched two hundred thousand catalogues, of which fifty thousand went, translated into all languages. Now, he had them illustrated in etchings, he even had fabric samples added, stuck to the pages. It was an overflow of shop shelves, Au Bonheur des Dames leapt out at the whole world, invading city walls, newspapers, even theatre curtains. He claimed that woman cannot resist advertising, and that she would, inevitably, go where the noise comes from.

As can be seen through the posters of Zola’s time, this strategy of aggressive advertising was far from being a matter of fiction. After Le Bon Marché, several retail stores opened: Le Printemps, La Samaritaine, Le Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville and franchises opened in the rest of France, in Belgium and in French Algeria, establishing Paris’s soft power as the capital of fashion and affordable luxury, on which all eyes were set. While Bordeaux, Marseille and Algiers were also imitating the Haussmann building style, women strove to imitate the looks presented in the catalogues, posters and magazines. Following fashion is eminently aspirational, and while advertisements show what to wear, they also tell customers where to find the latest dress or coat at the best price. In the ready-to-wear department of a large retail store, a working-class woman might find a way to imitate the style – albeit at a slightly lower quality level – of a more affluent lady.

Just as Haussmannian architecture brought the social classes together, commercial culture gave everyone the same things to look at and desire. While luxury is, by definition, not affordable, unnecessary and exceptional, advertising is meant to present things that can, conceivably, be bought. The aesthetic quality of these posters draws the eye and erodes the border between what needs to be bought and what can be bought. Beautiful adverts acknowledge that our needs are not merely physical. As René Girard notes, our most powerful needs are our metaphysical needs: the need not just for a warm coat but for a well-designed, fashionable coat, or the need for a fashionable dress, that will, in exchange for money, make whoever bought them belong to a higher social category. If the Second Empire and the Third Republic were branded as decisive eras for representative democracy, commercial culture democratised desire: as long as you could pay for it, you could have anything; and advertisements would tell you just what to buy and where to find it.

Claiming ownership of public space became a key factor in advertising strategies. First, the readable space, through the newspaper ad, became a market of its own. Newspaper advertising existed as early as 1631 in La Gazette, a periodical that included a commercial leaflet. But, in 1836, Émile de Girardin, a major promoter of mass journalism and mass education, realised that newspapers evolve in a double market. They are sold to the readers, of course, but they can also be sold to companies. By 1896, about 30 per cent of Le Figaro’s revenues were generated by advertising. A third of the newspaper was given over to advertising. The monetisation of space is even more striking when we consider the urban space. Vertical spaces – walls, billboards and even carriages – could carry public posters thanks to improvements in printing and gluing materials. In 1884, the city of Paris put 14,703 square metres’ worth of walls up for sale. That is slightly less than two football fields.

The posters are now entirely part of the way we visualise the late 19th-century public space. To this day, tourists in Paris buy keepsakes of 1890s posters for Le Chat Noir, for music-hall singer Aristide Bruant, or for the cancan dancer La Goulue. After the debacle of 1870, when the German Empire claimed Alsace and Lorraine and forced Napoleon III out of power, it became a necessity to revitalise the French economy. As they facilitate a quick flow of capital, retail stores were very much a part of this revival; but entertainment, too, was central to it. Leisure became a part of daily life. Venues had to seize the attention of potential visitors and patrons of all social classes, from the bals publics and cafés-concerts to elegant theatres.

As the poster format became more ubiquitous, the boundaries between the different items that could be purchased also eroded. The case of Alphonse Mucha shows how versatile visual arts became as they conquered the public space, making the most of the demand in advertising. That the art of a single painter could promote cigarette papers, theatre plays, biscuits and Eastern European culture may seem surprising, yet the art of Alphonse Mucha united idealist and symbolist style, national artistic heritage and a new appreciation of the visual arts. Graceful figures, harmonious pastels and delicate contours provided an answer to the ongoing debates about what painting should focus on – the movement, the colours or the line. One of the Job cigarette paper posters drawn by Mucha, for instance, presents a female figure, her hair whirling in ethereal coils, blending with the lines of smoke and with the brand’s monogram. Mucha is well-known today for the ethereal feminine figures of his advertising posters, now emblematic of the Belle Époque style. Yet the Czech painter debuted as a bohemian artist, first living in the boarding house La Crèmerie, where the owner accepted paintings in lieu of payment. Mucha first gained renown as an illustrator in 1890, providing images for a short story titled ‘L’inutile beauté’ by Guy de Maupassant, one of Émile Zola’s most successful disciples.

Towards the end of 1894, Sarah Bernhardt commissioned a poster for the play Gismonda from the painter. Bernhardt was the idol of her time. She attracted such fascination that she even appeared in contemporary novels, such as Félicien Champsaur’s Dinah Samuel (1882). When, in 1884, Bernhardt’s colleague Marie Colombier published outrageous notes about their tour in the United States in Le Voyage de Sarah Bernhardt en Amérique (1881) and her fake memoirs, Les Mémoires de Sarah Barnum (1883), the scandal was such that Octave Mirbeau, who was also one of the writers of the Naturalist school, challenged Paul Bonettain, who wrote the preface, to a duel and slightly wounded him. The poet Jean Richepin, a friend of Bernhardt, wrecked Colombier’s apartment. If Bernhardt’s reputation as a lofty goddess of the stage was tainted by this affair, it only increased her visibility amid a great deal of publicity. To work with her was, for Mucha, a guarantee of success. Bernhardt was so pleased with Mucha’s Gismonda that she hired him on a six-year contract. He drew posters for her performances, representing her as La Dame aux Camélias and Lorenzaccio in 1896, as Medea in 1898, and La Tosca and as Hamlet in 1899.

These images contributed greatly to Bernhardt’s fame as an artist, socialite, public figure and theatre star. The posters, which could be seen at the entrance of theatres or on billboards, slightly larger than life-size, were not only illustrations of the play. They were also consistent among themselves: some motifs, such as the halo, the ornate frame and the flowers, were markers both of Mucha’s personal style and of Bernhardt’s visual identity, the aesthetic quality of the poster foreshadowing the quality of the play and the leading actress. Yet Mucha and Bernhardt also collaborated for a more mundane sitting, promoting Lefèvre-Utile biscuits. In parallel with his advertising work for Bernhardt, Mucha also wished to be recognised as a thinker. In 1899, he illustrated the Lord’s Prayer in Le Pater in the same style of ethereal, symbolist drawing that he would use in his commercial work.

To the modern onlooker, the dawn of the 20th century stands out as a time of beauty. Even posters advertising biscuits were expected to be pleasing to the eye. To a viewer of that time, though, this popularisation of beauty echoed the democratic and egalitarian ideas that were conquering Europe. Everyone could see beautiful things; therefore, everyone could desire and be entitled to beautiful things. There is, however, a dark side to this narrative, foreshadowed in Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s short story ‘La découverte de monsieur Grave’ in 1873, republished later in his collection Contes cruels under the title ‘L’affichage céleste’. In the short story, a scientist discovers a way to project signs onto the night sky. The narrator explains that the sky will finally be good for something and cease being useless at last: ‘Le Ciel allait enfin cesser d’être inutile.’ Instead of being the realm of idle dreamers, it will be used to display moralising instructions, advertisements and even animated political posters. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s short story foreshadows the growth and importance of visual advertising through the last quarter of the century. What matters now is to catch the eye of the onlooker and infuse his mind with a very specific idea of what he may need, what he could enjoy and what he ought to believe is good.

Many of the Parisian department stores that appeared in the 19th century are still alive and well and have adapted themselves to the present. We live in a time where every inch of public space is for sale. Our attention is constantly grabbed by signs giving us new things to desire in the pursuit of a higher, better status. Commercial culture in the late 19th century marked a shift. New ways to make people buy things no longer focused on the actual item for sale. Advertising in the Belle Époque testifies to the best and the worst aspects of that period. The best, because it maintains that beauty is indispensable to making a product attractive; the worst, because it redesigned the street as a giant market-place where our attention is the most valuable product and where it is we, the passers-by, who are for sale.