Abstract

Au Bon Marché: A Paradise for the Flâneuse begins in Paris in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century with the emergence of a new type of monumental store, the grand magasin or department store, which launches the age of mass consumption. Consumer culture, in the guise of the department store, which Émile Zola referred to as the “cathedral of modern commerce”, introduced the new concept of shopping for pleasure and flânerie, the act of browsing and viewing the merchandise without any obligation to buy. This in turn gave rise to a ‘new’ woman of modernity, the shopper as flâneuse. Considered to be the first modern department store in Paris, Au Bon Marché is used as a case study to examine the innovative retail practices that were initiated by its founder, Aristide Boucicaut, to illustrate how these strategies impacted the social and cultural life of Parisian bourgeois women. Boucicaut achieved this by challenging the traditional shopping conventions of the smaller specialty stores and transforming the mundane and sometimes unpleasant ‘chore’ of buying necessities into the pleasurable social ritual of shopping as a distinctly feminine leisurely pursuit. Boucicaut’s Au Bon Marché thus became the domain of women in which they were encouraged to navigate this liminal ‘public/private’ paradise where they were free to be a flâneuse.