A Cubist History: The Department Store in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

A Cubist History: The Department Store in Late Nineteenth-Century ParisAuthor(s): Robert ProctorSource: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 13 (2003), pp. 227-235Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679255 .

Accessed: 17/07/2014 17:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and Royal Historical Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 84.245.231.186 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:09:04 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rhs

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679255?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Transactions of the RHS 13 (2003), pp. 227-35 ? 2003 Royal Historical Society DOI: Io.IoI7/Soo8o44o0o300ooo02X Printed in the United Kingdom

A CUBIST HISTORY: THE DEPARTMENT STORE IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARIS

By Robert Proctor

ABSTRACT. Postmodernism is now firmly established as a critique of historical narrative; this paper looks at its implications for architectural history, where the built object is viewed through many texts. The example of the department store in Paris shows how the process of writing history has been simplified to serve different purposes, while the complexity of different viewpoints and contradictions within and between them can be restored and emphasised to give a more truthful historical account. Cubist painting is proposed as a useful analogy for reconciling this process of historical representation to Postmodern thought.

What seemed at its outset merely a moment of crisis in the discipline of history has now become a thirty-year body of literature, both academic and, more recently, popular. Once criticised as a fleeting academic fashion, Postmodernism can no longer be so easily dismissed. Meanwhile, architectural historians have often insulated themselves from concerns that question the foundation of their work; but the reflexivity of theoretical debate promoted by this symposium is one sign that Postmodernism has now established itself in their discipline too. Many, even when rejecting a Postmodern approach, nevertheless realise that they must defend their rejection, since it no longer suffices to say that history has no theory. While the potential effects of Postmodernism on the working assumptions of historians may be seen as a drastic threat, I believe that it offers an opportunity for positive change. I propose an analogy to Cubism for my model of a Postmodern history: not a perfect comparison, but a vivid and relevant one.

In my work on the department store in late nineteenth-century Paris, a Postmodern approach has been just about inevitable; since the nature of the sources has largely dictated it, I will begin with them.

Historians and architectural historians have always been attentive to the reliability and provenance of their sources. Postmodernism demands that no source be considered as privileged in its access to reality, and most historians would accept that all evidence is the product of

227



228 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

conventions or viewpoints that make it partial. The greatest trepidation has been caused by the idea that Postmodernism regards reality as non-existent, but this is to miss the point; it would be better to say that Postmodernism holds reality to be unknowable except through partial texts. This is, of course, precisely the reason that documentary research has always been essential to the practice of history. But the idea has another important consequence, which is that the texts of the past must become the subject of history, rather than the past itself. Inasmuch as buildings can be considered as texts, architectural historians find themselves at an advantage, since they already write this kind of history. Of course, a building is more than just a text, but this something more can only be discovered through other texts; thus, the architectural historian needs to look more widely for historical sources, in other words, to become more like a historian.

The department stores of nineteenth-century Paris had a material existence: they were real. But there is no way of gaining access to this materiality today. The buildings that remain have been radically altered, and occasionally halfheartedly restored. The Bon Marche, for example, was built gradually throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, four architects having worked on it before the First World War. Its interior has had a few of its glazed cast-iron atria restored, but these no longer admit daylight, and bear no relation to nineteenth- century photographs. These photographs possess no sense of scale (being mostly unpopulated), they have no colour, they disguise materials and distort perspectives, and their vantage points are selected according to artistic convention. Architectural plans may be thought to provide an objective account, but what they describe was by no means always built, and shows different aspects of the building depending on their purpose. The evidence thus is always incomplete, and the historian's task involves conjecture to recreate the fact. However, even if it were possible to reconstruct the Bon Marche exactly as it was at a particular point in its history, we would still know nothing about it: what it means to have an iron frame or a classical facade or toplighting must be discovered through other texts.

Postmodernism, drawing on structural linguistics, insists that the meaning of a sign can only be known by comparison with many others in the same system of meanings, and that meaning depends as much on its reception by an audience as on the intentions of the sign's creator. The architectural historian, then, must draw from the widest possible range of contextual sources. Here, context is not so much the 'background' to architecture (in the sense that a nineteenth-century history painting possesses a background to its figures), but the field of texts which surrounds the building and actively constitutes it as an object (much as, in a Cubist painting, the hierarchy of figure and ground is



A CUBIST HISTORY 229

levelled through interpenetration).' In determining a building's meanings, the reactions of its viewers are of equal significance to a knowledge of the intentions of its architects. That this is an opportunity rather than a threat must be clear. In my research on the Parisian department store, first-hand sources included feminist newspapers, a paper produced by a union of shopworkers, women's magazines, a journal for investors in shares and the minutes of committee meetings for the formulation of building regulations, all with new things to say, since nobody had previously thought to consult them on this subject.

The more sources are consulted, however, the more the physical object breaks up, refracted through multiple viewpoints. As the department store tended to elicit extreme reactions from its contemporaries, the evidence gives a particularly distorted representation. Even images were often produced to serve distinct requirements: an engraving of the Bon Marche in the I870s, for example, has an exaggerated perspective, and depicts an impossibly fragile structure, its interior drenched in light.2 This is a different impression from that given by a contemporary photograph,3 and supports the right-wing myth of the store as a model of progressive capitalist concentration for the benefit of society - a myth purveyed by Emile Zola's novel of 1883, Au Bonheur des Dames, as well as by the stores themselves.4 Architectural journals, meanwhile, presented the buildings with greater pictorial accuracy, but, consonant with their practical function, tended to discuss technical advances at the expense of descriptions of architectural style or meaning, or of the buildings' social and cultural purposes.5 There are, then, no objective sources; the department store is only visible to us through the many prismatic facets of its contemporaries' minds. The image produced by archival research may already be compared to the multiple faceted viewpoints of single objects in the paintings of Picasso and Braque.

Perhaps none of this will be new to either historians or architectural historians, and it is my opinion that Postmodernism describes a condition that historians have always understood. This approach to sources, however, bears implications for the writing of history, which Post- modernism questions with greater urgency. Traditionally, history has taken the form of narrative, that is, it tells a story, and the techniques which it deploys are borrowed from literature, specifically the nineteenth-century realist novel. Descriptions of past events are informed

'Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative (i999), e.g. 115-26.

Archives de Paris, DI8Z/7. Reproduced in Bernard Marrey, Les grands magasins des ongines a 1939 (Paris, 1979), 59.

4Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford, 1995)- 5For example, an article on Paul Sedille's Printemps building, 'Grands magasins du

Printemps', in L'Encyclopidie d'architecture, 3rd series, iv (1885), 1-35.




and ordered according to conventional ideas of plot, in a linear mode which implies causality. Hayden White, in Metahistory, showed that the different kinds of narrative structure (whether farce, satire, comedy or tragedy) enable historians to produce different stories of the past according to their political thinking;6 while the conventions of realism (a continuous neutral timeframe, detailed descriptions, context as background), have been seen by others as giving an illusion of truth to the historian's subjective account.7 The past, meanwhile, eludes the narrative order that we would like to impose upon it, and so writers such as Hans Kellner have called for historians to 'get the story crooked' instead.8 Postmodernism's insight into the nature of writing allows us to question previous accounts of our subjects by revealing their methodology, and gives us the opportunity for presenting our evidence in new ways better to reflect our understanding of human experience and activity.

Just as the condition which Postmodernism describes is emphasised by the nature of the evidence about the Parisian department store, so the secondary writing on the subject confirms Postmodernism's attitude to narrative. The department store fulfils an important role in the plots of many histories. In architectural history, Sigfried Giedion first appropriated the building type in his Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-concrete of 1928, and later in Space, Time and Architecture.9 In both, the department store is described as a model of positive engagement with modernity in its bold use of exposed iron and glass, and therefore as a precursor to the structural and functional aesthetic of Modernism. Giedion's aim was to show that Modernism was the result of a century of continuous evolution towards an aesthetic perfection in harmony with the spirit of the age. His representation of the department store is thus engineered to support his linear narrative. In Building in France, an illustration of the Bon Marche's roof shows that structural honesty was a dormant principle, while the masonry fagade, acknowledged only as 'pure veneer', is not shown or discussed. Another store described is the Printemps. This building, one of three for the store before 1914, was built from 1882 to 1889 by the Rationalist architect Paul S'dille. It was taken by contemporaries as the ideal model of a department store, and was widely imitated subsequently; it also con- formed more strictly to the current idea of Rationalism in architecture.

SHayden White, Metahistory (1973). 'Thus Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Rep-

resentational Time (Princeton, NJ, 1992). 'Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation (Madison, WI, i989). 9 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-concrete, trans. J.

Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA, 1995); Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 3rd rev. edn (1954).




Giedion, however, frowns upon its decorative elements; corner pavilions 'could not be abandoned' - although they were created as an essential feature of the new building type.'o

Although Giedion's approach is easily faulted, it is unique in frankly announcing its intentions to the reader. It was imitated by Pevsner, whose A History of Building Types (as late as 1976) translated Giedion's enjoyable polemic into a putatively objective history concealing the motivations of its narrative." His distortions are fewer, but this only heightens its apparent realism. His analysis ascribes the department store a place in an evolution of types including arcades and bazaars, their position in the sequence determined by the complexity or honesty of their iron structures. Thus, the part of the Bon March6 designed by Louis-Charles Boileau receives attention because of the architect's description of it as a 'large metallic cage', and Gustave Eiffel is assigned the role of engineer on tenuous evidence.' The Grands Magasins du Louvre, one of the four largest in Paris from 1855 until its demise in the 197os, is only briefly mentioned, presumably because it had no structural innovations.'3 Perhaps it would be largely irrelevant to make any use of Giedion and Pevsner here, were it not for their overwhelming influence on subsequent writers. The Modernist narrative in architectural history has not substantially been altered; it has only gained in complexity and depth, for example in Bertrand Lemoine's erudite L'architecture du fer.'4

Other forms of history have other narratives, and therefore confer different roles upon the department store. The economic history of retail embellished a consistent story for nearly a hundred years following several articles in the 189os. The department store was first thought of as the most highly developed form of capitalist trade in a long evolutionary history, having introduced fixed marked prices, a low profit margin and a high turnover enabling economies of scale, further enhanced through concentration and centralisation of the business, and diversification of goods. The ancestry of the department store is traced from medieval fairs to eighteenth-century drapery shops. Variations on the story depend on their ending: for Georges d'Avenel in 1894, the department store was the final outcome of capitalist development;'5 in

,o Giedion, Building in France, 115-19. "Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (1976). 2lIbid., 268; for a revision of Eiffel's role, see Frangois Faraut and Cloud Dupuy de

Grandpre, 'Le Bon Marche: 119 rue du Bac', in Le Faubourg Saint-Germain: la rue du Bac, ed. Bruno Pons and Anne Forray-Carlier (Paris, [n.d.]), 79-95 (87).

'3 Pevsner, Building Types, 267-9. '4 Bertrand Lemoine, L'architecture dufer: France: XIXe sidcle (Paris, 1986). '5Georges d'Avenel, 'Le mecanisme de la vie moderne. I. Les grands magasins', La

Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 July I894, 329-69.




the twentieth century, economic history took the retail chain as the final logical phase of development, but acknowledged the department store as essential in the transition from small-scale enterprise to national corporation.'6

Here, then, are already two narratives incorporating the department store, and there are many others: more recently, social history, cultural history, consumption studies and the history of literature have all appropriated the department store for the invention of their own stories. Between the architectural and economic histories, there are convergences, largely due to cross-fertilisation (Pevsner, for instance, quotes d'Avenel); but there are also dissonances, as different scales of time are employed, and peaks of development are unrelated. Sometimes there are radical incompatibilities: Pevsner includes the bazaars (such as the Galeries du Commerce et de l'Industrie of 1837) as architectural predecessors of the department store; economic histories, meanwhile, describe the bazaars merely to explain their failure to develop, in telling contrast to department stores.'7 These divergences show that narrative is arbitrary, since it requires the selection of facts according to the particular story that is to be told, from the many stories that are possible. A major fault with all the histories mentioned here is their frequent use of terms such as 'evolution': causality is asserted without having to be investigated. The narrative is therefore constructed lin- guistically where evidence is insufficient.

The total range of sources, however, does not suggest that any particular story is truer than another, and in fact does not easily align itself to any story at all without substantial omissions. It is, in any case, improbable that life, society, events or the past should take the forms that stories take. Narrative is simply not suitable for the depiction of a complex and sometimes meaningless reality. So the task of a Postmodern history is to find a better mode of representation. I will conclude by suggesting some possibilities.

An acknowledgement of one's subjectivity is essential, and this can take the form of a continually reflexive approach: if, as Hans Kellner wrote, 'history is not "about" the past as such, but rather about our ways of creating meanings from the scattered, and profoundly meaningless debris we find around us', then this process of eliciting meaning from the evidence should always be explicit.'8 In my own history, this has meant, above all, being honest: describing the evidence within the text, rather than assigning it to footnotes; relating the

16 E.g. Hrant Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution and Economics (1954). '1Pevsner, Building Types, p. 262; Georges Michel, 'Une evolution economique: le

commerce en grands magasins', La Revue des Deux Mondes, I Jan. 1892, 133-56 (137). '8 Kellner, Language and Historical Representation, Io.




methods by which every conclusion has been drawn; leaving conjectures as possibilities rather than statements of truth. Here, the analogy to Cubism returns: by portraying unimportant objects, Picasso and Braque focused attention away from the painted subject and towards the act of mediation, that is, the process of observing and representing reality.'9

A possibility for structuring historical writing is suggested by the technique of collage. In Cubist painting, the collage undermined the illusionistic convention of the surface as a transparent plane, through which reality is viewed; bottles and violins were made of the newspaper which also partook of the scene as object of depiction."2 A comparison can be made with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project of 1927 to 1940, which deals with a subject close to my own, namely the shopping arcade in earlier nineteenth-century Paris." Benjamin's work was unfin- ished, and speculation continues over his intentions; but the form in which it was recovered is revealing. Assembled into folders headed with the titles of broad themes ('Photography', 'Iron Construction', 'The Streets of Paris' and so on) are reams of quotations from many sources, both contemporary and modern, on all possible subjects of interest, juxtaposed deliberately to confer meanings upon each other, many cross-referenced to other folders, and interwoven with Benjamin's own thoughts in the form of notes. Between each note or quotation is a gap, where a narrative connection is absent, so that the whole is made up of a vast collection of fragments composed to form a kaleidoscopic image of Paris. Despite the initial effect of incoherence, each theme is found to have a linear development, perhaps suggesting that the work was eventually to be integrated as prose. Between themes, however, there are further breaks, where the viewpoint or faceted surface is shifted, and complementary or contradictory images of the arcades emerge. Tying together the whole, however, and evident throughout, is Benjamin's own subjective motivation - to explain, as a Marxist, the artificial nature of consciousness under twentieth-century capitalism.

Giedion's correspondence with Benjamin is well known, and his Building in France also has a montage composition (implemented by Moholy Nagy of the Bauhaus) of images and captions and bold, disconnected statements. Both Giedion and Benjamin used the technique for its persuasive 'shock', jolting the reader into a sudden

'9Vargish and Mook, Inside Modernism, 81-3. '0o Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of

Rupture (1986), 44-51. "'Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

(Cambridge, MA, 1999); see also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989).




realisation of an underlying truth or reality.2 In a Postmodern history, no such manipulation would be intended; rather, the underlying reality would be gradually perceived as complex and full of contradictions, as the historian is open to different plausible conclusions.

In approaching the Parisian department store, my first intention was to understand the meanings behind it, giving the reasons for its physical appearance, from the viewpoints of the different people and institutions involved in its creation."2 Architects are therefore only one category; others were the owners and managers of department stores; the city, which influenced the possibilities for businesses through urban planning, and property laws, while restricting design with building regulations; technology, since engineering developments in iron, reinforced concrete and steel, as well as lifts and lighting, led to changes in meanings and the forms with which they were expressed; and the audience for the department store, subdivided into customers, workers, neighbours, other shopkeepers and various political groups.

Between each category, irreconcilable differences appeared, such as the willingness of architects to adopt certain technological features, particularly materials, but their extraordinary reluctance to use others, notably (with disastrous consequences) the improved understanding of fire precautions around 1900.24 Further inconsistencies appeared within each category, which could be separated into strands of intention or ideology. The owners and managers of department stores, for example, inherited traditions which were at variance with the perfect economical running of the business; one such was the desire for daylight, considered necessary for the honest exposure of the quality of materials, which made the central atrium a common, though spatially inefficient, feature.25 Architects, torn between the competing aesthetic systems of Beaux-Arts classicism, Rationalism and, later, Art Nouveau, attempted compromises with variable results: all three of these strands may be observed at once in Frantz Jourdain's Samaritaine building of 1907. Since even within a single person, conflicting ideas and motivations may coexist, there can be no simple narrative explanation for anything approaching the complexity of a building.

Thus, a Postmodern history, like a Cubist painting, can present its object of study through multiple perspectives, coexisting, though they may disagree; it represents the object as composed of different views according to the people and their texts that the historian consults, and

22 See, for example, Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (1992).

23Robert Proctor, 'The Department Store in Paris, 1855 to i914: An Architectural History' (doctoral thesis, Cambridge University, 2oo2).

24 bid., 234-40. 25Ibid., 87.




according to the methods used to interpret them. An important consequence is that the building no longer appears situated within a linear chronological frame, or as evolving across time, but as continuously present in different manifestations. Since the history is thematic, aspects of the represented object will recur in different contexts, not unlike the recurring patterns of a Cubist painting. The effect is one of a rhythmic time, or of parallel times, replacing the linear time of narrative based on literary realism. This Cubist history then approaches more recent literary models;26 ultimately, however, its intention remains a more truthful and realistic form of history.

26 Elizabeth Ermarth suggests Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (I96O), amongst other potential models (in Sequel to History, 72-84).



Documents

A Cubist History: The Department Store in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris