The bon marche essay

The book would excite business historians with the ideas of merchandising practices, marketing techniques, business strategies, and market forces. In the end, after a riveting look at the life of the house that Boucicaut built, The Bon Marche achieves the goal of telling a 19th century social history that strongly links the firm’s rise to social and cultural trends that sparked along with the human side of the story that made the store a possible success. Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, is a novel that tells the story of Denise Baudu, a 20 year old woman who comes to Paris to work at the department store Au Bonheur des Dames.

The novel is set from the employees’ perspective, and describes in detail the thirteen hour workdays, the less than sought after food, and the hardly livable lodgings for the female staff. The department store the novel is set in is said to be modeled after The Bon Marche. The narrative details many of Le Bon Marche’s innovations, including its mail-order business, its system of commissions, its in-house staff commissary, and its methods of receiving and retailing goods. The book is a sequel to another novel by Zola, Pot-Bouille or Pot-Luck. The book, other than focusing on Denise, it also features a returning character from the previous novel, Octave Mouret, who had married Caroline Hedouin, the owner of a small silk shop. Sadly, at the start of Paradise, Octave has now become a widower as his new wife had ied. Octave has expanded her business into a retail chain and is beginning to posses the entire city block. There is a social message in the book: Octave’s grand store (called, of course, Au Bonheur des Dames, aka Ladies’ Happiness, or Paradise) is beginning to encompass all business previously seen by the smaller stores, much like Denise’s uncle (who owns a small clothing store himself).

In those terms, fiction can actually fill in the gaps. Fiction and literature of all kinds (magazines, newspapers, etc) should be seen as vignettes into the past. In an era where moving pictures, or even pictures in general, were either scarce or nonexistent, fiction and literature can be what was the pulse on that period in time. It provides emotional context for the scene and gives you a story that would have been read during the time of its publication.

One can connect with a group of people who have died long before one was even born. With it all being said, Miller’s piece must have used Zola’s work in numerous occasions in order to properly give the examples needed. Miller’s work is a documentation, but its definitely narrative history. Using Zola as a source would give him a better understanding of the employees during the time of the store’s grandiose ventures pre and post WWI; It would allow him to give better descriptions of those who were actually there during the events. Using the character of Octave, he can better understand the ideologies and mindsets of Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut.