Shopping was born in Paris.

Despite being often regarded as a frivolous, unproductive, and self-indulgent activity, shopping has played an important part in the construction of social identities ever since its emergence as a social phenomenon in Paris in the early 1800’s.

It was the progeny of two revolutions: the first was the overthrow of Louis XVI and the ancien régime, and the second was the use of the steam engine to power cotton mills, which ushered the industrial revolution in England and the continent. The French Revolution catalyzed the emergence of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, whose purchasing power largely displaced the pre-revolutionary system of aristocratic patronage of artisanal guilds and craftsmen. The Industrial Revolution led to the prolifer­ation of commodities, products that depend­ed on the play of market forces, including advertising and the attraction of investment capital. Commodities and the bourgeoisie both required a stage where they could display themselves in all their newfound glory, and this came in the form of never-before-seen environments: the passage couvert (covered arcade), the bou­levard, and the grand magasin (department store).  

Cultural critic Walter Benjamin went as far to suggest that these new places incubated the modern era – these were places where people, com­modities and new building techniques came together to create a new social realm, one where members of the bourgeoisie could proudly display their status, status now being something that could be purchased rather than inher­ited. The importance of status symbols continues to this day, fueled by the incessant drumbeat of social media. We are social beings, and we shop in order to build our public, social personas, adopting the dress and manners of our perceived peer group: we shop to create the person we want to ap­pear to be. That is the paradox of shopping - we shop both to stand out and to conform.

The birth and evolution of shopping can be retraced as a walk that starts at Les Halles, the location of the original central market of Paris, and then mean­ders through the nearby Palais Royal and through five historical covered arcades, end­ing at the Galeries Lafayette on the Haussmann Boulevard. It is a walk that follows the rise of the shopping arcades and their eventual demise, and it contains lessons still relevant for bricks-and-mortar retail environments today.

 

1. Les Halles: the belly of Paris

Les Halles Market in its heyday, when it was the largest market in the western world. On the left: the Fountain of the Innocents is all that remains today of the old market and adjacent cemetery; on the right: increasing congestion led to the relocation of the Le Halles market to the Parisian suburb of Rungis; the subsequent demolition of the glass and steel market pavilions in the 70's caused a huge outcry.

The starting point of our walk, next to Westfield’s Canopée, is the orig­inal location of the markets of medieval Paris: a warren of filthy and unpaved narrow streets with open sewers, strewn with rotten veg­etables and splattered with blood from slaughtered animal carcasses. Hardly the centerpiece of a City with ambitions to be the cultural Capital of Europe in the 19th Century, these were replaced by the now-demolished covered market of Les Halles (the story of urban design in many Western cities is in large part the story of cleansing the raw, working medieval city and replacing the warren of streets with public spaces or structures glorifying the State). In its time Les Halles was the biggest market in the western world, fed by a new railway net­work that could deliver produce overnight from all over France.

Access and circulation challenges even­tually led to the relocation of Paris’s central market to Rungis, south of Paris, in the 1960s. Les Halles’s famed pavilions were unceremoniously destroyed to huge public outcry, and a much-reviled under­ground shopping mall was built in their place - ironically a bit of a rabbit warren, not unlike the medieval streets that once stood there. Westfield eventually took over the failing mall, demolished most of it, and inaugurated the new Canopée in 2016.

The demolition of Les Halles had forever banished the wholesale purchase of produce from the neighborhood, replacing it instead with today's assortment of luxury goods and commodities. To under­stand the origins of this shift, we need to head next towards the nearby Galerie Vero Dodat.

 

2. Galerie Vero Dodat: a new kind of street

On the left: the scale of Rue Aumaire (photograph by Charles Marville) was typical of most Parisian Streets prior to Haussman's interventions. On the right: Galerie Vero-Dodat was a new kind of semi-public street (author's photograph), offering a very different kind of experience.

Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the short street leading to the Galerie Vero-Dodat, is representative of the scale and width of many Parisian streets before the large-scale interventions of Baron Haussmann, Paris’s very own nineteenth-century Robert Moses. In these days it would have been unpaved, without sidewalks, and with an open sewer running down the middle. Horse-drawn carriages would have been speeding through, a danger to pedestrians. The streets of pre-revolutionary Paris were not conducive to leisurely strolling.

But take a right turn through the por­tal of the Galerie Vero-Dodat and you have entered a different world: gleaming surfaces, sophisticated flooring, and delicately proportioned storefront vitrines. Built 20 or so years after the events of the French revolution, and anchored by les Halles and the Palais Royal, the Galerie Vero-Dodat was one of the first places in Paris to get gas lighting. One can imagine what it felt like to step out of the chaos of the street into this artificially lit artificial street. A place where one could linger, tip one’s hat to fel­low shoppers, and appreciate the selection of goods. This was a new kind of leisure­ly activity, far removed from the utilitarian commerce of Les Halles.

Restored in the late 1990s, Galerie Vero-Dodat gives a genuine flavor of the prototypical Parisian lux­ury arcade. Neither inside nor outside, artificially lit by night and a little gloomy during the day, these were intriguing and unusual spaces. They represented a new way of ordering the public realm, an alternative to Paris’s labyrinth of small streets and the grandiose civic spaces carved out of them. The way the Parisian arcades cut through the blocks reorga­nized the city and provided a prototype for the large-scale urban moves later implemented by Baron Haussmann. They reflected the rise to power of the bourgeoisie, based on commerce, manufacturing, and purchasing power, rather than hereditary peerage. During their heyday there were over 100 arcades in Paris. Only 21 remain today: while their intimacy may have been appropriate for an emerging and somewhat timid class, once the bourgeoisie grew more self-confident and more established, they would search for grander settings more reflective of their self-image.

 

3. Palais Royal: an escape from Versailles

On the left: the "Galerie de Bois" was the first shopping arcade ever built, and pre-dates the French revolution. On the right - it was eventually replaced by the much grander Galerie d'Orleans - but all that remains today are the granite columns.

The first arcade (now long gone) was created nearby in the Palais Royal, Paris’s very own 18th Century version of Las Vegas. Initially built as Car­dinal Richelieu’s palace about 150 years before the French Revolution, the Palais was expanded as part of a speculative real estate venture by its owner Phillipe Duke of Orleans, cousin of the ill-fated King Louis XVI. Phillipe saw the goings-on at the Palais as an antidote to the strict formalities of the Ancien Regime Versailles court and created Europe’s first permanent retail/entertainment destination.

The courtyards of the Palais Royal became the public salons of the city. In between the twin pairs of colonnades of the now empty middle court stood the Galerie de Bois, a 5-bay wooden structure built in 1786 that spawned the craze for building shopping arcades that occurred over the next half-century. In addition to the Galerie de Bois, other attractions at the Palais included a huge circus-like space half-buried in the ground, located where the gardens now stand, and two performing arts theaters. The perimeter stone building arcades were lined with boutiques, cafes and restaurants.

The success of the Galerie de Bois and the subsequent proliferation of arcades can be attributed in large part to the “Freedom of Dress” decree which was passed shortly after the French Revolution, abolishing the old laws regulating what one could wear based on one’s social class (the drab woolens of the poor, the sober velvets of merchants, and the bright satins and silks of the aristocracy). Suddenly those who could afford it were able to adorn themselves with all manner of clothes, and what better place to show these off than in the new arcades.

The Galerie de Bois was eventually replaced in 1831 by the elegant glass and steel roofed Galerie d’Orleans. Described by Balzac as “cold, lofty... a sort of greenhouse without flowers,” the Galerie d’Orleans eventually be­came the first dead mall in the history of retail. People regretted the lost intimacy, the lost opportunities to indulge in vice, and longed for the old wooden galleries. It was torn down in 1935, but not before its design had influenced many of the grand gallerias in Europe (such as the Milan Galleria and the GUM department store), as well as the Dallas and Houston Gallerias.

 

4. Galerie Vivienne: the haunt of the flâneur

The Galerie Vivienne, still a popular destination today, is made up of a series of interconnecting spaces that house over 56 businesses, from specialty retailers and bookstores to food & beverage establishments. The arcades became the haunt of the flaneur- the prototypical people watcher and window shoppers

 

The Galerie Vivienne and its immediate neighbor the Galerie Colbert opened in the 1820s to feed off the popularity of the adjacent Palais Royal. Though not the first arcades to be built following the success of the Galerie de Bois, they were some of the most aspirational, seeking to attract an upscale clientele.

Galerie Colbert has now been transformed into an exhibition space, so it is the adjacent Vivienne that is of interest today. Unlike the typical arcade that runs straight through a block, Vivienne had to be cut through a series of pre-existing buildings, and it unfolds as a series of spaces of different scales. Vivienne thus becomes a series of indoor/outdoor rooms, housing cafés, high-end bou­tiques, beauty salons, art galleries, a flower shop, and a bookstore, all unified by a beautiful mosaic floor.

As you stroll through the arcade indulging in a little window shopping, you will be re-enacting the ritual of the flâneur. A man of leisure, first appearing in the literature of author Honore de Balzac and poet Charles Baudelaire, he was an urban tourist enjoy­ing the spectacle of the city. Unlike his fellow citizens who are per­petually harried by the chores of daily life, the flâneur roams where his fancy takes him, “right or left, without rhyme or reason,” a deliberate counterpoint to the ethos of productivity. Flanerie was itself a status symbol – flaneurs were flaunting their abundant leisure time.

According to sociologist Georg Simmel, the flâneur’s emotional detachment is in part a reaction to the proliferation of external stim­uli provided by the modern metropolis and its lack of social intimacy - what we might refer to today a lack of a sense of community. As class barriers were being broken down, the public realm was becoming more complex, with the intimacy of pre-revolutionary Paris giving way to a world where maintaining appearances and social distance was a necessary part of venturing out in public.  

  

5. The Passage des Panoramas: the seductions of consumption

On the left: The Passage des Panoramas was a popular destination in its heyday, but eventually fell out of favor like many of the other Parisian Arcades. It was one of the settings for author Emile Zola's novel "Nana", where he explored the many dangers of temptation. On the right – today it has regained some of its former popularity, and features a mix of boutiques, cafes and restaurants.

Today the southern entrance of the Passage des Panoramas is particularly uninspiring - the drab mid-century building that replaced the one that had stood there for over a century reduced the double-height portal to a single story - but walk a few dozen meters and you’ll reach the original arcade, one of the very first to be built. You’ll likely find yourself in the midst of bustling activity, with a series of food establishments and shops selling vintage postcards, coins, autographs, and old stamps. The Théâtre des Variétés, dating from the early 1800s, and the setting for Emile Zola’s novel Nana, remains a popular venue for shows and comedies; however the two giant panoramas that flanked the entrance on the Boulevard Mont­martre are no more. These were a pair of rotundas with a central viewing platform surrounded by a 360-degree painted image, creating something akin to today’s “immersive” experiences. Panoramas became huge­ly popular in the 19th Century, until the rise of the moving picture rendered them obsolete.

The arcades were themselves a panorama of consumer society: in his novel Nana, published in 1880, the author Emile Zola describes the intoxicating aspect of this plethora of goods – all designed to envelop the consumer in a seductive world of sights and scents, rather like the heroine of his novel, a part-time actress and full-time courtesan who adored the storefronts of the Passage des Panoramas. Walter Benjamin, the 20th Century cultural critic who became obsessed with the arcades,  identified them as a turning point in the history of capitalism: the factory had displaced the workshop, and the noble craftsman had been replaced by the anonymous factory work­er. Novelty, rather than craftsmanship and tradition, had become the consumer’s focus, on display in the spaces of the arcades, manifesting itself as an endless series of addictive but ultimately unfulfilling temptations.

 

6. The Grand Boulevards: society on display

 In both art and life the stability of the Ancient Regime had been replaced by a focus on surface appearances and the ephemeral. The Impressionists celebrated movement, impermanence and the great outdoors. In their heyday it was the life of the boulevards, and not the arcades, that impressed them. On the left, Camille Pissarro’s painting of the Boulevard Montmartre; on the right, a café scene by Louis Sabatier.

 

The Passage des Panoramas will discharge you onto the Boulevard Montmartre, one of Paris’s grand boulevards. These wide thor­oughfares form a ring around Paris’s Right Bank neighborhoods, and they became a popular destination in the city.

These also served as the prototype for the more ceremonial urban interventions created by Baron Haussmann: his boss Napoleon III had been impressed by London’s Georgian-era ex­pansion. If the Palais Royal had been the anti-Versailles, Haussmann was now introducing the allées of Versailles back into Paris, imposing a Napole­onic order and discipline onto the chaotic lay­out of the city’s working class neighborhoods. The openness of the Parisian Boulevard liberated the flow of people and goods from the constraints of Paris’s medieval alleyways, allowing for a much greater freedom of movement within the city.

If the flâneur was born in the shopping arcade, the boulevard is where he came of age: a space for the display of affluence, conspicuous consumption, and fashion. The inti­macy of the passages became anachro­nistic and their scale provincial in comparison to the lively and grandiose panorama of Parisian society that was on offer in the boulevards.

 

7. Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdeau: a swan song of glass and steel

On the left: Passage Jouffroy. On the right: Passage Verdeau. Both were built towards the end of the arcades era, and both feature extensive use of structural cast iron (author's photographs)

Among the last arcades to be built, the twin passages of Jouffroy and Verdeau opened in 1847 in an attempt to feed off the popularity of the Passage des Panoramas. By then the novelty of the passage was begin­ning to wear off; gas lighting, once unique to the passages, had spread to the city’s boule­vards.

Jouffroy and Verdeau are notable for their embrace of cast iron. The use of steel and glass had previously been confined to creating the glazed roofs of the passages; here cast iron forms the structure of both walls as well – an approach to construction that found its ultimate expression in London’s Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Despite the novel construction, the juxtaposition of businesses in these passages were no match for the seductive ordering and curation of the new kid on the block, the Grand Magasin. In many ways the arrival of the depart­ment store did to the arcades what the subur­ban shopping malls did to America’s downtowns - they provided a more cohesive environment, where bigger was better. By the 1860s, the arcades were beginning to be torn down, or were becoming decidedly downmarket as competi­tion from the department stores began to drive tenants out of business.

The loss of status of the arcades, and their abandonment by the moneyed classes, gave them a second, much less lucrative, lease on life as the haunt of the lower middle and working classes. Arguably what they lost in cachet they gained in authenticity, becoming somewhat chaotic, and occasionally a little louche, some with hotels where rooms could be rented by the hour, away from the prying eyes of the boulevards..

In order to understand why the arcades lost their commercial allure, we need to step out of Verdeau onto the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, make a left past the extraordinary storefront of the A la Mère de Famille confiserie shop, and head towards the largest department store in Europe, the Galeries Lafayette.

 

8. The Galeries Lafayette: retail reinvented

 On the left: The grand staircase of Le Bon Marche bears a striking resemblance to the grand staircase of Garnier’s Paris Opera House; on the right: the Galeries Lafayette to this day retains the grandeur of 19th Century Department stores.

Just a few short years after Jouffroy and Verdeau opened, entrepreneur Aristide Boucicault would cement the decline of the passages when he began the radical trans­formation and expansion of his shop Le Bon Marché into the world’s first fully fledged department store. This was in 1852, the year following London’s Great Exhibition, when the vast Crystal Palace, filled with a cornucopia of goods from around the world, had been erected in London’s Hyde Park. Boucicault set out to create his own version, intro­ducing a number of innovations that included fixed prices, ever-changing window displays, recurring sales, bulk purchase-driven competitive pricing, and heavy advertising in local papers.

Just as the arcades had introduced Parisians to gas lighting, the new department stores featured two equally impressive innovations: electric lighting, and the passenger elevator. The crowds were hooked, and the Bon Marché was followed by a slew of would-be competi­tors, including Printemps (1865), La Samaritaine (1870), and finally the Galeries Lafayette in 1893.

The central rotunda of the Galeries Lafayette is an impressive space. Looking up at its four stories, capped by an expansive dome of glass and steel, you feel that you have arrived in an Aladdin’s cave of con­sumer goods that hold out the promise of a better life. If the arcades were a street in min­iature, then the department store became a whole city in miniature, through which one could wander in wonder. Prior to the advent of the department store, middle-class women would typically send their servants out to perform what was seen as an unfulfilling chore. Buying was practical and func­tional, and impulse buying nonexistent. The depart­ment store became a ladies’ paradise, to borrow the title of another of Zola’s novels. All of the amenities of department stores, including a salon de thé and restrooms for women, contributed to the idea that spending the day in the store, pampered in luxurious surroundings, was better than spending the day at home.

After you wander through the shopper’s par­adise of the Galeries Lafayette, it’s worth making your way up to the roof. Once outside, you’ll enjoy an 180-degree panorama as you look out over the rooftops of the city, experiencing the seductive beauty of the capital of the 19th century.

Conclusion: the legacy of the arcades - settings for the creation of self and society

 A scene from the Galerie de Bois in the Palais Royal in the early 1800's: do we shop to express our individuality, or do we shop in order to reinforce our sense of belonging to a particular social class?

Suburban shopping malls today perform much the same function as did the Parisian shopping arcades, providing a place to perform a little people-watching, a place for teens to play at being out in public, a place to cultivate and forge one’s public image, and a place to adopt the identifiers of one’s class and of one’s perceived or desired status, whether by buying the latest in athleisure wear or purchasing a sharp new suit. The mall, Main Street, the High Street, and other shopping venues are where we go to display how we want to be seen, based on the brands we purchase. These brands reinforce our desired self-image and allow us to define our social identity.

A much-repeated claim within the retail in­dustry is that retail “creates community.” Judging by its Parisian birth and evolution, I would counter that shopping is primarily a social experience, and as such it builds social bonds rather than communal bonds. It does so in two primary ways:

• It allows us to purchase the goods (clothes, accessories, cars, furniture, real estate) that go into the social “presentation of our selves in everyday life” (to borrow a term from sociologist Erving Goffman), helping us define our public persona (whether for formal or casual social encounters), and reinforcing a sense of belonging to a particular social demographic.
• It gives us physical places where we can enjoy the everchanging spectacle of society, a welcome relief from the spectacle stream­ing on our devices. Retail activates the public realm. It fosters informal social interactions with those beyond our immediate communities, friends, family, coworkers. and neighbors - it puts us in the company of strangers.

The arcades were the first spaces specifically dedicated to middle-class social presentation and interaction. They were in due course ren­dered obsolete when these activities moved to the grander settings of the boulevards and the department stores, eventually finding their way to the midcentury shopping mall, which in its turn helped forge the identity of a new class of suburbanites.

Arguably these spaces of physical presentation and interac­tion, spaces of loose belonging, are needed now more than ever, given our current digital retrenchment into iso­lated private worlds. By allowing us to cre­ate our public persona and situate ourselves within the ever-increasing complexity of today’s society, shopping plays its part in fostering sociability, reinforcing the fragile bonds that hold our fragmented society together.