Review
Michael Miller has written a book that is both fascinating and original, about a large department store and its place not only in business history, but in the history of French society, culture, and bureaucracy.
Book Description
In this comprehensive social history of the Bon Marché, the Parisian department store that was the largest in the world before 1914, Michael Miller explores the bourgeois identities, ambitions, and anxieties that the new emporia so vividly dramatized. Through an original interpretation of paternalism, public images, and family-firm relationships, he shows how this new business enterprise succeeded in reconciling traditional values with the coming of an age of mass consumption and bureaucracy.
