Abstract
In 1881 camels carrying advertising kiosks appeared on the Grands Boulevards (figure 6.1) of Paris from the Madeleine to the Bastille, attracting a crowd of 250.1 The prefect of police responded by not only prohibiting the practice, reasoning that “the number of camels existing in Paris is increasing daily,” but also banned the sale and reproduction of camels throughout France. Denis Tapin in the newspaper Le Clairon protested against the demise of camel advertising, “one of the most interesting inventions of our time,” arguing that camels don’t deserve this treatment because they didn’t hinder traffic, never crushed anyone, and were free of disease, unlike horses and dogs. The extremely severe response of the prefect, Tapin claimed, had to do with a recent disastrous French military campaign in Algeria; the camel, as a symbol of Africa, caused embarrassment for the authorities.2
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Charles Holme, Henri Frantz, Octave Uzanne, Edgar Preston, and Helen Chisholm, Daumier and Gavarni (London: Offices of “The Studio,” 1904)
Victoria de Grazia, “Changing Consumption Regimes” in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 11–24
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Whitney Walton, France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
For a survey of Paris see Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville (XIXe-XXe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
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David van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
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Patricie Higonnet also notes this in Paris, The Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 1–3.
See Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)
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Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
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Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1999) 391
On this idea also see Jennifer Terni, “Paris Imaginaire: Le vaudeville et le spectacle de la ville moderne dans les années 1820 à 1840” in Karen Bowie ed., La Modernité avant Haussmann:formes de l’espace urbain à Paris: 1801–1853 (Paris: Editions Recherches, 2001), 177–190
Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–1848,” Theatre Journal 58:2 (May 2006), 221–248
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (London: Sage, 2007), 13
Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5–7.
Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).
Gluck, Popular Bohemia, 6–7; Donald Levine ed., Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 324–339
Henri Berson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001).
Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)
Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
See Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 274.
Judith Coffin has demonstrated that French advertising images for the sewing machine contained rich and diverse layers of meanings and symbols. Judith Coffin, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Ruth Iskin, “Father Time, Speed, and the Temporality of Posters Around 1900” in KronoScope 3:1 (2003), 27–50
Clemens Wischermann and Elliott Shore eds., Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)
Also see Frederic Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text (Winter 1979), 130–148.
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 5
Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: the Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Clemens Wischermann, “Placing Advertising in the Modern Cultural History of the City” in Wischermann and Shore eds., Advertising and the European City, 1–31: 22. Thomas Richards has argued that a new way of representing commodities emerged at the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London, and that advertising continued this trend of showcasing commodities, forming a culture based on the exchange of material goods. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Also see Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects” in Selected Writings 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 13–31
Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Boyars, 1978)
William Leiss, Social Communication in Advertising (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Varda Langholz-Leymore, Hidden Myth: Structure and Symbolism in Advertising (London: Heinemann Education, 1975), 141.
The leaders of advertising since the eighteenth century are largely thought to have been the English, followed by Americans who developed a massive culture of advertising by the turn of the twentieth century. Pre-Revolutionary French press ads were far fewer in number than the English equivalent, and throughout the nineteenth century the Anglo-American press greatly outpaced the French press in the number of ads, even before the abolition of English newspaper advertisement tax, stamp duty, and newsprint tax in 1853, 1855, and 1861 respectively, resulting in a rapid increase in circulation. Posters were also exempt from duty in England, unlike in France, and London’s streets were awash with vast quantities of posters already at mid-century. Marc Martin, Trois siècles de publicité en France (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1992), 34.
Also see W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981), 34–46.
Yves Guyot and A. Raffalovich eds., Dictionnaire du commerce, de l’industrie et de la banque (Paris: Guillaumnin et Cie., 1898–1901), 77
On this phenomenon also see Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945, v.2 Intellect, Taste and Anxiety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 513–514
Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 123–124.
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer culture, 1880s to 1910s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94–95.
Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System” in Simon During ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), 324–336: 324.
On the representation of the modern world, see Stefan Haas, “Die neue Welt der Bilder: Werbung und visuelle Kulture der Moderne,” in Bilderwelt des Alltags: Werbung in der Konsumgesellschaft des 19, und 20. Jahrhunderts (Steiner: Stuttgart 1995), 64–77
Marjorie Beale’s The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Tag Gronberg’s Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), 598–599.
Charles Dickens, Dickens’s Dictionary of Paris: An Unconventional Handbook (London: McMillan, 1882), 161.
Georges d’Avenel, “La Publicité,” Le Mécanisme de la vie moderne (Paris: A. Colin, 1902), 121–178: 143.
Octave-Jacques Gérin and C. Espinadel, Le Précis integrale de la publicité (Paris: Dunod, 1918)
L’Illustration, Dec. 22, 1883. An image of this is in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 72.
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© 2009 H. Hazel Hahn
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Hahn, H.H. (2009). Introduction. In: Scenes of Parisian Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101937_1
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