This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois women as the primary consumers in the late nineteenth century. It describes the perception of the modern marketplace and traces the processes the led to the creation of a female commercial culture and the impulse shopper. It explains that as the ethos of the market collided with that of the civic public in late-nineteenth-century France, bourgeois elites found themselves forced to grapple with...

This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois women as the primary consumers in the late nineteenth century. It describes the perception of the modern marketplace and traces the processes the led to the creation of a female commercial culture and the impulse shopper. It explains that as the ethos of the market collided with that of the civic public in late-nineteenth-century France, bourgeois elites found themselves forced to grapple with the question of how to map the boundaries between the market, the political public and the domestic sphere.