A remarkable coincidence exists in French history. On each July 14th since 1880, Bastille day has been celebrated. What’s not been memorialized is the quiet entrance, on this same day, of a baby who would become one of the most celebrated names in French retail history. He would exemplify the opportunism of the entrepreneurial classes who built fortunes in the 1850’s, benefitting from the freedoms and societal reforms which trace their roots to the historic 1789 storming of the Bastille.
Aristide Boucicaut was born on July 14, 1810 to a simple hat maker in Bellême, France. By 1835 he was living in Paris, where he worked for a small magasin de nouveauté, or novelty store. He rose to a managerial position before the Crisis of 1848 forced many small businesses, including his employer Petit Saint-Thomas, to close.
Luckily, Monsieur Boucicaut had made the acquaintance of Paul Videau, who owned a nearby variety store called Au Bon Marché Videau. A brief partnership was formed, and M. Boucicaut began the innovations which would make him one of the wealthiest men in France. Mr. Videau wasn’t comfortable with many of these new ideas, and sold the store to Boucicaut in 1851. He may well have lived to regret this.
By 1860, sales at Au Bon Marché had grown from 500,000 francs to 5 million francs. By 1877 it grossed more than 73 million francs, and shopping for the Parisian middle class had changed forever.
No longer was it necessary to visit three different stores to purchase three different things, or to haggle over prices along the way. Boucicaut introduced several marketing innovations, including fixed prices, seasonal sales and in 1867, the first mail-order catalog.
Within his store, shopping itself was also rapidly evolving – from a goal-oriented endeavor to a more relaxed browsing experience. Customers could touch things they might choose not to purchase. Everything one might wish to buy was located under a single roof, and organized for ease of location into departments. To further induce women to relax and enjoy themselves, he created entertainments with prizes to occupy their children, and reading rooms for their husbands.
Au Bon Marché became so successful that by 1868, M. Boucicaut was able to purchase the entire block on which the current store stood. Thus began twenty year’s worth of expansion and renovations. These were inspired in part by The Marble Palace of New York, which had been constructed by Alexander Turney Steward in 1846, and was the only multi-story building of the time devoted entirely to selling retail merchandise.
Boucicaut had learned of Mr. Stewart’s store from a French entrepreneur named François Maillard, who loaned M. Boucicaut 1.5 million francs to finance the first “Grand Magasin” (Big Store) of Paris. The framework was iron, with large glass windows for displaying merchandise and skylights to maximize natural lighting. No sooner had the first series of construction projects ended, than another larger renovation began – this time with the help of an architecture firm owned by Gustav Eiffel.
Sadly, Aristide Boucicaut passed away ten years before his expansive and glorious department store reached its full size in 1887. But the popularity of his “Grand Magasin” had inspired other entrepreneurs. Paris was soon home to Printemps and the Galleries Lafayette, as well as BHV (Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville), which like Au Bon Marché, still exists today.