This threat to France's shopkeepers is just the latest in a 200-year war
Small traders have long been protected in their battles against big business
There could be "trouble in store for the small shopkeepers of France", according to a Paris retail consultant quoted in your New Europe article (Pâtisseries fear rise of chain-cafe culture, 22 March). Having just completed a study of small shops and their depiction in French fiction, I can't suppress a sense of deja vu.
For almost two centuries small shopkeepers have claimed their existence was threatened by big retailers. As early as 1843, shopkeepers published a petition in the Journal des Économistes. They declared it "horrible" that shoppers should be able to buy stockings, handkerchiefs, shirts and shawls in the same establishment, and won a concession from the government which limited the development of department stores.
Then, however, Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris cut swaths through the old quartiers, destroying neighbourhood loyalties to butcher, baker and greengrocer, and drawing away shoppers who could henceforth take the boulevards to the recently opened grands magasins. Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames of 1883 fictionalises the contest between the department store and the local traders, who struggle to maintain their artisan crafts and traditions but are driven out of business by ruthless price-cutting.
In reality, during the economic depression of the 1890s the small shopkeepers created one of the most powerful lobby groups of the decade, to which governments responded by providing preferential tax regimes favouring the petits commerçants in the competition with the department stores: small shopkeepers were actually seen as a force for social stability in the face of working-class unrest and militancy. Measures taken subsequently to mitigate the effects of the financial crisis in the 1930s included restrictions on large retailers intended to protect le petit commerce, valued for its artisan tradition and viewed as the image of Frenchness.
Thus "France's Raffarin law which was introduced in 1996", which you mention, was merely the latest in a long line of measures to help small shops defend themselves against big business.
In the early 20th century, many small traders allied themselves with the art nouveau movement, their frontages having a distinctive décor of ceramic and painting under glass of which, sadly, few original traces remain.
On the other hand, small traders have been regularly reviled by socialists and progressives for their reactionary politics and commercial swindles. Jean Dutourd's novel Au Bon Beurre (1952) castigates the proprietors of a neighbourhood grocery shop who exploit food rationing under the Nazi occupation and build a vast black market operation. In the 1950s Roland Barthes and others also denounced the rightwing ideology of Pierre Poujade's shopkeeper movement (in which Jean-Marie Le Pen served his political apprenticeship), which traded on fears of the impending death of small businesses.
Ironically the small shop has achieved a kind of permanence in those very stories which perennially tell of its demise. Despite so many years of decline, as you say: "France is home to more than 80,000 independent retailers – more than twice the number in the UK."
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