|
Title
|
|
|
|
Towards a bourgeois public sphere of consumption: the language of consumption as found in auction advertisements in late eighteenth-century Paris (1760–1778)
|
|
|
Author
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Abstract
|
|
|
|
| This article revisits the world of goods of late eighteenth-century Parisian households through the lens of auction advertisements which offer a unique and challenging view on early-modern material culture and consumption. The advertisements' relative disadvantages are outweighed by the presence of additional layers of information such as the appearance of descriptive adjectives that associate these objects with broader concepts of value. In order to explore the potential of these sources for re-examining the question whether a ‘bourgeois public sphere of consumption' guided by ‘notions of civic equality' was arising in eighteenth-century France, this case study has looked at the evolution of Parisian auction advertisements between 1760 and 1778, focusing on three elements: the objects featured in the advertisements, the social distribution of auctioned estates and the descriptions given to the advertised goods as they often convey sensibilities other than those expressed by inventories. The findings reveal the presence of a hybrid consumer model, in which bourgeois and aristocratic households displayed increasingly converging consumer habits, an evolution that was, moreover, accompanied by an advertising discourse that gradually shifted from being based on elite-based, distinction-promulgating aesthetic values to emphasising more bourgeois and middling sorts’ sets of consumer values of quality-consciousness and prudence. |
|
|
|
Language
|
|
|
|
English
|
|
|
Source (journal)
|
|
|
|
History of retailing & consumption. - Abingdon, 2015, currens
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
History of Retailing and Consumption
|
|
|
Publication
|
|
|
|
Abingdon
:
Taylor & Francis
,
2023
|
|
|
ISSN
|
|
|
|
2373-518X
[print]
2373-5171
[online]
|
|
|
DOI
|
|
|
|
10.1080/2373518X.2023.2273171
|
|
|
Volume/pages
|
|
|
|
(2023)
, p. 1-25
, 25 p.
|
|
|
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
|
|
|
|
|
|