The facts do not wholly support the proposition, advanced by Zola in Au bonheur des dames, that having a grand magasin in the neighbour-hood spelled the end for the local petits commerçants. Philip Nord has examined the detailed evidence, in a case study of the quartier du Palais-Royal (extending west as far as the rue Saint Roch), and concludes: ‘Proximity to a department store was by no means a sentence of death for the luckless retailer’. In fact, the grand magasin could bring new trade into a neighbourhood, as Francis Ambrière points out: ‘C'est que, par sa publicité, par ses merveilles, par le prestige de son nom, le grand magasin attire une clientèle immense. Les petites boutiques profitent de ce rayonnement’. However, it remains the case that trade in the arrondissements we have been considering did decline in reality, even though Zola's department store was merely a fiction. The truth has to do with the fact that during the economic depression of the 1890s governments responded to the powerful lobbying of the petits commerçants by providing preferential tax régimes favouring them in the competition with the department stores, seeing them as a force for social stability in the face of working-class unrest and militancy. But this proved a mixed blessing, since it enabled the survival of small operations that in fact were barely viable. As Christophe Charle points out: ‘Il est probable […] que le pullulement des commerces dans certains secteurs ou dans certains quartiers condamne la majorité à végéter, le petit commerce occasionnel ou le micro-atelier étant parfois une solution au chômage trouvée par des salariés d'autres secteurs.’ Many of these small businesses thus operated in conditions of constant precariousness. Being the proprietor of a small shop actually meant, as often as not, fighting tooth and nail to make ends meet, in an overpopulated and thus fiercely competitive sector, with little guarantee of success. But in the eyes of the petit commerçant, having one's own business brought with it a major distinction: one was self-employed, or even an employer (though few had more than one employee, if that). Not being a worker was crucial to a class whose main preoccupation was to remain apart from the proletariat and seek to rise in society either on one's own account or through one's children.