The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of the department store and the concomitant decline of the small shop. Robert Burnand, in a complaint echoed by many, laments ‘le déclin du petit commerce, sa lente agonie, la désaffection de la clientèle pour le fournisseur, la rupture d'un lien noué souvent depuis plusieurs générations. Fidélité réciproque, tradition, goût de l'ouvrage bien fait disparaissent petit à petit’. But this somewhat nostalgic, even rose-tinted evocation does not tell the full story, and opposition between the two forms of commerce was perhaps not inevitable. Balzac adds nuances to the picture in César Birotteau, a novel dated 1837. The story, situated in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, provides a useful starting point for a consideration of the subsequent fortunes of the small shopkeeper. Birotteau, a parfumier by trade, is a highly successful entrepreneur ultimately brought low by the machinations of rivals who lure him out of the realm of commerce into financial speculation on a dubious land deal that goes badly wrong for him. But, initially, as a petit commerçant on the rue Saint Honoré near the Place Vendôme, and a personality in local politics of the 2e arrondissement, César Birotteau is presented as a model of the small businessman at the start of the century: in the closing lines of the novel he is famously described as ‘un martyr de la probité commerciale’ (386).

His career starts in the closing years of the eighteenth century when he is employed as a shop assistant in the firm la Reine des roses. Here he demonstrates great aptitude so that eventually, in a manner that was customary, he takes over the business on the retirement of the previous owner, his employer M. Ragon. His decision to do so is bound up with his falling in love with Constance Pillerault, his future wife. When he first sees her she is ‘la première demoiselle’, head sales assistant, in ‘un magasin de nouveautés nomméle Petit Matelot ’ (33). An early precursor of the modern department store created under the Ancien Régime, the shop actually did exist, occupying a site on the rue des Deux-Ponts at the corner of the quai d'Anjou on the Ile Saint-Louis, where it continued to trade until the end of the 1920s, when it was demolished to enable the widening of the rue des Deux-Ponts.