The Ladies' Paradise

Yes, Zola, he really captures a lot of the transformation of the city in this period.

And if you look at, for instance, what he does in his novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, the lady's Paradise, which is about the history of the department store, he really captures in a dramatic way the destruction of old Paris being eaten up by the monster of the department store that is leading to the downfall of all of the small shops, but also the quite literal downfall of the shops as entire streets are bulldozed to create these massive cathedrals of commerce, as he calls them.

And they very much participated also in this Right.

Right.

And then they go back and they write, boy, I've never, these people here, they can't speak French at all, or they are hopeless, they are out of date, they are pluk, they are bumpkins, and all of that.

But, eventually, as I said, you have these schoolhouses that they will improve over time, they get more resources, they're made to have more resources, the towns do more and more for them, girls' schools start up, girls' education increases rapidly, and thus it's quite, these if you're, another Zola novel, which is a great one, called Au Bonheur des Dames, which is about department stores, the department store Bon Marché in Paris.

I mean, for these young women, they get really miserable jobs, and what they're doing is they're sleeping in dormitories under horrible sort of draconian regulations about what they can do.

But for them to get those kinds of jobs they have to be able to count, they have to be able to read, they have to be able to write.

... um, without getting most of what's great about them.

But, um, uh, and this is gonna sound like overly pretentious, but it really is the first one that comes into my mind, is Emile Zola in the late nineteenth century wrote a novel called The Ladies' Paradise, and it's about the growth of one of the first large department stores in Paris.

It displaces all the local businesses around it.

Huh.