ABSTRACT
The analytical habits and visual politics of Zola and Vallotton are highly complementary. Zola's writings and Vallotton's images circulated as other critics of rampant commercialism in the French Third Republic alleged that unscrupulous, profit-maximizing store owners and their guileful salesmen enticed consumers, especially vulnerable women, into dangerously self-indulgent and irrational purchases. More impassioned and hyperbolic conservative critics claimed that such immodest spending, fueled by unbridled feminine desire stoked by commercial advertising, threatened the financial integrity of the crazed shoppers' own households, the stability of bourgeois families, and the security of the nation as identified with prudent domestic economy and female self-sacrifice. These various artful, late nineteenth-century French perspectives on novel commercial environments inspire and inform this chapter, which shows that modern interior and exterior architectures of commercial display deeply shaped and resonated through other contemporary French media of creative expression and cultural commentary at the time.
