The Consumer Revolution, 1650-1800

Abstract

‘Every day he chose a fresh white piqué waistcoat, beneath which his pear-shaped, protuberant belly would wobble around, causing a heavy gold chain hung with watch-charms to bounce…. His snuffbox, also made of gold, contained a locket full of hair…. His armoires (which he pronounced “ormoires” as those of humble station do) were crammed with an abundance of his household silverware’. These are the terms in which Honoré de Balzac describes the eponymous character of Le Père Goriot (1835), and in many ways they serve as a perfect introduction to Michael Kwass’s new book on the ‘consumer revolution’. Granted, Balzac sets his story in Restoration France and dwells on the bourgeois nature of Père Goriot’s consumption, whereas Kwass situates the origins of modern consumer culture in the ‘long eighteenth century’ and emphasizes how it embraced a broad swath of European society, ranging from courtly aristocrats to skilled artisans. But, where both authors clearly overlap is in their portrayal of a world increasingly filled with ‘stuff’ by the early 1800s, a world in which people’s acquisition of a growing number of consumer goods was in the process of reshaping economy, society, culture and politics, among much else.