For the former chain of American department stores, see The Bon Marché

The Bon Marché

The Bon Marché, whose name means "the good deal" or "the good market", was the name chosen for a department store launched in Seattle, Washington, United States, in 1890 by Edward Nordhoff. The name comes from Le Bon Marché, a noted Paris retailer and one of the world's first department stores,...

. Bonmarché is also the name of a British clothing retail chain owned by The Peacock Group plc

Peacocks (retailer)

Peacocks, is a fast fashion retailer based in Cardiff, Wales. The chain is owned by The Peacock Group plc and employs over 6,000 people. There are currently over 600 Peacocks stores in the United Kingdom and more than 200 in 12 overseas countries...

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Le Bon Marché ("the good market", or "the good deal" in French; lə bɔ̃ maʁʃe) is the name of one of the best known department store

Department store

A department store is a retail establishment which satisfies a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice of multiple merchandise lines, at variable price points, in all product categories...

s in Paris, France. It is sometimes regarded as the "first department store in the world". Although this depends on what is meant by 'department store', it may have had the first specially designed building for a store in Paris. The founder was Aristide Boucicaut

Aristide Boucicaut

Aristide Boucicaut created what is considered to be among the first department stores.Born in Bellême, Orne, at 3:00 A. M. on Bastille Day, the son of a banker, he began as a simple clerk in Bellême before he left to become a fabric salesman selling shawls...

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History

The store was founded as a small shop in Paris during 1838, and was a fixed-price department store from about 1850. It was a successful business, and a new building was constructed for the store by Louis Auguste Boileau in 1867. Louis Charles Boileau, his son, continued the store in the 1870s, consulting the firm of Gustave Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer from the École Centrale Paris, an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures...

 for parts of its structure. Louis-Hippolyte Boileau

Louis-Hippolyte Boileau

Louis-Hippolyte Boileau was a French architect.Grandson of Louis-Auguste Boileau and son of Louis-Charles Boileau , Louis-Hippolyte studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Gaston Redon...

, the grandson of Louis Auguste, worked on an extension to the store in the 1920s.

After adopting the interlocking rings emblem in 1914, Pierre de Coubertin

Pierre de Coubertin

Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin was a French educationalist and historian, founder of the International Olympic Committee, and is considered the father of the modern Olympic Games...

 commission the official Olympic flag to be made in this store for the 1916 Summer Olympics

1916 Summer Olympics

The anticipated 1916 Summer Olympics, which were to be officially known as the Games of the VI Olympiad, were to have been held in Berlin, Germany. However, due to the outbreak of World War I, the games were cancelled.-History:...

. It debuted in the 1920 Summer Olympics

1920 Summer Olympics

The 1920 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the VII Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event in 1920 in Antwerp, Belgium....

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http://www.fotw.net/flags/oly@ioc.html

Recommended reading

The Bon Marché. Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920, by Michael B. Miller – a history of the store.

Au Bonheur des Dames

Au Bonheur des Dames

Au Bonheur des Dames is the eleventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first serialized in the periodical Gil Blas and published in novel form by Charpentier in 1883....

, Émile Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

, 1883. The eleventh novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. Documents the birth of modern retailing, changes in city planning and architecture, considers feminism, deconstructs desire in the marketplace and tells in a Cinderella format the life of the Boucicauts who, in the novel, appear as Octave Mouret and Denise Baudu. One of Zola's more positive novels about the changes in society during the Second Empire.

Bernard Marrey, Les Grands Magasins des origines a 1939 (Paris: Picard, 1979)

External links

• Le Bon Marché official website (French only)
• Cape (with Au Bon Marché label), ca. 1890-1905, in the Staten Island Historical Society Online Collection Database