PARIS–“La Samaritaine has always caused a scandal.”
The quip is attributed to artist and critic Emmanuel de Thubert, who was not referring to a provocative novel or an avante garde theatrical performance, but to a Paris department store.
De Thurbert made the remark in 1931—almost a century before part of the building’s façade was derisively likened to “a shower curtain” and a band of angry protesters doused its windows with black paint. But more on that later.
The legendary grand magasin (department store), one of four in the city, has been in the French media in recent weeks largely thanks to its grand reopening following a 16-year closure and a multi-million euro overhaul.
Established in 1870 as a small Right Bank boutique at the end of Pont Neuf, La Samaritaine evolved over the decades, particularly during the early 20th century when owners Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ tapped Belgian architect Frantz Jourdain for expansion and remodeling projects. Jourdain added Art Nouveau features to the building and designed a second retail building known as “Magasin 2” that included twin domes composed of vividly colored glass.
This Art Nouveau masterpiece no longer exists. By the time La Samaritaine was completed in 1910 it was, according to historian Meredith L. Clausen, “light and transparent, wholly of steel and glass…brilliantly colored with bright orange ceramic panels embellished with naturalistic flowering vines.” It was also, she writes in a book she authored on the subject, “one of the most controversial buildings in Paris” and “too brazen and shrill for Parisian tastes.” Indeed, one critic said it looked like a “heating system.”
Jourdain’s original Art Nouveau structure underwent an extensive remodel in the late 1920s, during which time its vivid color was removed, and its glass domes were torn down. Around the same time, architect Henri Sauvage added another building to the Samaritaine complex in the Art Deco style that was seen as refreshingly modern and more palatable than Jourdain’s original creation.
Unlike its chic cousins Le Bon Marché and Galeries Lafayette, La Samaritaine catered to a less well-do-to client base and served as a one-stop shop for working-class city dwellers. Its famous slogan—“On trouve tout à la Samaritaine,” (You can find everything at La Samaritaine)—referred to its sheer variety of merchandise, which comprised everything from ladies’ apparel to lawnmowers.
In June of 2005, the store abruptly closed over the building’s reported failure to meet safety codes, and the following day the French media were filled with stories of despondent workers and heartbroken customers who had viewed La Samaritaine as a second home. One employee even likened the closure to destroying the Eiffel Tower.
“The last day I saw people leaving in tears and even the clients wanted to stay with us in the store,” recalled Rosine Sanglard, who had worked for the company for over two decades. The 72-year-old told Libération that on the last day, the store stayed open two hours after its scheduled closing time so that workers and customers could say a final good-bye.
“The solidarity of the clients was incredible,” she said. “The current store is not at all what we knew,” she said.
Indeed, following its €750 million ($891.6 million) facelift, La Samaritaine bears scant resemblance to its former more modest incarnation. LVMH (which also owns Le Bon Marché) acquired the store in 2001, and with the luxury goods behemoth at the helm, the onetime unpretentious “La Samar”—as it was known among locals—has morphed into an exclusive mixed-use destination space that appears made for monied foreign tourists rather than the everyday Parisian.
In addition to stocking high-end global brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci, the new Samaritaine houses a 36,000-square-foot beauty and cosmetics department—the largest in Europe. It also includes a spa, duty-free shopping, a concept store, a daycare center, and numerous cafes and eateries. In September, a five-star “palace” hotel, Le Cheval Blanc, will open in the complex, complete with Seine and Eiffel Tower views and a Michelin-starred restaurant. Nightly rates start at €1,300 ($1,530).
Two days before its official reopening on June 23, French President Emmanuel Macron joined LVMH head Bernard Arnault (the world’s richest person), Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and members of the press for the store’s official inauguration. Macron hailed the new Samaritaine as “a wonderful French historical treasure,” and Arnault described it as promoting “a unique Parisian art de vivre around the world” and “a great source of pride.”
Although tourists in the French capital have been scarce because of COVID, crowds still descended on the new Samaritaine in the weeks following the reopening. Twice I walked past the main entrance and noticed long lines snaking down the block, which evoked markdown-hungry Americans at a Black Friday sale. And while the excessive wait times may have been partially due to pandemic-era capacity restrictions, they were also thanks to the media hype surrounding the shop’s long-awaited revival and what one radio station hailed as a “spectacular restoration.”
Not everyone agrees that Samaritaine’s second life is worth celebrating, however.
More than a century after one critic remarked that Jourdain’s original Art Nouveau structure looked like a heating system, La Samaritaine’s architecture, particularly its new contemporary addition on the Rue de Rivoli is stirring up fresh controversy. The undulating glass façade designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architecture studio SANAA, has been disparaged by its detractors as “an eyesore,” a “dung pile,” and, my favorite, a “shower curtain.”
For some, it’s not the architecture, but the store’s newfound opulence (plus the fact that it’s owned by Arnault) that’s scandalous.
Less than two weeks after the grand opening, an anti-capitalist group sprayed black paint on the storefront and hung a giant banner that included an image of Arnault alongside other French billionaires. The banner denounced the group as a “gang of profiteers.”
The purpose of the vandalism, the group said, was to “protest the shameless enrichment of billionaires during the health crises.”
The social divide also angered Swiss journalist and architecture critic Christophe Catsaros, who called the new store “the headquarters for the war against the middle class.”
Blogging in Le Temps, Catsaros pointed out that the posh establishment shared space with 96 social housing units for low-income families, arguing that catering to two extremes of the wealth spectrum represented the city’s growing erasure of middle-income Parisians.
“Between the very rich for whom the new Samaritaine is intended, and the very poor for whom the social housing is intended is a majority who can legitimately feel wronged. The considerable middle class at whom Paris is engaging a merciless war.”
For others, the revamped department store not only marks the end of an era, but also embodies everything that is wrong with the current day French capital.
Journalist and columnist John Litchfield writes in The Local that “the transformation is cruelly emblematic of what has happened to central Paris in the last two or three decades.”
The reinvention of La Samaritaine, Litchfield argues, is an example of the “Disneyfication” of central Paris wherein the city’s inner arrondissements have morphed into a theme park for wealthy foreign tourists. In doing so, central Paris has lost much of its “quirkiness and eccentricity.” In other words, its soul.
“The destruction of the old Samaritaine,” Litchfield writes, “was romantically, historically and socially a calamity.”
It was also, he acknowledges, “inevitable.”
He is right on both counts. The city has changed dramatically since the old Samaritaine’s heyday, and parts of the center sadly resemble the set of an Instagram-ready perfume commercial by day and a ghost town by night since fewer and fewer Parisians can afford to live there.
Moreover, the French department store itself, which took center stage in Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (believed to have been based on Le Bon Marché) has since fallen out of fashion and seemed destined to go the way of foreign news bureaus, smoky cafes, and cheap apartments.
Like other grand magasins, Au Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, La Samaritaine opened in the latter half of the 19th century during the waning days of the Industrial Revolution—a time period that saw the rise of mass-produced goods with accessible prices and a newly burgeoning middle class with the disposable income to purchase them.
The stores quickly became popular leisure destinations to a mostly feminine clientele. As Monica Burckhardt writes in Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, these retailers largely catered to bourgeois Parisiennes for whom the stores represented “a haven of freedom and pleasure.” Shopping was fun, of course, but the opportunity to spend an afternoon relaxing and socializing away from their husbands was equally enjoyable and, for 19th-century mesdames, was a large part of a department store’s allure.
Grands magasins were also important fixtures of the Belle Époque or, beautiful age. The roughly four-decade period that ran from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the onset of World War I in 1914 is legendary for its economic and artistic prosperity, as well as hedonistic pursuits among the monied classes. Think brothels, absinthe fountains, and the newly opened Moulin Rouge with its parades of frilly petticoats and clouds of opium smoke.
La Samaritaine may have served the working classes, but in Belle Époque Paris—from artistic and literary movements to leisure pursuits—decadence was de rigueur. With their opulent interiors and panoply of aspirational luxury, department stores flourished during the era.
In the 20th century, French department stores expanded from their Paris flagships to cities both inside and outside of France. However, the last several decades have seen a seismic shift in consumer buying habits, including the rise of online shopping. Like their American counterparts, France’s department stores have suffered plummeting sales and branch closures. And while the COVID crisis has contributed to some of the angst, retail insiders say that it just accelerated already existing problems.
“At Le Bon Marché, in the 1990s, they were already wondering about the future of the channel,” Christophe Anjolras, the president and founder of the Volcan Design agency, which provides consultancy services to retailers, told FashionNetwork.com earlier this year.
“But globally, like every other distribution channel, [department stores] must undergo an in-depth transformation.”
Basically, even if the old Samaritaine hadn’t been shuttered in 2005, it’s safe to say that its days as a local shopping mainstay were numbered.
I was thinking about this, as well as all the brouhaha surrounding the store in recent weeks when I stepped inside for the first time. The first thing I noticed was the light. It was an overcast day, but the daylight poured in through the restored glass-roofed atrium overhead.
The architecture is striking, and I spent a good 45 minutes taking it all in: Jourdain’s steel beams, the restored Art Nouveau peacock fresco, and the magnificent double staircases leading to the atrium, which evokes an exquisite layer cake. Even the much reviled “shower curtain” façade has been well executed, and the glass ripples both add a unique contemporary touch to the area and reflect the surrounding historical buildings.
Alas, a quick visit to the retail levels yielded findings that were less original. Purple Louis Vuitton slip-ons, for instance, retailing for €700 ($824) that resembled the result of a one-night stand between a discount house slipper and an inflatable pool raft. These were in addition the pair of fluorescent-yellow men’s sneakers that conjured visions of a circa-1986 Orange County mallrat who had unwittingly stumbled through a transnational time warp and had become separated from his shoes. These kinds of high-ticket items for fashion victims are staples of any high-end department store, and there are already several standalone Vuitton boutiques in the city.
Heading over to the jewelry section, I spied a Reine de Naples (named for Napoléon’s sister) watch by the famed French brand Breguet with tiny diamonds encircling its face. Bling isn’t typically my thing, but the timepiece offered a whiff of pretty daintiness that helped blot out the montage of ’80s-era dayglo headbands and permed hair that had been running through my head since my run-in with the men’s shoe department. That is, until I noticed the price: €60,200 ($71,190). Never mind. Besides, there is also a Breguet shop in the Place Vendôme. I fled upstairs to the bar.
Perched on the store’s upper level beneath the glass roof, the bar/restaurant in question could be reason enough to go back if and when the crowds thin. The menu at Voyage isn’t extraordinary—beef tartare, salads and a burger—and I am automatically wary of any spot serving a side of fries for €7 ($8.30). But if you can snag a good table (the restaurant doesn’t accept reservations) you can really take in the Art Nouveau frescoes and ironwork. Plus, there’s ample opportunity for people watching.
I wrapped up the day with a trip to the beauty department, which does indeed stock a sizable selection of lotions, potions, and perfumes, as well as candles in elegant, lapis-blue jars with scents like grapefruit and Indian jasmine. It’s on the ground level, so the interior is more standard luxury cosmetics counter than fin de siècle grandeur, but the selection is good so I will likely pop in next time I need a perfume refill. That is, if I don’t hit the nearby Sephora first.
Open just over a month, it’s too early to know if the new Samaritaine will reinvent the concept of the French department store, or just build on the already-existing model as a tourist fixture. One thing that stood out during my afternoon in the store was how little shopping seemed to be taking place. Sure, the interior was busy, but the swarm of people inside seemed more intent on snapping pictures or having a snack than making any purchases. What will happen, I wondered, when the novelty wears off?
Curious, I headed north to peek inside Galeries Lafayette. Unlike at La Samaritaine, there were no lines outside and the pre-COVID busloads of foreign tourists were absent. Even though the colorful, Neo-byzantine dome was as breathtaking as ever, the interior was heavy with the dim silence of a wake. A jumbo heart logo dangled listlessly from the center of the dome like a forgotten party streamer.
For a Paris resident accustomed to hordes of international visitors crowding the balconies and escalators it was a bit surreal. It was also a reminder of how obsolete the city’s grands magasins have become and how dependent they are on tourist dollars for their ongoing survival.
Indeed, during an interview with BFMTV, Benjamin Vuchot, the chairman and CEO of DFS (LVMH’s luxury travel retail business), said that 50 percent of La Samaritaine clientele would be foreign tourists and that French and European customers would make up the other half. He said that the store’s vast beauty space would be a main draw for locals, and I agree with him to a point. What he didn’t mention, is the Sephora on Rue de Rivoli that already does a brisk business and will likely have less tourist crowds than Samaritaine. Moreover, a bottle of perfume will bring in far fewer euros than say, a Dior bag, and it’s the tourists who will be snapping up the pricier merchandise.
Vuchot acknowledged that it will be a while—six to 12 months, he said—until tourists from the Middle East, the U.S., and China begin to return to Paris.
In the meantime, I plan to come back for soy candle splurge and tea on the top floor where I will take another look at the fin de siècle peacock frescoes. I have a passion for Art Nouveau architecture, even though what remains is but a weak echo of Jourdain's original chef d'oeuvre. Indeed, the new Samaritaine may not resemble the original, but it does resurrect a certain delicious, Belle Époque-era decadence that can be enticing, especially during uncertain times.
However, unlike in the past, you can no longer “find everything at Samaritaine.” If anything, the mass-produced luxury brands and the throngs of tourists that will purchase them are a reminder that the traditional French department store, like many of the city’s beautiful relics, vanished with the last century.
