Typically founded as bakeries or grocery stores, the consumer cooperatives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became vital to the French working class movement both as vehicles for social vision and as sources of funding for labor militancy. Examining the history of French consumer cooperation on national and local levels, Ellen Furlough argues that cooperation not only played a substantial role in socialist militancy and provided a forum for women's concerns, but for a time offered an alternative to capitalist forms of retailing, indeed to the whole emerging culture of capitalist consumption.

Furlough begins with an overview of the cooperative movement's early years, locating the origins of consumer cooperation within the associationist movement that flourished between 1834 and 1851. She then traces the emergence of divergent radical and reformist strands of consumer cooperation from 1851 to 1885. Furlough examines the development of two national cooperative organizations, outlines the activity of individual cooperatives in the Nord department, and illuminates the process by which consumerism came to be gendered as "feminine." She offers an explanation for the crucial shift during the 1920s through which consumer cooperation came to signify a corrective, rather than an alternative, to capitalist commerce.

Consumer Cooperation in France will be welcomed by historians of France, the working class, labor, and socialism; women's historians; economic historians; social historians; and sociologists.

Ellen Furlough is Assistant Professor of History at Kenyon College.