Abstract
This article examines fake news, rumors, and truths – an entire heavy machinery of all-pervasive information – for which we propose the label capharnaüm to denote informational disorder. Reality is a composite and partial construct, shaped by the ways in which representations are produced and articulated: through techniques and technologies, but also through the intentions, strategies, and imagination of the actors of a given era. Such is the case with É mile Zola who, in Au Bonheur des Dames, offers an astonishingly visionary perspective on the world of advertising and the media, on the war of images and imaginaries – phenomena one might consider contemporary, yet whose origins go back as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The affinity with a certain dramatic mode of narration – here, the opening of the great department stores and the purchasing frenzy into which Zola’s female characters are drawn through exceptional sales and the flattering of their egos – transcends facts and figures. It opens a reflective window onto our own portraits, whether as reasonable buyers or as consumers of any product that enhances our self-image and, why not, as consumers of fine nineteenth-century literature.
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Keywords: Zola, rumors, naturalism, description, marketing, fake news
1. Preamble. When disorder becomes informational turbulence: the case of fake news
Our targeted inquiry focuses on fake news, rumours, and truths—on the dense and heterogeneous mass of textual information that we have immediately labelled as a “capharnaüm”, in order to capture the notion of informational disorder. These forms of information are identified, commented upon, and analysed in an illustrative nineteenth-century novel, Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola, selected - admittedly - for literary reasons, given our background in literary studies and translation. We will therefore propose another perspective on this novel from the angle of rumours as carriers of meaning and narrative triggers. Our long-range lens fixes rumour within both the diachrony of historical perspective and the synchrony of contemporaneity.
Let us concede that fake news, conspiracy thinking, and distorted relations with reality have existed for several years, and that the advent of digital technologies has actually cemented the emergence of fake news in public discourse, propagated and embodied by influencers and other so-called “guarantors” of post-truths. Yet what stands out as increasingly evident — already noted in professional spheres as well as among dilettantes or casual enthusiasts of communication and advertising — is our contemporary tropism: this issue of informational disorder requires a kaleidoscopic approach, as the diversity of Zola scholarship clearly attests.
Reality is a partial and biased construction, shaped by the ways in which representations are produced and constructed: by techniques and technologies, but also by the intentions, strategies, and indeed the imaginations of historical actors. Such is the case with Émile Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames. The naturalist writer offers an extraordinarily visionary perspective on the world of advertising and the media – on the war of images and imaginaries – concerning phenomena we might consider recent, yet prove to be very old. Literary history readily proves it: their origins reach far further back, arguably as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest known text from ancient Mesopotamia, specifically the Sumerian-Babylonian tradition (early 3rd millennium BCE). It is worth recalling that this epic begins with the rumour of the death of Gilgamesh’s beloved friend, Enkidu, his precious companion in lion-hunting. The rumour provokes the hero’s crisis of conscience and subsequently instigates the earliest recorded quest for wisdom and immortality. This viewpoint may thus give an additional dimension to the topic under discussion.
Today, informational turbulence is the term that has, to some extent, replaced what the specialised literature once referred to as false reports – rumours. Overly politicised and even transformed into a rhetorical weapon in public discourse, the term fake news was initially supplemented conceptually by disinformation and misinformation, before the notion of information warfare emerged. As a result, we now speak of a reality that is even more difficult to capture within existing theories: informational disorder, a veritable capharnaüm, if one appreciates rare words; or even information troubles, to add a clinical or pathological nuance to the phenomenon without generalising or falling into pragmatic or argumentative aporia.
In the age of digitisation, with the overwhelming multiplication of platforms accessible to a wide public, technological challenges place various manifestations of informational disorder directly in the hands of users (cf. Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan’s 2017 study Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking). Let us briefly recal that the semantic field of fake news is rich: gossip, tittle-tattle, hearsay, rumour-mongering, and the expressions that accompany them, to peddle, to circulate, to slip in a few words, etc. There is a whole plethora of common and popular terms designating the phenomenon of informational disturbance within the public sphere. Over time, fake news (used far too frequently both in relation to mass media and, even more so, in relation to the political sphere) has become a broad umbrella term encompassing propaganda, information warfare and, by natural semantic extension, disinformation. With the emergence and global development of the Internet and social media, it has taken on increasingly complex and sophisticated forms, which today constitute a vast field of inquiry for specialists and researchers (to pardon the modest oxymoron).
2. General considerations on Au Bonheur des Dames
Before turning to an analysis of fake news in the aforementioned novel, a brief synopsis is necessary to recall the evolution of the narrative. The central plot revolves around Denise, a young Norman woman, orphaned and in charge of her two brothers (aged sixteen and five). She arrives in Paris seeking employment in the shop of her uncle Baudu, a dealer in cloth and flannel, for whom “money [was] his cruel concern” (chapter 5). Yet in the rue de la Michodière, small shopkeepers are all drained dry by the great magasin de nouveautés, Au Bonheur des Dames, whose ambitious owner, Octave Mouret, is the architect of this “phalanstery of commerce” (p. 411). Across fourteen chapters of increasing narrative interest, a fairy-tale structure also emerges, where a love plot is subtly interwoven, with just enough suspense to satisfy the reader’s horizon of expectation, a love story dressing an economic intrigue that is equally compelling: the confrontation between old and new forms of commerce, set against the fascinating backdrop of a Paris undergoing profound transformation. In the Ébauche, Zola confessed that he sought to “compose the poem of modern activity […] to move with the century, to express the century, which is a century of action and conquest, of effort in every direction” (Dossier du Bonheur des dames, p. 516).
The Second Empire, a period of intense activity marked by the development of financial, industrial, and commercial enterprises, witnessed the emergence of the department store. Influenced by Saint-Simonian thought, Napoleon III took a keen interest in economic matters and aimed to promote the material prosperity of the country; he imposed free trade, which subjected French industrialists to the conditions of competition and the market. Thus, Le Bon Marché (1852), founded by Aristide Boucicaut (a store that particularly interested Zola and served as his model), Le Louvre (1855), Le Printemps (1865), and La Samaritaine (1869) were born and developed.
The informational capharnaüm at the center of our corpus rests on a conceptual framework concerning the ways in which informational turbulence can be examined critically – under the philologist’s literary lens – by highlighting the various types and phases of informational disturbance: its point of departure, its constituent elements, and their shared features. It appears from the very incipit: the opulence of the store stands in total opposition to the characters’ destitution - “gilding,” “silk,” “blue silk,” “velvet”: from the outset, the fabrics signal social segregation. Alongside the richness of the goods displayed, the dominant impression is one of enormity, a proxemics of infinite dimensions: “a vanishing perspective.” Compared to a buzzing beehive awakening, with ornaments laden with gilding (p. 30), the store seems to swallow both its staff and the entire neighbourhood: “an endless expansion”. It is depicted as a kind of ogre ready to devour everything – even people; the metaphor of food and symbolic cannibalism will be amply developed as the narrative progresses. Zola gathers disparate elements from other department stores to personify Au Bonheur des Dames as an ogre, or, by extension, a voracious beast.
The novel adopts a circular structure framed under the sign of rumour: rumours of a major winter-sale event launched by Boudoncle – Mouret’s lieutenant and friend – on a Monday that yields a fabulous day’s takings; the inauguration of the new store buildings on 14 March 1887 stirs all of Paris and ultimately brings about the extinction of all rumour, culminating in a happy ending.
Within the basic taxonomy established by researchers in the field, three phases of informational disorder are identified, each designated by its English term: mis-, dis-, and mal-information, corresponding respectively to erroneous information, disinformation, and information that is erroneous with the deliberate intention of misleading and causing harm to individuals implicated in the communicative process. According to Wardle and Derakhshan (2017), the three concepts must be clearly distinguished:
• misinformation refers to information that may be false or erroneous but is disseminated without the intention to deceive or to produce harmful effects; idle chatter, for example: “People whispered that the first saleswoman was Mouret’s favourite, that she rendered him certain delicate services. […] But she, too, had employed all her charm to disarm her enemies. […] The young ladies cried injustice, accusing her of having won her position over dessert with the patron; some even added abominable details.” (pp. 325–326)
• disinformation entails the distortion of information for specific purposes benefiting one party involved in the communicative act—whether economically, reputationally, or otherwise. Public discourse thus acquires the status of a veritable datum: At Au Bonheur, “The story of this quarrel, exaggerated and distorted, was already enlivening the store when the story of Mouret’s letter began to circulate. It was precisely to a silk salesman that Liénard entrusted the news.” (p. 334)
• malinformation concerns information that may be true or factual but is used strategically to distort or mislead; this includes so-called leaks to the public or the press, information taken out of context, and old information recycled and reintroduced into the public sphere when convenient.
New retail techniques emerged: advertising (the réclame), price reductions (decreased production costs, loss-leader pricing, low-profit high-turnover strategies), competition, new product lines, high finance, interior design, and conveniences offered to buyers (oblique techniques – seducing mothers through their children). A keen observer of feminine psychology (whom he judges in the manner of a moralist), Mouret spends three hundred thousand francs on advertising (for “woman is powerless against advertising”), functioning as a pioneer of marketing, orchestrating significant discounts and setting clever traps. The Department Store becomes almost divinised, the temple of a new religion, a cathedral of modern times. Mouret would be the Father; the salesmen and saleswomen, the clergy; and the customers, the faithful.
3. Circulating a Reputation
If the employer’s image is praised in laudatory terms by his staff, he reinforces it through a heightened, nearly megalomaniac sense of self-worth (see the free indirect discourse in which Mouret ruminates over Denise’s refusal): “Why, then, did she refuse with such obstinacy? Twenty times he had implored her, increasing his offers, promising money, a great deal of money. Then he told himself that she must be ambitious; he had promised to make her first saleswoman as soon as a department fell vacant. And she refused—she refused still! It was a stupefaction to him, a struggle in which his desire fumed in rage. The case seemed impossible; the child would surely end by yielding, for he had always regarded a woman’s wisdom as a relative thing. He saw no other purpose now; everything disappeared before this need: to have her finally at home with him, to seat her on his knees, kissing her lips; and at this vision the blood beat in his veins, he remained trembling and shaken by his impotence.”
Within the categories of disinformation and misinformation, Wardle and Claire identify the following forms of manifestation:
1. satire or parody, which have no intent to cause harm but possess the potential to deceive;
2. misleading content, which uses accurate information to contextualise an issue or case in a distorted way, thereby generating erroneous perceptions;
3. impostor content, which appropriates genuine information and transforms it into contextually displaced material;
4. fabricated content, or 100% false content, intentionally created to cause disadvantage;
5. false connections, or headlines that bear no relation to the content, thereby misleading the reader, alongside manipulative content;
6. false context, where accurate information is removed from its original context and intentionally placed into another;
7. manipulated content, in which true or false information is altered to mislead or deceive.
In Au Bonheur des Dames, the forms listed above unfold primarily within a cause–effect–consequence pattern, manifested most clearly as the punishment of employees following circulating rumours: “Management showed itself implacable at the slightest complaint from the customers; no excuse was accepted, the employee was always at fault, and had to disappear like a defective instrument damaging the proper mechanism of sales; and the co-workers bowed their heads, not even attempting to defend him. In the panic that swept through the store, each trembled for himself.”
Disinformation is information that is false, knowingly disseminated as such by the person who spreads it. “It is a deliberate and intentional lie, revealing that people are actively misinformed by malicious actors.” Rumours and malevolent intentions together place Denise under high pressure, the store itself being described, as Michel Serres notes, as a “steam engine.”
Exaggeration emerges through naturalist touches, as in: “The customers, stripped bare, violated, left half undone, with their desires gratified and the silent shame of a pleasure satisfied in some dubious hotel.”
4. Erroneous Information in Au Bonheur des Dames
Disinformation refers not only to wholly or partially fabricated content, but also to the manipulation of images and videos, and to impostor content imitating legitimate news sources. It must be recalled that disinformation is not a new phenomenon; however, the Web has produced radical changes in the way information is produced, communicated, and above all distributed. Information is now widely accessible and inexpensive, and editing and publishing technologies have enabled anyone to create and distribute content—even any kind of content – to a broad audience. The consumption of information, once private and individual, has become public through social media. It is characterised by extraordinary speed: distribution cycles are accelerated, and information is now transmitted in real time – unlike twenty years ago, when it depended on the presence of a reporter or cameraman commissioned by a media trust.
Malinformation appears to us the most difficult to conceptualise, as it brings together both false information taken out of context and the “resurrection” of information in new contexts with altered meaning, thrust back into the public sphere with less than “orthodox” objectives (these are incorrect or insufficiently objective pieces of information).
5. The Agent and the Target Audience: We/You/She
The agent is involved in all three phases of informational disorder. Regarding the agent, one may ask a series of questions: what type of actor is involved—official (government, spokesperson, political party) or unofficial (a group of citizens)? How are they organised—individually or collectively (pressure groups, public relations departments)? What are their motivations (financial, political, social, psychological, or the desire to dominate a more or less public sphere)? Which audiences do they seek to reach? Are automated technical resources employed? Do they intend to transmit erroneous information or cause harm in one form or another?
These dynamics are clearly present in the novel: “We shall lose a few centimes on the article, I agree. And then? A small price to pay if we attract all women and keep them at our mercy, seduced, dazzled before the accumulation of our goods, emptying their purses without counting! The essential thing, my dear fellow, is to set them alight, and for that we need an article that flatters, that marks an epoch. Afterwards, we can sell the other items at the same price as elsewhere; they will believe they are buying them cheaper from us. For instance, our ‘Cuir-d’Or,’ that taffeta at seven francs fifty, sold at the same price everywhere, will also pass as an extraordinary bargain and will make up for the loss on the ‘Paris-Bonheur’… You will see, you will see!”
6. The Receiver of the Message : The General Public
The following passage explicitly designates the principal target of marketing: women : “It was woman whom the stores fought over through competition, woman whom they captured in the continual snare of their bargains after having stunned her before their displays. They had awakened new desires in her flesh; they were an immense temptation, to which she succumbed fatally—yielding first to the purchases of a good housewife, then won over by coquetry, then devoured. By multiplying sales, by democratising luxury, they became a terrible agent of expenditure, ravaging households, contributing to the mad frenzy of fashion, ever more costly. And if, in their midst, woman was queen, adored and flattered in her weaknesses, surrounded by attentions, she reigned there as a beloved queen whose subjects trade upon her, and who pays with a drop of her blood for each of her caprices.” and again, in the owner’s strategy: “Mouret had a single passion: to conquer woman. He wanted her queen in his house; he had built this temple to hold her there at his mercy.”
The store’s clientele is divided between the wealthy woman who desires luxury at a favourable price and the working woman who purchases the illusion of luxury. “Pale with desire” before the silks – the corollary of forbidden pleasures – women long to lose themselves therein (p. 141). Customers fall like flies under the mirage: “My God! The lace is so pretty!” she repeated with her nervous laugh. “When I am in there, I should like to buy the whole shop.” (chapiter III)
The text puts it plainly: “These ladies, seized by the current, could no longer retreat. As rivers draw to themselves the wandering waters of a valley, it seemed that the flood of customers, flowing through the wide vestibule, drank in the passers-by from the street, absorbing the population from the four corners of Paris.” And then: “At last the doors were reopened, and the crowd surged in. From the first hour, before the store was full, there occurred beneath the vestibule such a crush that the assistance of city sergeants was required to restore circulation on the pavement. Mouret had calculated rightly: all the housewives, a compact troop of small bourgeois ladies and women in bonnets, assailed the bargains, the sales and the remnants displayed even into the street.”
The message – whether it takes the form of gossip, rumours, articles, pamphlets, or audio-visual material – must likewise be approached through a critical framework grounded in questions such as the following: What is the longevity of the message over time? What is its accuracy? Its legality? Moreover, does it bear official insignia (logos, trademarks), or, in other words, is a specific target audience implied? A message tends to trigger an emotional response when it contains a strong visual component, when it unfolds as a well-crafted narrative, and when it is repeated. Those who design information campaigns are fully aware of this formula and apply it systematically. By identifying these elements, we are better positioned both to recognise “successful” campaigns and to maintain vigilance regarding the truthfulness of what is being conveyed.
The various manifestations of informational disorder invariably lead to error – even misleading buyers along specific paths. The rapid turnover of goods mirrors this instability. Rumour itself is described metaphorically as “the idea blowing in from the four corners of the sky” (p. 432).
The narrative reaches its paroxysm at the moment when the day’s revenue surpasses the psychological threshold of one million francs (p. 492): “In this final hour, amidst the overheated air, women reigned. They had stormed the store, they camped there as on conquered land, like an invading horde installed amid the collapse of the merchandise. The salesmen, deafened and exhausted, were no more than their tools, to be disposed of with the tyranny of sovereigns. Stout ladies pushed their way through the crowd. The slighter ones took up space, grew arrogant... The customers hurled themselves toward the buffet in a frenzy of appetite, mothers themselves gorging on Malaga... Forty thousand red balloons had risen into the warm air of the store, an entire swarm drifting from one end of Paris to the other, carrying across the sky the name of Au Bonheur des Dames!”
7. Sales Techniques and Marketing Strategies
First, this constant back-and-forth of customers scatters them everywhere, multiplies them, and makes them lose their bearings; second, because they must be guided from one end of the store to the other – for instance, to purchase lining after having bought a dress – these criss-crossing movements triple, for them, the perceived magnitude of the establishment; third, they are forced to cross departments where they would never otherwise have set foot, and the temptations encountered along the way seize them in passing, leading to their surrender.
his reinforces Denise’s admiring affection toward her employer and future husband: “Mouret had invented this machine for crushing the world, whose brutal functioning had once outraged her; he had sown the neighbourhood with ruins; stripped some, destroyed others; and she loved him nonetheless for the greatness of his work, loved him all the more with each excess of power, despite the flood of tears that rose within her at the sacred misery of the vanquished.” (p. 448)
The novel’s closing passage masterfully encapsulates and resolves these reflections: “A final murmur rose from Au Bonheur des Dames, the distant acclamation of a crowd. The portrait of Mme Hédoin still smiled, with its painted lips. Mouret had collapsed into the million lying upon the desk, no longer seeing it. He would not release Denise; he held her tightly against his chest, telling her she could leave now, that she would spend a month in Valognes, which would silence the gossip, and that he would then go fetch her himself, to bring her back on his arm, all-powerful.” (p. 495)
8. Rumours and Reputation
Denise suffers from the malevolence of her colleagues, who spread all manner of misinformation about her with the evident intention of causing harm; she is the victim of calculated bullying. Rumours, insinuations, and spiteful fabrications multiply around her. Feminine jealousy merges with professional resentment – “the ill-will” of her colleagues (p. 325) – and torments the poor “unkempt girl”: “Marguerite and Clara pursued her with instinctive hatred, closing ranks so as not to be devoured by this newcomer, whom they feared beneath their pretence of disdain.” Here is a relevant excerpt: “Next came the torment of having the entire department against her. To the physical martyrdom was added the silent persecution of her companions. After two months of patience and gentleness, she had still not disarmed them. There were hurtful words, cruel inventions, a deliberate exclusion that struck her to the heart, in her need for tenderness.”
Competition is also born of feminine jealousy: Mme Desforges assists Bourthemont in opening a store with Baron Hontman’s capital. The bourgeois clientele scorn the saleswomen – “wretches who sell themselves like merchandise” (p. 365) – and the sentiment is mutual: “[…] these ladies exhaled their rancour. One devoured the other across the counters, woman consuming woman in an acute rivalry of money and beauty. It was a sullen jealousy of the saleswomen toward the well-dressed clients, the ladies whose manners they tried to imitate, and an even sharper jealousy of the poorly dressed clients, the petty bourgeois women toward the salesgirls – those girls clad in silk – of whom they demanded the humility of servants in exchange for a ten-sou purchase.” (pp. 364–365) For Denise, the rumour regarding her alleged misconduct – maliciously spread by Bourdoncle – is ultimately inverted: the slander becomes a testament to her integrity, and the defamatory gossip transforms into respect and recognition of her seriousness.
Furthermore, the funeral ceremony of Geneviève Baudru, Denise’s cousin – who dies of sorrow – turns into a demonstration, even a riot, against the oppressor. The small shopkeepers of the neighbourhood circulate falsehoods, going so far as to attribute the young girl’s death, as well as their own financial hardships, to the Grand Magasin (chapter XIII).
9. Conclusion
In this novel, exaggeration and overstatement function as the dominant stylistic devices used to evoke luxury and promote merchandise. The store is enveloped in the aura of a fairy tale capable of producing a shiver of delight; reality and excess, fabricated stories and inflated information all contribute to the force and logic of its “mechanisms,” each element organised with mechanical precision. Conceiving of communication as a ritual process may offer a key to the debate surrounding the thorny issue of informational disorder, for within this framework we may also understand why individuals perceive messages so differently – not only through social and cultural heredity or informational education, but also through successive, overlapping filters. One’s self-image is constructed through voluntary and involuntary associations with models, through the covert transmission of messages shaped by identitarian exemplars.
From the standpoint of a valorising identity-image and the ritual function of communication, it becomes clear that manipulative advertising (another oxymoron?) plays a fundamental role in representing our beliefs. It constructs the drama, the storytelling, or, in more appropriate French terms, a ritualised mise en scène, “an imagistic portrait of the competing forces in the world” (cf. James Carey).
The affinity with a certain dramatic mode of narration – in our case, the opening of the Grand Magasins, the compulsive purchases (“a necessary expenditure of nervous passion, the ever-renewed struggle of a god against the husband, the endlessly renewed cult of the body, with the divine beyond of beauty,” as the naturalist writer notes) to which Zola’s female characters succumb thanks to exceptional sales and the flattery of their egos – transcends facts and figures. It opens a reflective window onto our own portraits, if not as reasonable buyers, then as consumers of any product that enhances our identitarian reflection and, why not, as readers of the fine literature of the nineteenth century.
We conclude by drawing back the curtain with a E. Goffmanian wink or gentle reminder: to share information, we use social networks as a vast public theatre, upon whose stage we become actors performing our own roles or interpreting the life-scripts of others—of friends in both the proximal and extended circle. We all become followers, with the (un)stated intention of being followed and appreciated for the content we distribute.
REFERENCES
- Bârgăoanu, A., & Nastasiu, C. (2022). “Fake News. O armă în războiul informațional. Război (informațional) și pace? [Fake News. A Weapon in the Information War. (Information) War and Peace?],”. Polis, vol. X, no. 2 (36), pp. 27-33.
- Carey, J. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. London: Routledge; (1989.
- Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking. Vol. 27. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2017. Available at: https://tverezo.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/PREMS-162317-GBR-2018-Report-desinformation-A4-BAT.pdf
- Zola, Émile, Au Bonheur des Dames, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, coll. “Folio classique”, preface de Jeanne Gaillard, édition d’Henri Mitterand.
