Sold Out
Friday, 3 April 2026
I had dinner last week with old friends, Americans like me who have lived in Paris so many years they're better left uncounted. We started talking about the rue de Rivoli department store BHV. I say "department store", but the BHV is much more than that. The BHV is a beloved institution woven into the fabric of our Paris lives, our Notre Dame de Commerce, if you will, a store with something for everyone. Until recently, anyway.
At the dinner, everyone had a story of fetish items no longer available, from agenda refills to bathroom fixtures to journalists’ notebooks with horizontal lines and pockets for taxi receipts.
Having not been in almost a year, I feared for the fate of the pre-cut matting I frame photos with and the Herbin ink I use in my fountain pens.
Situated across from City Hall, The Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville (BHV), was founded in 1866 by François-Xavier Ruel, an itinerant salesman from Lyon. When he moved to Paris in 1852 with his wife Marie-Madeleine Poncerry, he hired 20 hawkers to find the best sales point in the city; they soon set up shop on the corner of the rue de Rivoli and the rue des Archives.
Legend has it there was a sovereign investor as well. Not long after the store opened, the Empress Eugénie (wife of Napoléon III) was riding by in her carriage when the horses went haywire. Monsieur Ruel reportedly stepped out to calm them and was handsomely rewarded for his firm hand. For a while, the shop was even called Bazaar Napoléon.
The BHV was one of several grands magasins that opened in Paris mid-19th century. By selling items in one place at a fixed, reasonable price, the founders revolutionised commerce. They may have put smaller shop owners out of business, but they cared about quality and were generous benefactors. Monsieur et Madame Ruel, for example, remembering their humble beginnings, distributed 500 kg of bread a day to the poor during the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris. They opened a soup kitchen and a free dispensary.
The BHV kept expanding, eventually spawning mini-BHVs elsewhere in France. The vast bricolage (hardware) basement of the main Marais store became a Mecca for professionals, DIYers and even artists, after Marcel Duchamp bought a champagne bottle-holder there in 1914 and declared it art. In the 1960s, le sous-sol was apparently known as un lieu de rencontre, a pick-up spot.
The store stayed in the family until 1989. Two years later, the Galeries Lafayette (another grand magasin) bought the building and ran the business. In the 2010s, when all the other Paris department stores (Galerie Lafayette included) were going super-chic and fancy, catering to wealthy tourists rather than average Parisians, the BHV held on tight to its soul.
But in 2023, the Galeries Lafayette sold the lease to the Société des Grands Magasins (SGM), a company specialising in urban commerce and run by a very young (31 and 35 at the time) brother and sister team, Frédéric and Maryline Merlin (for photo and more info in French, click here). They too were fortune-seekers from Lyon, though apparently not cut from the same cloth as Monsieur et Madame Ruel.
The decline has been dramatic. Last year French brands fled, mostly because they hadn't been paid, but also because in November, SGM leased the top floor to the l'ultra fast-fashion (as the French call it) Chinese clothing company Shein, and they didn't want to be tainted by association.
At first, every day was Black Friday. The queues went out to the street. People pushed and shoved at the racks. 50,000 people in five days, the papers said.
Partly because of the hordes, partly on principle, I was shunning Shein and the BHV in general. But after our dinner conversation and an article in Le Parisien about Galeries Lafayette selling the building to the US-Canadian investor Brookfield Asset Management, I rode over to have a look.
There was a pre-Shein time not so long ago when you could hardly find a spot to attach a bicycle, when you had to jostle to get in the front door and wait in a lengthy line to pay for your widgets.
But no more. Even the Shein crowds are gone, and now you are greeted by a sign...
...that is already out of date because every floor is "under renovation". What's left of the merchandise has been herded here and there, making for some strange displays...
...and forlorn sights...
The store feels like an abandoned beehive, with a few uninformed bees still buzzing around in a daze. The magical bricolage basement already looks generic American...
Several ascending escalators were out of order, but once I got to the second floor, midway between where the agenda fillers and Herbin ink once stood, a saleswoman leaning against an empty display table told me that the plan was to close off and renovate half the store, "then switch sides," she gestured. "At least now that we've been bought, there's hope. "
But I found hope hard to muster. Who will want to shop in a half-store unlikely to satisfy any of our quirky purchasing needs?
"Le jeune tycoon" Merlin is still running the show under the new owners. I cannot think why. The flagship store is so in debt that last month the water company threatened to cut them off. Unpaid hygiene providers apparently even stopped delivering loo paper for a while.
And that top Shein floor is worse than I'd imagined. The clothes were crumpled, as if they'd just emerged from a long ocean journey in a plastic bag (they probably had) and looked so cheap, I shivered at the thought of a single fibre touching my skin.
It was as hauntingly empty as the rest of the store.
French legislative efforts are underway to staunch the spread of Shein, and the judiciary is trying to prevent their online sex toys being sold to minors. But five new Sheins nevertheless opened in BHV-owned provincial outlets in February. It seems unstoppable. Quality is clearly the furthest thing from their minds, and I don't see soup kitchens being offered by management anytime soon.
