"The Galeries Lafayette [?al?i lafaj?t] is a large traditional French department store chain, one of the oldest department stores in France, remarkable for its Art Nouveau architecture.
The merchant Théophile Bader from Dambach-la-Ville and his cousin Alphonse Kahn from Kolbsheim first opened in 1893 a clothes store business with a retail area of ??70 m² in the 9th arrondissement in Rue La Fayette No. 1 in the best location, a few minutes away from the Parisians Opera. They named the business in 1894 after the road in Aux Galeries Lafayette. On 21 December 1895 the company bought the entire building rue La Fayette No. 1; Soon a storehouse with 265 m² on five storeys became a fashion store. In the following five years more fashion shops were added in Paris and Lyon. The company expanded its business activities beyond the pure retail sector to fashion production. In 1899 the company Société Anonyme of the Galeries Lafayette was founded.
Georges Chedanne was commissioned in 1906 for a 10-storey reconstruction, which was finished in 1908. This extended the headquarters to address 38-41 Boulevard Haussmann. In 1907 the department store had more than 750 employees. From 1910 to 1912, a building complex was constructed in reinforced concrete skeleton construction. A 40-meter-high colored glass dome was built on the 33-meter high Art Nouveau gallery hall; The opening took place on 8 October 1912. The house now had a sales area of ??18,000 m². In 1912, Kahn sold his share of baths.
At the beginning of the First World War the company suffered a phase of falling sales. In 1916, a branch was opened in Nice, and another branch in London in 1920. The business in the Paris and Lyon locations has been continuously expanded. 1931 opened a branch in Bucharest.
To deal with the consequences of the global economic crisis, the first Monoprix business was opened in Rouen in October 1932; Until 1938 42 Monoprix branches were established in France: department stores with simple equipment and popular, popular goods at uniform prices. Founded in 1928, Uniprix and Prisunic, a company founded in 1931, opened and operated similar department stores.
In June 1940, the Wehrmacht occupied parts of France; The Vichy regime soon enacted some anti-Jewish laws. They forced the entire management, consisting of Théophile Bader, Max Heilbronn and Raoul Meyer, to resign. The company was "arised". Bader died on 16 March 1942. Heilbronn was arrested on 12 June 1943 by the SD, then imprisoned in Lyon and Compiègne, deported to Buchenwald concentration camp on 3 January 1944, then deported to the Natzweiler Struthof concentration camp and then to the Allach camp concentration camp . There he was liberated on 30 April 1945. In 1945, after the Second World War, Heilbronn and Meyer took over the management again.
The first post-war years were characterized by supply bottlenecks and a restricted range. From about 1950 onwards, the company was again able to offer and expand the full range of goods as in pre-war times. In the 1970s the chain had a department store in almost every big city in France.
Nearby, on Boulevard Haussmann no. 64, lies Printemps, the second famous Paris department store.
In 1996 the Galeries Lafayette opened one department store, the Galeries Lafayette Berlin, as one of the first companies after German reunification in the former eastern part of Berlin. "
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