How Did 'Bourgeois' Become a Bad Word?

The French word 'bourgeois' originally just meant a middle-class town dweller, but it's taken on a lot of different (and often derogatory) connotations over the centuries, including in the English slang term 'bougie'. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/bourgeoisie.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Lauren Boglebaum here. The word bourgeois has gone through some
serious twists and tumbles in its time. Although Americans tend
to think of everything French as fancy and high class,
the French definition of bourgeois has ranged from everything from

(00:25):
decidedly basic to effortlessly stylish. Today, let's look at how
this term and various slang around it, like bougie, came
to be. The English language started borrowing bourgeois from the
French sometime in the fifteen hundreds. The French developed the
word earlier during medieval times, from the old French word bourg,

(00:48):
meaning a market town or settlement. It's from the same
route where we get the burg in city names like
Pittsburgh or the word burrow. Anyway, a bourgeois was a
person who lived in a town. The plural was bourgeoisie,
though technically anyone living in these blooming urban environments was

(01:09):
a bourgeois. The term was usually only applied to craftspeople, merchants, landowners,
and the like, people who were an economic step up
from farmers and other manual laborers, but a step down
from the noble aristocrats. The bourgeoisie were people who had
middle class status. The word bourgeois expanded to become not

(01:33):
just a noun for one of these folks, but also
an adjective describing someone with certain middle class traits or behaviors,
and not necessarily in a positive way. In the sixteen seventies,
the famous French playwright Moliere wrote a musical comedy called,
in translation, the Bourgeois Gentleman, which pokes fun at a

(01:55):
guy who's this naive middle class social climber who hires
tutors and fashion consultants to try to fit into high
class society. Bourgeois was not a term one would apply
to oneself. However, this loose middle class, also called the burghers,
became instrumental in the late seventeen hundreds during the French Revolution. Again,

(02:19):
they didn't self identify as a single group, but they
were the people with the means to form the revolutionary
political clubs and legislatures and even militaries. The toppled the
feudal system and the nobles at its head, and that's
how by the middle of the nineteen hundreds and the
Industrial Revolution, the term bourgeois shifted from sometimes snarky social

(02:43):
commentary to the center of a different political movement. In
eighteen forty eight, the German philosopher Karl Marx published the
Communist Manifesto, which laid out his economically revolutionary worldview. Marx
believed that capitalist industrial societies were engaged in a class war.

(03:04):
The heroes were the proletariat, the working class, while the
villains were the bourgeoisie, the higher class capitalists who owned
the means of production. The argument goes that the bourgeoisie
took ownership from the noble class, but then failed to
share it with the actual workers. To Marx, the bourgeoisie
had ripped off the proletariat by getting rich off of

(03:26):
their labor, and therefore the bourgeoisie had to be toppled,
like the nobles before them. Marxist ideas crossed the Atlantic
in the early nineteen hundreds. There the plight of the
proletariat was picked up by an international labor union called
the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, better known
as the Wobblies, which was founded in Chicago in nineteen

(03:48):
oh five. During the nineteen oughts, the Wobblis coined the
term bouchois spelled bushwa as slang for bourgeois. Historian Dorothy
Gage explained in her two thousand and nine book The
Dey Wall Street Exploded that the Wobbles quote bellowed out
revolutionary songs, scorned the niceties of boucheois society, and made

(04:13):
a point of dressing in the workman's garb that eventually
became the Wobbly's trademark uniform. Members of the IWW mocked
what they saw as empty boucheois promises and conventions. What's more,
this dismissive connotation of boucheois pretty much immediately slipped into

(04:33):
the common lexicon as a sort of PG version of
the word bullsh excuse my French. The Random House Dictionary
of American Slang found the first such usage in a
nineteen oh six issue of the National Police Gazette, which
politely defined boucheois as a term of derision used to
convey the same comment as hot air. In this use,

(04:57):
the word boucheois showed up in detective novels and the like.
For decades, Black American culture started remixing bourgeois too, perhaps
influenced by this labor movement and by the Black Panther Party,
which also drew ideology from Marx. The R and B
group Gladys Knight and the Pips released their disco hit

(05:17):
Bougie Bougie in nineteen eighty spelled b o u r Gie.
The song was written and produced by the legendary husband
and wife team Ashford and Simpson. It describes a person
from across the tracks who flaunt their newly acquired money
with fancy clothes and a shiny car with a sun roof.

(05:38):
It is a bob if you're not familiar, look it up,
and it's also commentary about the pursuit of the trappings
of wealth through this type of use. As of the
early two thousands, the American English term bougie spelled without
the R of bougie, had flipped back to a definition
that Moliere might recognize. It's often used to playfully or

(06:02):
more derisively call out upwardly mobile people who have upper
middle class tastes and affectations. As such, the term can
be part of larger discussions of what aspiration, propriety, and
authenticity even mean. Meanwhile, back in modern France, being bourgeois
no longer indicates that you have stodgily pedestrian tastes. In fact,

(06:26):
it's the opposite. In French culture, being bourgeois these days
is about having effortless style, a good manners, good education,
and maybe a country house to escape the city to
on the weekends. The flashy nemesis of the French bourgeois
is now the nouveau riche, or literally new rich, who
vulgarly flaunt their wealth and status through a lavish lifestyle,

(06:51):
which makes it pretty ironic that the American English definition
of this French word now basically means nouveau riche. Today's
episode is based on the article bougie Slang How did
Bourgeoisie become a bad word? On HowStuffWorks dot com written

(07:11):
by Dave Bruce. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Tyler klang A. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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