Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff
Speaker 1: Lauren Boglebaum here. The word bourgeois has gone through some
Speaker 1: serious twists and tumbles in its time. Although Americans tend
Speaker 1: to think of everything French as fancy and high class,
Speaker 1: the French definition of bourgeois has ranged from everything from
Speaker 1: decidedly basic to effortlessly stylish. Today, let's look at how
Speaker 1: this term and various slang around it, like bougie, came
Speaker 1: to be. The English language started borrowing bourgeois from the
Speaker 1: French sometime in the fifteen hundreds. The French developed the
Speaker 1: word earlier during medieval times, from the old French word bourg,
Speaker 1: meaning a market town or settlement. It's from the same
Speaker 1: route where we get the burg in city names like
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh or the word burrow. Anyway, a bourgeois was a
Speaker 1: person who lived in a town. The plural was bourgeoisie,
Speaker 1: though technically anyone living in these blooming urban environments was
Speaker 1: a bourgeois. The term was usually only applied to craftspeople, merchants, landowners,
Speaker 1: and the like, people who were an economic step up
Speaker 1: from farmers and other manual laborers, but a step down
Speaker 1: from the noble aristocrats. The bourgeoisie were people who had
Speaker 1: middle class status. The word bourgeois expanded to become not
Speaker 1: just a noun for one of these folks, but also
Speaker 1: an adjective describing someone with certain middle class traits or behaviors,
Speaker 1: and not necessarily in a positive way. In the sixteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the famous French playwright Moliere wrote a musical comedy called,
Speaker 1: in translation, the Bourgeois Gentleman, which pokes fun at a
Speaker 1: guy who's this naive middle class social climber who hires
Speaker 1: tutors and fashion consultants to try to fit into high
Speaker 1: class society. Bourgeois was not a term one would apply
Speaker 1: to oneself. However, this loose middle class, also called the burghers,
Speaker 1: became instrumental in the late seventeen hundreds during the French Revolution. Again,
Speaker 1: they didn't self identify as a single group, but they
Speaker 1: were the people with the means to form the revolutionary
Speaker 1: political clubs and legislatures and even militaries. The toppled the
Speaker 1: feudal system and the nobles at its head, and that's
Speaker 1: how by the middle of the nineteen hundreds and the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, the term bourgeois shifted from sometimes snarky social
Speaker 1: commentary to the center of a different political movement. In
Speaker 1: eighteen forty eight, the German philosopher Karl Marx published the
Speaker 1: Communist Manifesto, which laid out his economically revolutionary worldview. Marx
Speaker 1: believed that capitalist industrial societies were engaged in a class war.
Speaker 1: The heroes were the proletariat, the working class, while the
Speaker 1: villains were the bourgeoisie, the higher class capitalists who owned
Speaker 1: the means of production. The argument goes that the bourgeoisie
Speaker 1: took ownership from the noble class, but then failed to
Speaker 1: share it with the actual workers. To Marx, the bourgeoisie
Speaker 1: had ripped off the proletariat by getting rich off of
Speaker 1: their labor, and therefore the bourgeoisie had to be toppled,
Speaker 1: like the nobles before them. Marxist ideas crossed the Atlantic
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen hundreds. There the plight of the
Speaker 1: proletariat was picked up by an international labor union called
Speaker 1: the Industrial Workers of the World or IWW, better known
Speaker 1: as the Wobblies, which was founded in Chicago in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh five. During the nineteen oughts, the Wobblis coined the
Speaker 1: term bouchois spelled bushwa as slang for bourgeois. Historian Dorothy
Speaker 1: Gage explained in her two thousand and nine book The
Speaker 1: Dey Wall Street Exploded that the Wobbles quote bellowed out
Speaker 1: revolutionary songs, scorned the niceties of boucheois society, and made
Speaker 1: a point of dressing in the workman's garb that eventually
Speaker 1: became the Wobbly's trademark uniform. Members of the IWW mocked
Speaker 1: what they saw as empty boucheois promises and conventions. What's more,
Speaker 1: this dismissive connotation of boucheois pretty much immediately slipped into
Speaker 1: the common lexicon as a sort of PG version of
Speaker 1: the word bullsh excuse my French. The Random House Dictionary
Speaker 1: of American Slang found the first such usage in a
Speaker 1: nineteen oh six issue of the National Police Gazette, which
Speaker 1: politely defined boucheois as a term of derision used to
Speaker 1: convey the same comment as hot air. In this use,
Speaker 1: the word boucheois showed up in detective novels and the like.
Speaker 1: For decades, Black American culture started remixing bourgeois too, perhaps
Speaker 1: influenced by this labor movement and by the Black Panther Party,
Speaker 1: which also drew ideology from Marx. The R and B
Speaker 1: group Gladys Knight and the Pips released their disco hit
Speaker 1: Bougie Bougie in nineteen eighty spelled b o u r Gie.
Speaker 1: The song was written and produced by the legendary husband
Speaker 1: and wife team Ashford and Simpson. It describes a person
Speaker 1: from across the tracks who flaunt their newly acquired money
Speaker 1: with fancy clothes and a shiny car with a sun roof.
Speaker 1: It is a bob if you're not familiar, look it up,
Speaker 1: and it's also commentary about the pursuit of the trappings
Speaker 1: of wealth through this type of use. As of the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, the American English term bougie spelled without
Speaker 1: the R of bougie, had flipped back to a definition
Speaker 1: that Moliere might recognize. It's often used to playfully or
Speaker 1: more derisively call out upwardly mobile people who have upper
Speaker 1: middle class tastes and affectations. As such, the term can
Speaker 1: be part of larger discussions of what aspiration, propriety, and
Speaker 1: authenticity even mean. Meanwhile, back in modern France, being bourgeois
Speaker 1: no longer indicates that you have stodgily pedestrian tastes. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's the opposite. In French culture, being bourgeois these days
Speaker 1: is about having effortless style, a good manners, good education,
Speaker 1: and maybe a country house to escape the city to
Speaker 1: on the weekends. The flashy nemesis of the French bourgeois
Speaker 1: is now the nouveau riche, or literally new rich, who
Speaker 1: vulgarly flaunt their wealth and status through a lavish lifestyle,
Speaker 1: which makes it pretty ironic that the American English definition
Speaker 1: of this French word now basically means nouveau riche. Today's
Speaker 1: episode is based on the article bougie Slang How did
Speaker 1: Bourgeoisie become a bad word? On HowStuffWorks dot com written
Speaker 1: by Dave Bruce. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
Speaker 1: partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler klang A. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio.
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