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 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, 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
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 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 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, 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
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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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,
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, 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 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. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.