épater le bourgeois
épater le bourgeois verb: to scandalize, provoke the middle class.
Verb
épater le bourgeois
- To scandalize, provoke the middle class.
- All that was needed were the heroes willing to act out the fantasies the public now accepted as reality: the hero, as hedonist, who dares to do in public what the public wants to see. It was épater les bourgeois as a bourgeois calling.1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students
Forms of épater le bourgeois
| alternative form | épater la bourgeoisie |
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Origin of épater le bourgeois
Borrowed from French épater le bourgeois (“amaze the bourgeois”).
Questions about épater le bourgeois
- What does épater le bourgeois mean?
- Épater le bourgeois means to scandalize, provoke the middle class.
- What part of speech is épater le bourgeois?
- Épater le bourgeois is a verb.
Words near épater le bourgeois in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: épater le bourgeois (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “épater le bourgeois.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/%C3%A9pater_le_bourgeois. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.