Épater la bourgeoisie

Épater la bourgeoisie or épater le (or les) bourgeois is a French phrase that became a rallying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late 19th century including Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.^[1] It means "to shock or scandalize the (respectable) middle classes".^[2]

The expression is first found in a book by French author Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont, a friend of Baudelaire.^[3] The Decadent poets, fascinated as they were with hashish, opium, and absinthe, found, in Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel À rebours (1884), an eccentric hero who secludes himself in his house, basking in life-weariness or ennui, far from the bourgeois society that he despises.