All 50 Uses of

bourgeois

in

Les Miserables

Before becoming a hospital, this house had been the ancient parliament house of the Bourgeois.†
Chpt 1.1

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and d'Urfe mingles druids with them.†
Chpt 1.3

Groups of dwellers in the suburbs, in Sunday array, sometimes even decorated with the fleur-de-lys, like the bourgeois, scattered over the large square and the Marigny square, were playing at rings and revolving on the wooden horses; others were engaged in drinking; some journeyman printers had on paper caps; their laughter was audible.†
Chpt 1.3

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.†
Chpt 1.4

At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois, and spurs the pedestrian.†
Chpt 1.5

That gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back.†
Chpt 1.5

There is, in truth," added the wheelwright, "an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the thirty-sixth of the month—never, that is to say.†
Chpt 1.7

But the bourgeois must not see it pass—and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses.†
Chpt 1.7

"You do not belong in town, sir?" replied the bourgeois, who was an oldish man; "well, follow me.†
Chpt 1.7

On the way, the bourgeois said to him:— "If Monsieur desires to witness a case, it is rather late.†
Chpt 1.7

"That is different," said the bourgeois.†
Chpt 1.7

He conformed to the bourgeois's directions, and a few minutes later he was in a hall containing many people, and where groups, intermingled with lawyers in their gowns, were whispering together here and there.†
Chpt 1.7

mistake in massing, instead of echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised; Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels; Marcognet's division caugh†
Chpt 2.1

At the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois.†
Chpt 2.3

The date of the year 1823 was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.†
Chpt 2.3

In the rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered a l'oiseau royal, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated man, two great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide blue ribbon: it was the king.†
Chpt 2.3

They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses, the other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious, neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye.†
Chpt 2.3

and then, we have so few bourgeois in the neighborhood!†
Chpt 2.3

In a calm and even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to make—we will not say to be— what people have agreed to call an honest trader, a good bourgeois.†
Chpt 2.3

A few paces more, and you arrive at the abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.†
Chpt 2.4

Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.†
Chpt 2.4

One would have pronounced them four spectres disguised as bourgeois.†
Chpt 2.5

Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and salt.†
Chpt 2.8

The bourgeois did not care much about being buried in the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty.†
Chpt 2.8

He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors: to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations, calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.†
Chpt 3.1

All belonged to that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.†
Chpt 3.1

bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class

—THE GREAT BOURGEOIS.†
Chpt 3.2

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

He was a peculiar old man, and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates.†
Chpt 3.2

He was a peculiar old man, and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates.†
Chpt 3.2

bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class

—THE GREAT BOURGEOIS truth, some penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it came.†
Chpt 3.2

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

He was horrified by all the names which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and bourgeois.†
Chpt 3.2

"He is the disgrace of my family," said the old bourgeois.†
Chpt 3.2

Although a bourgeois, M. Gillenormand was received in society.†
Chpt 3.3

Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised persons.†
Chpt 3.3

bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class

He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing, dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great age added to it.†
Chpt 3.3

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who served him.†
Chpt 3.3

bourgeoise = a female member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a female member of the property-owning class

The old bourgeois, thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh, saying: "The greatest families are forced into it."†
Chpt 3.3

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

Moreover, as it is indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century, this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois.†
Chpt 3.3

Even before he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one of his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was something crushing:— "Well!†
Chpt 3.3

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."†
Chpt 3.3

One of the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle.†
Chpt 3.4

bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class

But the bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de, that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it.†
Chpt 3.4

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

Later on, this disappears like the playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois, on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.†
Chpt 3.4

He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the reason they are intelligent."†
Chpt 3.4

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel.†
Chpt 3.4

The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score.†
Chpt 3.4

bourgeoisie = a member of the middle class OR (in Marxist theory) a member of the property-owing class

The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score.†
Chpt 3.4

The old bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."†
Chpt 3.5

bourgeois = typical of the middle class or their values and habits

As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Theodule entered clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever of him, and was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand.†
Chpt 3.5

The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"— and made a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.†
Chpt 3.5

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Highlighting 2 Senses of the Word

Definition:

typical of the middle class or their values and habits - typically used disapprovingly

or (in Marxist theory):

typical of the property-owning class

Bourgeois is often used to refer to the values of the upper middle class. You may also see the term petit bourgeois to describe very small business owners.

Note that bourgeois, bourgeoisie, and bourgeoise are often interchanged.

Bourgeois is most common and can be used as an adjective or a noun. Bourgeoisie is typically used only as a noun, and bourgeoise is occasionally used as an alternate spelling of bourgeois.

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bourgeois in Les Miserables

bourgeois

in

Les Miserables