7 Surprisingly Modern Ideas in Abel Hermant’s The Bourgeois

Few social types have been mocked as relentlessly as the bourgeois.

For artists, he is the philistine. For radicals, the defender of property and convention. For aristocrats, the parvenu. For intellectuals, the respectable enemy of imagination. Even the word bourgeois seems capable of becoming an insult simply through tone of voice.

Abel Hermant knows every version of the caricature. What makes The Bourgeois interesting is that he refuses to discard it.

Instead, he asks a far more mischievous question: what if some of the qualities we ridicule in the bourgeois are precisely the qualities that allow societies to survive change?

His answer is not a straightforward defense of a class. It is a comedy of manners, a work of moral psychology, and ultimately a theory of how modern societies absorb disruption.

Here are seven of its most striking ideas.

1. “Bourgeois” is powerful precisely because nobody can quite decide what it means

Hermant begins not with economics but with language.

Is bourgeois a respectable description or an insult? Historically, the word can designate a citizen possessing rights, a prosperous town-dweller, an employer, a member of a social class—or the unimaginative creature whom artists despise.

Hermant’s fictional philologist Mélanthée proposes a wonderfully comic solution. Words, he says, do not merely possess meanings. They have a temperature.

The same word changes according to the heat with which it is pronounced.

Hermant’s point is larger than a joke about dictionaries. Social labels rarely remain neutral because they carry accumulated admiration, resentment, memory, and rivalry.

“Bourgeois” therefore becomes interesting precisely because it oscillates.

The instability tells us something about the society using the word. People may despise bourgeois respectability while craving bourgeois security. They may ridicule bourgeois conventionality while depending upon bourgeois institutions.

The word functions simultaneously as identity and accusation.

Hermant understands that before studying a social type, we should study what people are trying to do when they name it.

2. The bourgeois is not fundamentally defined by money

This is one of Hermant’s most important reversals.

We expect bourgeois identity to be economic: property, savings, inheritance, careful accounting, the prudent balance between income and expenditure.

Hermant certainly recognizes those traits. His bourgeois knows how to count.

But money cannot finally explain the type.

The bourgeois can become extravagant. The saver can spend. The sedentary man can travel. The respectable household can adopt fashionable irregularities. Fortunes can disappear without entirely destroying the habits formed by possessing them.

Something survives beneath economic circumstances.

Hermant locates that something in temperament.

The bourgeois temperament values continuity, order, measure, probity, and a certain resistance to extremes. It seeks to organize life into forms that can be sustained.

That matters because it transforms Hermant’s subject. The Bourgeois gradually stops being merely a portrait of one social class and becomes a study of a particular way of confronting instability.

The central question is no longer simply: Who owns what?

It becomes: What kind of person knows how to remain recognizable while everything around him changes?

3. Moderation may be a form of strength rather than mediocrity

Modern culture often prefers extremes.

We admire the rebel, the visionary, the uncompromising artist, the person prepared to risk everything for an idea. Against such figures, moderation can look suspiciously like cowardice.

Hermant refuses that equation.

For him, bourgeois “measure” is not merely the absence of daring. It is the ability to give durable form to competing impulses.

His bourgeois wants contradictory things. Security and adventure. Equality and distinction. Morality and pleasure. Tradition and novelty.

Yet contradiction does not necessarily destroy him.

It becomes his method of adaptation.

The saver learns to spend. The conservative experiments with new ideas. The supposedly uncultivated bourgeois becomes an art collector. Families that once feared literature discover that intellectual work may itself become a profession.

Hermant’s bourgeois survives because he can absorb what initially contradicts him.

This is easy to mock as compromise.

But Hermant asks us to consider another possibility: perhaps civilization itself depends upon compromise of this kind.

New ideas may begin with radicals, but eventually someone must turn them into habits, schools, professions, homes, conventions, and institutions.

Revolution produces novelty.

Accommodation makes novelty livable.

4. The supposed enemy of culture may actually be one of its principal guardians

Hermant reaches one of his most provocative claims in the chapter on intellectual life:

“The bourgeoisie, in France at least, is the guardian of the intellect.”

For generations of artists, that sounds almost absurd.

The bourgeois is traditionally the man who fails to understand art. He prefers respectable pictures, respectable books, respectable opinions. He distrusts excess and forces creativity into conventional forms.

Hermant does not entirely dispute the charge. His bourgeois can indeed be a “tyrannical guardian.”

But a guardian is still a guardian.

Who maintains education? Who continues to value the humanities even when they are economically useless? Who preserves the prestige of professions devoted to scholarship, literature, teaching, and culture? Who buys books and paintings, sends children to school, creates collections, and transforms artistic production into something transmissible?

Hermant connects bourgeois intellectual virtue with the famous formula:

“Drawing is the probity of art.”

The word probity matters.

For Hermant, art does not exist only through inspiration. It also requires craft, discipline, continuity, training, and standards.

The bourgeois tendency to impose structure upon thought can certainly constrain it.

But structure is also what allows thought to survive its creators.

The bourgeois domesticates culture.

Hermant’s uncomfortable suggestion is that domestication may be one of the ways culture remains alive.

5. Bourgeois virtue may contain fear—and that does not make it meaningless

Hermant is too ironic to allow his defense to become heroic.

In a philosophical dialogue, he proposes that the bourgeoisie may be governed by virtue and honor, borrowing terms from Montesquieu.

His younger interlocutor Xavier immediately notices the problem.

Montesquieu associates a third political principle with despotism: fear.

Might the bourgeois possess that one too?

Hermant’s answer is essentially comic surrender.

“Xavier, I think…. I think you are altogether too clever.”

The exchange punctures any simple idealization of bourgeois morality.

Perhaps respectability is not sustained entirely by noble conviction. Perhaps people behave properly partly because they fear disgrace. Perhaps probity is reinforced by self-interest. Perhaps social decency sometimes resembles hypocrisy.

Yet Hermant refuses the comforting assumption that mixed motives necessarily invalidate good behavior.

A person may act honestly because honesty preserves credit.

A family may value culture partly because culture confers prestige.

A society may preserve decorum partly because its members dread embarrassment.

Pure motives are rare.

What interests Hermant is not moral purity but social effect.

Human beings may perform worthwhile actions for less-than-sublime reasons.

Civilization, inconveniently, may have to work with that.

6. Snobbery can be ridiculous—and still improve people

This is probably the book’s most delightful paradox.

Snobbery should be an easy target. The snob admires people above him, imitates their manners, envies their status, and desperately attempts to belong.

Hermant recognizes all the comedy.

But then he asks: what happens after the imitation begins?

His answer is startling.

The snob may actually learn something.

“Only those societies live in which no one is content with his lot and everyone wishes to change places, to climb one rung higher; for life is movement.”

Snobbery produces dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction produces imitation.

Imitation can produce education.

The aspiring snob attends concerts because fashionable people attend them. He encounters modern painting because sophisticated circles value it. He learns new manners, develops unfamiliar tastes, discovers sport, music, literature, or art.

The motive may be vanity.

The consequence may be cultivation.

Hermant therefore overturns another convenient moral assumption: good results do not necessarily require good motives.

A person who approaches art for prestige may eventually develop taste.

Someone who imitates refinement may become refined.

The imitation that begins superficially may end by reshaping the imitator.

Snobbery is ridiculous because the snob wants to become someone else.

It is productive because, in trying, he may actually become someone new.

7. The bourgeois survives modernity by absorbing the people who rebel against him

The book’s culminating example is Jacques.

He comes from a prosperous bourgeois family that possesses stability but has ceased to move. His parents have arrived.

And arrival, for Hermant, is dangerous.

Jacques becomes a snob.

He enters fashionable society, encounters artists and newly rich circles, acquires modern tastes, takes up sport, learns music, and becomes interested in contemporary art and literature.

At first, he imitates other people.

Eventually, something changes.

“He still thinks he is imitating others when they have already begun to imitate him.”

This may be Hermant’s most revealing image of bourgeois power.

The bourgeois does not necessarily defeat his enemies.

He learns from them.

The avant-garde scandalizes him—until he collects it.

New manners shock him—until they become respectable.

Rebellion threatens him—until some version of it becomes ordinary life.

What initially exists outside bourgeois culture is gradually translated into bourgeois culture.

This makes the bourgeois something stranger than modernity’s conservative opponent.

He becomes its metabolizer.

Hermant’s final description of Jacques captures the ideal:

“Everywhere and always he remains the bourgeois—in motion, up to date, but well-tempered.”

That phrase contains the entire argument.

Movement without dissolution.

Modernity without permanent revolution.

Change without complete loss of form.

Hermant’s bourgeois is not a hero.

That is precisely why the book remains interesting.

He compromises. He calculates. He worries about appearances. He wants comfort. He admires people he pretends to disdain. His virtues frequently shade into vices: discipline into conformity, probity into narrowness, respectability into hypocrisy, culture into prestige.

Yet Hermant keeps returning to an awkward possibility.

Perhaps societies cannot live by heroic temperaments alone.

Someone must preserve what revolutionaries invent. Someone must educate children, maintain professions, collect art, convert experiments into institutions, make strange ideas ordinary, and carry inherited forms into altered circumstances.

The bourgeois is commonly accused of accommodating himself to the world.

Hermant asks whether accommodation might itself be an indispensable civilizational skill.

And that leaves us with a question more interesting than whether we admire the bourgeois.

What if the people who appear least revolutionary are sometimes the ones who make revolutions permanent?