“Bobo” appears to getting incorporated into French. The Le Monde reporter does feel the need to define the term once, but doesn’t use scare quotes, treat it as a foreign word, or mention David Brooks. The people quoted use it freely. Curiously, we get a detour into the English word “gentrification,” “which can be translated as embourgeoisement”. (Not without change of meaning it can’t.) But no mention of bobo‘s foreign genesis.
While the article contains moments of traditional French contempt for the bourgeoisie, both boboification and drawing attention to it are probably very good things in French political and social culture. Dislodging French artists and intellectuals from their traditional disgust for all things commercial, properties, or middle-class would be valuable, as would weakening the tight relationships among class, politics, and culture both in fact and in stereotype (“rich but artists; bourgeois but of the left,” etc).
Elsewhere in Le Monde: a serious, respectful, and substantial article on the dedication of the WWII memorial in Washington.
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