épater le bourgeois

• épater la bourgeoisie

Borrowed from French épater le bourgeois (“amaze the bourgeois”).

épater le bourgeois

1. (literary) To scandalize, provoke the middle class.
   • 1987, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students:

     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.