Daily Inspiration Quote by Jules Renard

A petty masterpiece of class parody: Renard tweaks Sartre before Sartre, turning the existential wound of "Hell is other people" into a social sneer. "The bourgeois are other people" works because it compresses an entire French cultural habit into one glancing line: define yourself by disowning the comfortable middle, then enjoy the moral high ground that comes with it. The sentence is less an observation than a performative act of distinction.

Renard, a dramatist with a diarist's ear for hypocrisy, aims his blade at the reflexive scapegoating baked into fin-de-siecle bohemia. The bourgeois here aren't simply shopkeepers and suburbanites; they're a portable insult, a category that absorbs whatever the speaker fears becoming: tame, respectable, incurious, compromised. Calling them "other people" is a way of laundering anxiety into contempt. It says: my compromises don't count; yours do.

The subtext is also theatrical. Onstage, "the bourgeois" is the audience you need and the audience you dread: the paying crowd whose approval can turn revolt into commodity. Renard's line acknowledges that uneasy symbiosis. The artist flatters himself as outsider while depending on the very class he mocks.

Context matters: late 19th-century France is a culture where "bourgeois" becomes shorthand for a whole regime of taste, politics, and manners - not just wealth, but the aspiration to be untroubled. Renard punctures the pose. The joke lands because it catches a familiar mechanism: othering as self-definition, with class as the most convenient mirror to smash.