Bobo (socio-economic group)

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Bobo is a portmanteau used to describe the socio-economic bourgeois-bohemian group in France. The geographer Christophe Guilluy has used the term to describe France's elite class, whom he accuses of being responsible for many of France's current problems. The term was introduced into the English language by the cultural commentator David Brooks to describe the 1990s descendants of the yuppies in the book Bobos in Paradise (2000). Brooks describes Bobos as "highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success". Brooks describes the relation between the two cultural groups in Paris starting in the 1820s when the Bourgeoisie had "displaced the aristocracy as the moving group in society" and the bohemians "really rose up" to express their disgust, expressed by Stendhal: "Hatred of the bourgeoisie is the beginning of all virtues, and they make him want to weep and vomit at the same time." According...

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