To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

Jules Renard (1864–1910), a French novelist and diarist associated with fin-de-siècle literary circles, was a sharp observer of social posturing and artistic affectation. The remark is typically attributed to his journal, where he recorded aphorisms and judgments about writers, critics, and the manners of his time. In late-19th-century France, “bourgeois” was often used pejoratively by bohemians and avant-garde artists to denounce conventional taste, material comfort, and social conformity. Renard’s epigram turns that fashionable disdain back on the speaker, suggesting that the pose of anti-bourgeois “horror” can itself be a predictable, status-seeking reflex within bourgeois culture.

Renard’s line is a paradox meant to puncture moral and aesthetic snobbery. If “bourgeois” names a mindset of conformity and self-satisfaction, then loudly advertising one’s “horror” of the bourgeois can become another form of conformity—an approved gesture within certain milieus. The quote implies that identity built on negation (“I am not like them”) can be as socially scripted as the thing it rejects. It also critiques the way cultural elites sometimes use contempt for the middle class as a badge of refinement, turning rebellion into a convention. In short, Renard warns that disdain can be a mirror: the anti-bourgeois pose may reproduce bourgeois habits of judgment and belonging.