You must shock the bourgeois.

The line is commonly invoked as a manifesto of modern artistic provocation: art should not merely please respectable middle-class taste (“the bourgeois”) but unsettle it, exposing hypocrisy, complacency, and moral self-satisfaction. Read this way, “shock” functions as an aesthetic strategy—forcing an audience to confront what it prefers to ignore (sexuality, vice, poverty, spiritual emptiness) and thereby widening what can be represented in art. At the same time, the slogan can be taken ironically: the desire to scandalize can become a predictable pose, turning rebellion into a new convention. The quote’s enduring appeal lies in how it captures the tension between art as critique and art as performance of transgression.