I shouldn’t try to get fancy in a language that I don’t know well! I wanted to slip in ecouter les bourgeoisie in the previous item. It didn’t seem right, so I googled. Nothing at all. Finally, after rolling the phrase around in my mind, the right phrase came in.
Epater les bourgeoisie.
Looking it up, the meaning is right but the time is wrong. The phrase was popularized by the post-WW1 avant garde, not by the French Revolution.
Ecouter simply means listen, same word as Spanish escuchar. Both are from Latin auscultare, an abbreviated compound of auris, ear, and possibly clinare, lean or incline. (Romans, friends, countrymen! Bend me your ears!) Auscultation is only used medically in English, listen through a stethoscope.
Listen to the bourgeoisie would have been exactly backwards!
Epater has an interesting origin. It comes from patte, paw, and seems to mean something like declaw; but it was used figuratively as astonish or shock or show off.
Polistra's Mill 