Let them eat cake

"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche",said to have been spoken in the 18th century by "a great princess" upon being told that thepeasantshad no bread. The French phrase mentionsbrioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, considered a luxury food. The quote is taken to reflect either the princess's frivolous disregard for the starving peasants or her poor understanding of their plight.
Although the phrase is conventionally attributed toMarie Antoinette, there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché.The phrase can actually be traced back toJean-Jacques Rousseau'sConfessionsin 1765, 24 years prior to theFrench Revolution, and when Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France. The phrase was only attributed to Antoinette decades after her death.
The phrase appears in book six of Rousseau's autobiographicalConfessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess":
Rousseau does not name the "great princess", and he may have invented the anecdote altogether, as theConfessionsis not considered entirely factual.
The phrase was supposedly said by Marie Antoinette in 1789, during one of the bread shortages in France during the reign of her husband,King Louis XVI. But it was not attributed to her until half a century later. Although anti-monarchists never cited the anecdote during the French Revolution, it acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to denounce the upper classes of theAncien Régimeas oblivious and rapacious. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly powerful phrase because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 percent of their income, as opposed to 5 percent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."
Rousseau's first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published when she was 26, eight years after she became queen.
The increasing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution also likely influenced many to attribute the phrase to her. During her marriage to Louis XVI, her critics often cited her perceived frivolousness and very real extravagance as factors that significantly worsened France's dire financial straits.Her Austrian birth and her sex also diminished her credibility further in a country wherexenophobiaandchauvinismwere beginning to exert major influence in national politics.While the causes of France's economic woes extended far beyond the royal family's spending, anti-monarchist polemics demonized Marie Antoinette asMadame Déficit, who had single-handedly ruined France's finances.Theselibellistesprinted stories and articles vilifying her family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious anecdotes, and outright lies. In the tempestuous political climate, it would have been a natural slander to put the famous words into the mouth of the widely scorned queen.
The phrase was attributed to Marie Antoinette byAlphonse KarrinLes Guêpesof March 1843.
Objections to the legend of Marie Antoinette and the comment centre on arguments concerning the Queen's personality, internal evidence from members of the French royal family and the date of the saying's origin. According toAntonia Fraser, the notorious story of the ignorant princess was first said 100 yearsbeforeMarie Antoinette in relation toMaria Theresa, the wife ofLouis XIV, citing the memoirs ofLouis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau'sConfessionswere written and whose own memoirs were published much later.Louis XVIII does not mention Marie Antoinette in his account, but says that the story was an old legend and that the family always believed that Maria Theresa had originated the phrase. However, Louis XVIII is as likely as others to have had his recollection affected by the quick spreading and distorting of Rousseau's original remark.
Fraser also points out in her biography that Marie Antoinette was a generous patron of charity and moved by the plight of the poor when it was brought to her attention, thus making the statement out of character for her.This makes it even more unlikely that Marie Antoinette ever said the phrase.
A second consideration is that there were no actualfaminesduring the reign ofLouis XVIand only two incidents of serious bread shortages, the first in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king'scoronation on 11 June 1775, and the second in 1788, the year before theFrench Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots that took place in northern, eastern and western France, known at the time as theFlour War(guerre des farines). Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family inAustriaat this time reveal an attitude largely contrary to the spirit ofLet them eat brioche:
Another problem with the dates surrounding the attribution is that when the phrase first appeared, Marie Antoinette was not only too young to have said it, but living outside France as well. Although published in 1782, Rousseau'sConfessionswere finished thirteen years prior in 1769. Marie Antoinette, only fourteen years old at the time, would not arrive at Versailles from Austria until 1770. Since she was completely unknown to him at the time of writing, she could not have possibly been the "great princess" he mentioned.
Another hypothesis is that after the revolution, the phrase, which was initially attributed to a great variety of princesses of the French royal family, eventually stuck on Marie Antoinette because she was in effect the last and best-remembered "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had also been previously attributed to two ofLouis XV’s daughters:Madame SophieandMadame Victoire.
In his 1853 novelAnge Pitou,Alexandre Dumasattributes the quote to one of Marie Antoinette's favourites, theDuchess of Polignac.
TheBook of Jin, a 7th-century chronicle of the ChineseJin Dynasty, reports that whenEmperor Hui(259–307) ofWestern Jinwas told that his people were starving because there was no rice, he said, "Why don't they eat porridge with(ground) meat?" (何不食肉糜), showing his unfitness.