Marie Antoinette said 'let them eat cake' when told the peasants of France had no bread. The line captured everything wrong with the French monarchy in the 1780s: a queen so insulated from reality that she didn't know the difference between bread and cake, dropped on a population starving in the streets. The line sealed her fate, contributed to the Revolution, and put her on the guillotine in 1793. It is in every history textbook from Year 6 onwards.
She didn't say it. The line ('qu'ils mangent de la brioche') first appears in print in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'Confessions,' Book 6, written between 1765 and 1770, and refers to 'a great princess' who said it. Rousseau's account predates Marie Antoinette's arrival in France by several years (she came to Versailles in 1770 as a 14-year-old) and the brioche-comment princess is described as already old at the time the line was supposedly uttered. Marie Antoinette would have been a child, in Austria, when Rousseau heard or invented the anecdote. The attribution to her was a later 19th-century smear, propagated through revolutionary pamphlets and then absorbed into general history. Marie Antoinette had real failings (extravagance, political tone-deafness, a fatal mishandling of the diamond necklace affair). Inventing this quote was not one of them. She lost her head for many things. This was not one. The princess in Rousseau, if she ever existed, has been forgotten. The substitute has been on every textbook page for 200 years.
Reception
Sources
- Wikipedia: Let Them Eat Cake PRIMARY
- Snopes: Let Them Eat Cake REFERENCE