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"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", supposedly spoken by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread. As brioche is a luxury bread enriched with eggs and butter, it would reflect the princess's obliviousness to the nature of a famine.

Although they are commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of these words ever having been uttered by her. They appear in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his putative autobiographical work (completed in 1769, when Marie Antoinette was 13, and only published in 1782), where he wrote the following in Book 6:

Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche."

Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and there is speculation that he invented the anecdote, which has no other sources.

In Chinese culture, there is a variation of this story that involves rice and meat, instead of bread and cake. This was quoted by Emperor Hui of Jin who ruled ancient China in the 3rd Century. When his imperial officials informed him of victims of a famine having no rice to eat, he replied: "If they do not have rice, why not eat meat stew?"

Attribution

The quotation, as attributed to Marie Antoinette, was claimed to have been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband Louis XVI. Upon being alerted that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche." Although the phrase was seldom cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution, it did acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper-classes at that time. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly useful phrase to cite because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 per cent of their income, as opposed to 5 per cent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."

However, there is no evidence that Queen Marie-Antoinette ever uttered this phrase. Objections to the legend of Marie-Antoinette and the cake/brioche centre on arguments concerning the real queen's personality, internal evidence from members of the French royal family, and the date of the saying's origin For example, the Queen's best-selling English-language biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, wrote in 2002:

" was said 100 years before her by Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV. It was a callous and ignorant statement and she, Marie Antoinette, was neither."

Author Vincent Cronin also agrees that Marie-Thérese made the statement, and not Marie Antoinette.

However this attribution also has little credibility for Fraser cites as justification for the alternative attribution to the wife of Louis XIV the memoirs of Louis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau's Confessions were written and whose own memoirs were published much later. He does not mention Marie-Antoinette in his account, but states that the saying was an old legend, and that within the family it was always believed that the saying belonged to the Spanish princess who married Louis XIV in the 1660s. Thus Louis XVIII is as likely as others to have had his recollection affected by the quick spreading and distorting of Rousseau's original remark.

As Fraser points out in her biography, Marie-Antoinette was a generous patroness 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, coupled with the aforementioned evidence that the royal family of France had always believed the saying had originated a century before makes it almost impossible that Marie-Antoinette ever said this.

A second point is that there were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, which occurred, first, in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation (11 June 1775), and again in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots, known as the Flour War, la guerre des farines, a name given at the time of their occurrence, that took place in the northern, eastern and western parts of France. Letters from Marie-Antoinette to her family in Austria at this time reveal an attitude totally different to the Let them eat cake mentality:-

"It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The King seems to understand this truth."

There is a further problem with the dates surrounding the attribution, in that Marie-Antoinette was not only too young but not even in France when it was first published. Rousseau's Confessions were finished in 1769 and, as Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles from Austria in 1770, at the age of fourteen, the young Austrian Archduchess, unknown to him at the time of publication of his work, could not be the "great princess" mentioned by Rousseau. Furthermore, Rousseau had mentioned the phrase in a letter in 1737, long before he included it in his Confessions, and a full eighteen years before Marie-Antoinette had even been born.

One factor that is important to understand when studying how this phrase came to be attributed to Marie Antoinette is the increasing unpopularity of the Queen in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. During her marriage to Louis XVI, her perceived frivolousness and her very real extravagance were often cited as factors that only worsened France's dire financial straits. Her Austrian birth and femininity were also a major factor in a country where xenophobia and chauvinism still played major parts in national politics. In fact, many anti-monarchists were so convinced (albeit incorrectly) that it was Marie Antoinette who had single-handedly ruined France's finances that they nicknamed her Madame Déficit. In addition, anti-royalists libellists printed stories and articles that attacked the royal family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious events and outright lies. Therefore, with such strong sentiments of dissatisfaction and anger towards the king and queen, it is quite possible that a discontented individual fabricated the scenario and put the words in the mouth of Marie Antoinette.

Finally, another theory is that, since the time of Louis XIV, in popular myth, the phrase had been attributed to several princesses of the French royal family, and that the legend "stuck" on Marie-Antoinette because she was, in effect, the last "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had, for example, been attributed to two of Louis XV's daughters, Madame Sophie and Madame Victoire.

References

1. Fraser, Antonia (Lady), Marie Antoinette: The Journey, p.xviii, 160; Lever, Évelyne, Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France, pp. 63–65; Lanser, Susan S., article Eating Cake: The (Ab)uses of Marie-Antoinette, published in Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen, (ed. Dena Goodman) , pp. 273–290.
2. Johnson, Paul, Intellectuals, Harper & Row, 1988, p14f. ISBN 0-06-016050-0
3. http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxletthe.html
4. Fraser, p.135.
5. Lady Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, p. 124n
6. http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/antoinette.htm
7. Vincent Cronin on page 13 in his biography Louis and Antoinette, confirms that Marie-Thérèse did utter the words
8. Fraser, Marie Antoinette, pp. 284–285
9. Lettres de Marie-Antoinette, volume 1, p. 91
10. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/227600.html
11. Fraser, pp. 473–474.
12. This historical phenomenon is fully explored in Eroticism and the Body Politic: The Family Romance of the French Revolution by Lynn Hunt and The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette by Professor Chantal Thomas.
13. Fraser, pp. 254–255.

Bibliography

• Barker, Nancy N., Let Them Eat Cake: The Mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, Historian, Summer 1993, 55:4:709.
• Campion-Vincent, Véronique & Shojaei Kawan, Christine, Marie-Antoinette et son célèbre dire : deux scénographies et deux siècles de désordres, trois niveaux de communication et trois modes accusatoires, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 2002, p. 327 full text.

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