"Let them eat cake " is the traditional but inaccurate translation of the French phrase "qu'ils mangent de la brioche ." Brioche is actually a type of egg bread enriched with a large proportion of butter, rather than any type of dessert or confection. However this translation inaccuracy is largely academic and does not affect the two main points about the phrase - 1) that cake and bread (and brioche) are made with flour so if flour is in short supply then both bread and cake (and brioche) will be, and (2) that cake (and brioche) is more of a luxury (more expensive) than bread. Therefore the phrase, whether refering to cake or brioche, can only be either crass or ironic. Although commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, others [1] have pointed out that there is no record of these words ever having been spoken, but rather that it actually first appears in The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his putative autobiographical work, where he wrote the following in Book 6 (1736): « 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. J’achetai de la brioche. » "Finally I recalled the worst-recourse of a great princess to whom one said that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche..." Rousseau does not name the "great princess", and it must be noted that he was an eighteenth-century philosophe and fiction writer, not a historian or a journalist, of whom one of his biographers wrote: he was a mentally sick man . . . The conviction of total rectitude was a primary symptom of his illness . . . Evidence is cunningly fabricated, history rewritten and chronology confused with superb ingenuity . . . the truths Rousseau presents often turn out to be half-truths [2] So since he frequently made things up [2] and this anecdote has no other source, this story is also probably his own invention. Suggestively, he also wrote to one grand lady: ‘It is the wealthy class, your class, that steals from mine the bread of my children’ and admitted to ‘a certain resentment against the rich’ [4]

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Attribution

The quote, 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, she is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche." ^[5] This type of callousness on the part of the monarchy has often been referred to in writings about the possible factors that led to the French Revolution. English biographer and author of Marie Antoinette: The Journey , Antonia Fraser, states:

"[Let them eat cake] was said 100 years before her by Maria Theresa of Spain

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Fraser, however, provides no source or any other reason for believing in this attribution either. Moreover, although not published before 1782, Rousseau's Confessions were finished in 1769 and, as Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles from Austria in 1770, at the age of fourteen, it could not have been the young Austrian Archduchess who was the "great princess" mentioned by Rousseau, as she was not yet a great princess and, in any case, was completely unknown to him. ^[7]

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 monarchy as the eve of the French Revolution approached. During her marriage to Louis XVI her frivolousness and extravagance were often cited as factors that only worsened France's dire financial straits. ^[8] In fact, the public was so convinced that it was Marie Antoinette who had single-handedly ruined France's finances that they nicknamed her Madame Déficit . ^[9] In addition, libellists printed stories and articles that attacked the royals with exaggerations, fictitious events and 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 in which Marie Antoinette used the now infamous phrase.

References

1. Fraser, Antonia (Lady), ''Marie Antoinette: The Journey,'' p.xviii, 160; Lever, Évelyne, ''Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France,'' pp. 63-65; Manser, 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. Johnson, Paul, ''Intellectuals'', Harper & Row, 1988, p14f. ISBN 0-06-016050-0
4. Johnson, p. 23f.
5. Fraser, p.135.
6. http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/antoinette.htm
7. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/227600.html
8. Fraser, pp. 473-474.
9. Fraser, pp. 254-255.