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Still life with Brioche, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, 1763

"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "qu'ils mangent de la brioche", supposedly said by a French 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 commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette,^[1] there is no record of these words ever having been uttered by her; they first appear in The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his putative autobiographical work (completed in 1769, when Marie Antoinette was 13), 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 last resort 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.^[2]

[edit] Attribution

The quotation, as attributed to Marie Antoinette, was claimed to have been shouted 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."^[3] 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."^[4]

However, it is now considered by most historians to be a "chestnut" - that is something wrongfully attributed. There is no evidence that Queen Marie-Antoinette ever uttered this phrase and substantial evidence that she did not. 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, the date of the saying's origin and its frequent citation in works pre-dating Marie-Antoinette's life. For example, the Queen's best-selling English-language biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, wrote in 2002 :-

"[Let them eat cake] 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."^[5]

Author Vincent Cronin also confirms that Marie Thérese made the statement, and not Marie Antoinette. ^[6]

Fraser cites as justification for the alternative attribution to the wife of Louis XIV the memoirs of Louis XVIII, who was only 14 when Rousseau's confessions were written and whose 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.

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. ^[7] 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 moments of serious bread shortages, which occurred around the time of the king's coronation and again in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. The Coronation-era shortages led to a series of riots in Paris, which are now known by historians as "the Flour Wars". 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."^[8]

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 into general circulation. 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.^[9] 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[10] Her Austrian birth and femininity were also a major factor in a country where xenophobia and chauvinism still played major parts in national politics.^[11] 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.^[12] 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 in which Marie Antoinette used the now infamous phrase.

Finally, another theory is that, since the time of Louis XIV, the phrase had been attributed to many of the first ladies of the French royal family in popular myth and that the legend "stuck" on Marie-Antoinette because she was, in effect, the last of the first ladies of Versailles thanks to the Revolution. The myth had, for example, been attributed to two of Louis XV's daughters, Princess Sophie and Princess Victoire in the previous generation.

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• Nancy N. Barker, "'Let Them Eat Cake': The Mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution", Historian 55:4:709 (Summer 1993).
• Véronique Campion-Vincent et Christine Shojaei Kawan, "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 327 (2002) full text.