Let them eat cake

"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche",[1] spoken in the 17th or 18th century by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread. This phrase is more accurately translated as "Let them eat brioche", as the original French phrase contains no mention of cake (gâteau). Brioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, was considered at the time to be a luxury food. The quotation in context would thus reflect either the princess's disregard for the peasants or her poor understanding of their situation, if not both.

This article is about the phrase. For other uses, see Let them eat cake (disambiguation).

The phrase is commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette.

While the phrase is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no reliable record of her having said it.[2]

A brioche

Attribution

The phrase was first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789, supposedly having been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI.

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 disdain the upper classes of the Ancien Régime as oblivious and selfish. 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 percent of their income, as opposed to 5 percent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."[3]

The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography (whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in 1782). In the book 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":[4]

At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches."

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions is not considered to be entirely factual.[5]

The phrase was attributed to Marie Antoinette by Alphonse Karr in Les Guêpes of March 1843.[6] 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. To wit, the Queen's English-language biographer wrote in 2002:[7]

[Let them eat brioche] 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.

— Antonia Fraser, 2002 Edinburgh Book Fair

In attempting to justify an alternative attribution of the phrase to the wife of Louis XIV, Fraser cites 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 story was an old legend and that the family always believed a Spanish princess who married Louis XIV in the 1660s had originated the phrase. 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.

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.[8] This makes it even more unlikely that Marie Antoinette ever said the phrase.

A second consideration is that there were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, the first of which occurred in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation on 11 June 1775, and the second in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots that took place in the northern, eastern and western parts of France, known as the Flour War, la guerre des farines, a name given at the time of the conflict. Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family in Austria at this time reveal an attitude largely contrary to the spirit of Let them eat brioche:[9]

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.

— Marie Antoinette

Another problem with the dates surrounding the attribution is that when the phrase first appeared, Marie Antoinette was not only too young but living outside France as well. Although published in 1782, Rousseau's Confessions were 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.[10]

The increasing unpopularity of the Queen in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution has 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.[11] Her Austrian birth and her gender also diminished her credibility further in a country where xenophobia and chauvinism were beginning to exert major influence in national politics.[12] While the causes of France’s economic woes extended far beyond the royal family’s spending alone, many anti-monarchists were nevertheless so convinced that it was Marie Antoinette who had single-handedly ruined France's finances that they nicknamed her Madame Déficit.[13] In addition, anti-royalist libellistes printed stories and articles that attacked her family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious events, and outright lies. Therefore, in a political climate marked by 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 into the mouth of Marie Antoinette to slander her.

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 "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had also been previously attributed to two of Louis XV’s daughters: Madame Sophie and Madame Victoire.

In his 1853 novel Ange Pitou, Alexandre Dumas attributes the quote to one of Marie Antoinette's favourites, the Duchess of Polignac.

Similar phrases

The Book of Jin, a 7th-century chronicle of the Chinese Jin Dynasty, reports that when Emperor Hui (259–307) of Western Jin was told that his people were starving because there was no rice, he said, "Why don't they eat (ground) meat?" (何不食肉糜), showing his incompetence.[14][15]

See also

• Noblesse oblige

References

Notes

1. "Yandex.Translate – EN-FR "Let them eat brioche"". translate.yandex.com. Retrieved 2019-12-20.
2. Fraser, Antonia (2002). Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Anchor. pp. xviii, 160. ISBN 978-0385489492.; Lever, Évelyne; Temerson, Catherine (2000). Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France. St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 63–65. ISBN 978-0312283339.; Lanser, Susan S. (2003). "Eating Cake: The (Ab)uses of Marie-Antoinette". In Goodman, Dena; Kaiser, Thomas E. (eds.). Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen. Routledge. pp. 273–290. ISBN 978-0415933957.
3. Lady Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, p. 124.
4. Translated from Rousseau (trans. Angela Scholar), Jean-Jacques (2000). Confessions. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 262. 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.
5. Johnson, Paul (1990). Intellectuals. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 17–18. ISBN 9780060916572. The 'facts' he so frankly admits often emerge, in the light of modern scholarship, to be inaccurate, distorted or non-existent.
6. 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, full text
7. "Is That Infamous Marie Antoinette Quote You Know a Myth?".
8. Fraser, Marie Antoinette, pp. 284–285
9. Lettres De Marie-Antoinette (in French). 1. Nabu Press. 2012. p. 91. ISBN 978-1278509648.
10. "Let them eat cake". The Phrase Finder. Retrieved 18 September 2012.
11. Fraser, pp. 473–474.
12. This historical phenomenon is fully explored in Hunt, Lynn, ed. (1990). Eroticism and the Body Politic. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0801840272. and Thomas, Chantal (2001). The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette. Zone Books. ISBN 978-0942299403.
13. Fraser, pp. 254–255.
14. Book of Jin, Volume 4
15. Tian Chi, quoted in Joshua A. Fogel, Peter Gue Zarrow, Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920, 1997, ISBN 0765600986, p. 173

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 and 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