"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", said to have been spoken in the 18th century by "a great princess" upon being told that the peasants had no bread. The French phrase mentions brioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, considered a luxury food. The quote is taken to reflect either the princess's frivolous disregard for the starving peasants or her poor understanding of their plight.
Although the phrase is conventionally attributed to Marie Antoinette, there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché. The phrase can actually be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions in 1765, 24 years prior to the French Revolution, and when Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France. The phrase was not attributed to Antoinette until decades after her death.
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Origins
The phrase appears in book six of Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. 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":
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."
Rousseau does not name the "great princess", and he may have invented the anecdote altogether, as the Confessions is not considered entirely factual.
Attribution to Marie Antoinette
The phrase is alleged to have been said by Marie Antoinette, queen consort of France, during one of the bread shortages during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI. However, it was not attributed to her until half a century after her death. Anti-monarchists during the French Revolution never cited this anecdote, but it nevertheless acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to denounce the upper classes of the Ancien Régime as oblivious and rapacious. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly powerful phrase 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."
Rousseau's first six books were written in 1765, when Antoinette was nine years of age, and published when she was 26, eight years after she became queen.
The increasing unpopularity of Antoinette in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution 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. Her Austrian birth and her sex also diminished her credibility further in a country where xenophobia and chauvinism were beginning to exert major influence in national politics. While the causes of France's economic woes extended far beyond the royal family's spending, anti-monarchist polemics demonized Antoinette as Madame Déficit, who had single-handedly ruined France's finances.
The phrase was attributed to Antoinette by Alphonse Karr in Les Guêpes of March 1843.[Note a]
Objections to the legend of 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. According to Antonia Fraser, the notorious story of the ignorant princess was first said 100 years before Antoinette in relation to Maria Theresa, the wife of Louis XIV, citing the memoirs of Louis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau's Confessions were written and whose own memoirs were published much later. Louis XVIII does not mention Antoinette in his account, but says that the story was an old legend and that the family always believed that Maria Theresa had originated the phrase.
Other attributions
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 Antoinette because she was in effect the last and best-remembered "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 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 porridge with (ground) meat?" (何不食肉糜), showing his unfitness.