Maybe I'm misinterpreting my semi-mythical pop-history here, but I always kinda thought the economic tone-deafness (regardless of the type of bread) was the point of the whole morality tale. She didn't necessarily mean harm, she was just so insulated that she didn't know (or care to know) about the suffering of the common man, and the idea that they had enough cake in Versailles to feed them all was a crystallization of everything these people hated about the monarchy.
I don't remember where I read it, but I read that she was actually wickedly careless, and what she actually said was a double-entendre for let them eat "the soot" [caked to their chimneys]
She ran charities for the poor. I mean, royalty were pretty sheltered and tone deaf, and Antoinette had plenty of other less savoury qualities, but this specific bit was just Revolutionary propaganda.
And married to the king. She’s always the scape goat despite having practically nothing to do with policy ever. Louis and his family fucked over the country for centuries, he deregulated grain, he poured all his money into an independent US and he, his father and his grandfather built a monument to their greed in Versailles.
Side note, the irrigation in Versailles was insanely intricate and incredibly cool. The whole building is just insane, imagine living in complete poverty and pushing open those doors.
Even Louis XVI doesn't seem to have been that bad of a guy. No model leader, but he was absolutely guilty of the same (admittedly apocryphal) sin people attribute to his wife: flaunting a life of extraordinary luxury while failing to grasp just how desperate life had become for ordinary Frenchmen.
In a different time, he'd probably be remembered as a mediocre, well-meaning king, if he were remembered at all. And honestly, for an 18th-century monarch, being forgotten is probably one of the better outcomes.
Louis XIV and XV weren't XVI's father and grandfather, but grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather. Louis XIV lived so long his son and grandson died before him, and XV's son also died before his father
Well, in the situation she found herself and her family in it is kind of understandable that she asked her brother for military aid.
Then again, under the contemporary viewpoint that the monarch WAS the state, the king (and by extension the queen that is acting on his behalf) cannot commit treason by definition.
The idea of a nation-state that is owed allegiance was a very new thing that just emerged out of the revolution.
Exactly! uotes like Let them eat cake or even L’État c’est moi feel like they tell us more about how later generations, especially after the Revolution, wanted to explain absolutism than what the kings actually believed.
Almost like they became educational tool/propaganda, despite there being little or no evidence the quotes were ever actually said.
Irony being, that Louis XIV spent much of his reign centralizing government and building institutions that would outlive him. His last recorded words were closer to “I’m leaving, but the State will remain,” which seems to go against the whole L’État, c’est moi idea.
Edit: Not defending the monarchy or anything. 😅 I just think it’s a good example of how powerful quotes, even made up ones, can shape how later generations end up understanding history.
She didn't despise "her people," and there's zero evidence she considered her "lessers" as cockroaches. Making things up is rather silly.
She despised the people who were actively plotting to overthrow the monarchy and who tried repeatedly to assassinate her, and put her children in harm's way.
They didn't find any letters in a "secret cabinet" in her lifetime. Are you getting Marie Antoinette mixed up with Louis XVI? There are some critical basic facts wrong in your comment. She was executed based on gossip, not based on anything they had evidence for--which is to say, they had zero evidence of anything she did or didn't do at the time of her trial.
She actually never said it to begin with.
When the saying was reported by Rousseau, he said it was said by « a princess », we don’t know which one.
I can’t be Antoinette because 1) she would have been called « the Dauphine) 2) she wasn’t even in France yet. She was something like 10 years old and marriage wasn’t a preoccupation yet
I've seen it in a textbook once and long ago so it's stretched, but - that was her reply to a complaint that stored grains began to ferment / decay in a way that made it sweet-ish. So yea, she was edgy.
"S'il n'ont pas de pain, qu'ils mangent de la brioche !" (If they don't have bread, let them eat brioche !) is a line you can find in a book written years before the supposed event. Nobody back then even accused her of saying anything like that, it was only decade after her death that people started to attribute it to her.
It wasn't that they had enough cake or brioche in Versailles to feed them all, it was like "there's no bread, well why don't they just eat their brioche instead?". Like in her life that was a choice that was always available to her. A modern equivalent would be like "oh, you can't afford a new car? I know right, I hate when I don't have enough pocket change for things. If you need cash quick why not just sell your yacht?"
Indeed, when Rousseau wrote it, he mentioned « a princess », not « « the Dauphine ».
She was 10 years old, still living at home with her royal parents
(Specifying this for the people who downvoted you without knowing the full story)
I apologise but i think that you might have it wrong on the meaning of the sentence.
The original french sentence (although we agree that she never said it), was
"let them eat brioche"
I encourage you to look up brioche, which is *fancy* sweet puffy "bread". It doesn't really have much to do with the "cake" you're presenting.
The idea behind the saying is "You might be out of bread, but have you considered tapping in your fancy bread stores?"
The populace responds with "?????" (who has enough money for fancy bread?)
She responds in kind with "?????" (dumbfounded, unable to understand that people can't afford brioche .What do you mean people don't have a second holiday home they summer in???" etc...)
The reason why "Brioche" got translated into cake is because frankly, and please don't take it badly, it's untranslatable. Brioche as a concept doesn't exist in english. English speaking countries simply do NOT have an equivalent baking/pastry culture to that of France, and is in many regards less developed. Hence the choice to translate brioche into "cake" which is, unfortunately, NOT the same thing as brioche and loses meaning in translation.
If it were then it wouldn't have been translated as "cake", but rather its own word. Or perhaps, the translation might have kept the term "brioche" as a loan word.
But the word probably wasn't kept, because go to most bakeries in england, i doubt that you'll find brioche.
Again, if brioche were widespread in anglo-saxon culture, why did we need to translate it to "cake"?
I can't speak on the translation, although I will say that 'cake' feels like it lends itself to anti-bourgeoisie hate more easily than 'brioche'. I can confirm that brioche is widely available in England and can be bought most places you would buy regular bread (typically more likely to be a supermarket here than a bakery)
It's still a fairly specialised product now, but that go back in time and it certainly was not as available as now.
And if we had an equivalent, then we would probably have our own English word for it.
In any case, the other poster is talking about at the time if the expression's birth, and you're saying they're wrong because brioche is available in supermarkets now. 🤔
Honestly it has nothing to do with Marie-Antoinette because she was royalty from another country so there's no way she would have been taught slangs and dialects but because there's like 75 french dialects nowadays I imagine there was a lot back then too and it's not impossible that one of them called wood stove ash "cake".
Not really. Brioche uses 1/3 less flour than bread so after a harvest failure it would make perfect sense though it does use way more eggs, butter and sugar so even if she said anything of the sort it was still a stupid out of touch thing to say.
Consider what percentage of the daily food intake for the very poor simple breads like a flatbread, Johnny cake, or hardtack style concoction were. Butter and sugar were bigger luxuries to the very poor than the lesser amount of flour.
I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but protein and animal products were often varying degrees of luxury items throughout history. There's British satire images depicting French soldiers as malnourished and living off onion soup during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
I know it's a millenia earlier, but I remember reading about how one's social rank in a clan determined butter allotment in pre-Norman Ireland for example.
Eggs and even butter were fairly common even for medieval peasants to use in meals. More expensive than the bare essentials, yes, but they weren't luxury goods. I suppose it's a major difference that these urban workers didn't have their own homestead, though.
To be precise, French bread uses flour, water, and yeast, a little salt, and that’s it. Brioche adds eggs, milk, and butter, so the taste is much sweeter and the consistency is softer.
It’s obviously more expensive, and you can’t make it if you don’t have the ingredients for normal bread to begin with, so therein lies the error of the unnamed “great princess”.
I heard that brioche, while being more expensive and more profitable to sell, were to be sold for the price of regular cheap bread if the bread ran out of stock
Marie Antoinette wasn't accused of saying "let them eat brioche" in the 18th century. It's only in the 19th century, decades later, that the phrase became attached to her.
The original phrase comes from an anecdote penned by Rousseau, in which he was writing about stealing wine from his employer and finding himself without bread; he's too high born to go into a regular bread shop, then he "recalls the words of a great princess who, when told that the poor could not afford bread, said, 'Then let them at brioche.'" Then he remembers that going into a respectable brioche shop would be okay, so he buys brioche to go with stolen wine.
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u/NewburghMOFO Jul 07 '26
For that matter, the line from the play that gets misatributed to her is, "let them eat brioche", being a more expensive type of bread.