YOU CAN EAT CAKE!

Let them eat cake

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What's the origin of the phrase 'Let them eat cake'?

It's a steal with Reservoir Bitches. Let Them Eat Cake , a six-part sitcom set on the eve of the French Revolution, is described as "murder, scandal and lots of rumpo involving mad aristocrats in the court of Louis XVI" and begins next month. It's the French and Saunders Revolution. BBC controller defends his channel at season launch. Of the poor she said: And, if the caloric demands start to get to you, perhaps you should remember some famous historical advice and let them eat cake.

The meaning and origin of the expression: Let them eat cake

Wherever I've been in Africa there's always been air-conditioning, fresh paint and dancing natives; c Let them eat cake. Queen's in a quandary over Bob's Live 8 bash. A second helping was hard to swallow. Vive la French and Saunders. It appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's Confessions , his autobiography whose first six books were written in , when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in The context of Rousseau's account was his desire to have some bread to accompany some wine he had stolen; however, feeling he was 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: Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote , as Confessions cannot be read as strictly factual.

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The quotation, first attributed to Marie Antoinette in , 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 told that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche.

Let them eat cake - Wikipedia

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. However, there is no evidence that Queen Marie Antoinette ever uttered this phrase.

For example, the Queen's English-language biographer wrote in It was a callous and ignorant statement and she, Marie Antoinette, was neither. The attribution also has little credibility.

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 s. 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.

Marie-Antoinette

Fraser 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. A second point is that there were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, which occurred, first, in April—May , a few weeks before the king's coronation 11 June , and again in , the year before the French Revolution.

The shortages led to a series of riots, known as the Flour War , la guerre des farines , a name given at the time of their occurrence, that took place in the northern, eastern and western parts of France. 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. There is a further problem with the dates surrounding the attribution, in that Marie Antoinette was not only too young but also outside France when it was written.

Although only published in , Rousseau's Confessions were finished in Marie Antoinette, aged 14, didn't arrive at Versailles from Austria until She was unknown to him at the time of writing his work so she could not have been the "great princess" mentioned by Rousseau. When investigating how this phrase came to be attributed to Marie Antoinette, it is important to understand 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. 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 and put the words into the mouth of Marie Antoinette.

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