2. Marie Antoinette Actually Was Deeply Concerned About France’s Lower Classes
Saying the lines, “Let them eat cake!” would have been highly uncharacteristic for Marie Antoinette, who was entirely engaged in charitable causes that benefitted France’s large peasant population. Though she did partake of an unsustainably lavish lifestyle, as did her husband and centuries of kings and queens before her, she routinely donated towards charitable causes. Her bedchamber maid described her as being a generous soul who hated to miss an opportunity to do good. She would regularly dress as a milkmaid and milk the goats that she kept at Versailles when she found royal life to be too suffocating.
Similar to the “milkmaid charade,” Hillary got much flak for playing dominos and dancing with impoverished populations in places like Harlem during her 2016 presidential campaign. Many people felt that it was an act that hid the fact that she, like Marie Antoinette, was entirely out of touch with the American people. However, in 1994, the then-first lady presented a healthcare reform plan that addressed the nation’s broken system 15 years before Obamacare. When she was campaigning with the public for acceptance of the reform plan, resistance and vitriol were so intense that she had to wear a bulletproof vest. Both women had the public’s interest in mind throughout their careers; however, history has remembered them less than favorably.