Myth 4) Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake”
Upon learning about yet another bread shortage amongst the French peasantry, the Queen of Versailles, Marie Antoinette, is supposed to have exclaimed, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche“. It’s a wonderful example of an out-of-touch aristocrat completely missing the point, musing over why the starving masses don’t trade in their basic nourishment for a more luxurious egg and butter-based delicacy. The idea that these words were uttered by Marie Antoinette is also completely and utterly false.
The phrase first appears in the autobiography of the influential political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He attributes the words to une grande princesse, “a great princess”. But the fact that Rousseau wrote this part of his biography in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was just nine years old, makes her an unlikely candidate for the princess in question. At least one hopes.
Some historians have suggested that if these words were ever uttered at all, they were done so by a princess who lived around 100 years earlier, the wife and first cousin of “the Sun King” Louis XIV, Marie-Therese. But in trying to pin them on a historical figure, these historians aren’t being skeptical enough about their sources. Rousseau’s autobiography has been proven to be fundamentally unreliable, and later writers were unable to agree on which woman was supposed to have suggested the French peasantry munch on brioche.
Another problem with the quote is that during the reign of Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis XVI, there were in fact no famines, only bread shortages. The first happened before his coronation in 1775, while the second broke out in 1788, the year before the Revolution. That people could have put these words in her mouth in the months leading up to the Revolution is possible, given the tattered state of her public image.
While Marie Antoinette may not have been insensitive and ignorant, she was opulent and frivolous. This was especially problematic considering the dire financial straits France found itself in during the months leading up to the Revolution, and it earned the queen the epithet Madame Déficit. The fact that she was Austrian by birth didn’t help her cause either, especially given levels of xenophobic chauvinism sweeping the nation at the time.
We often hear that history is written by the victors, and Marie Antoinette clearly sat on the losing side of the French Revolution. This explains why later pro-revolutionary historians knowingly—and erroneously—ascribed this phrase to her: partly to justify her execution at the guillotine, partly to blacken her image as someone whose extravagant spending exaggerated the plight of the poor, ideally to do both.