Who said let them eat cake quote
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Did Marie Antoinette really say 'Let them eat cake'?
Did Marie Antoinette really utter the infamous words, "Let them eat cake"?
The quick answer to this question is a simple "no." Marie Antoinette, the last pre-revolutionary queen of France, did not say "Let them eat cake" when confronted with news that Parisian peasants were so desperately poor they couldn't afford bread. The better question, perhaps, is: Why do we think she said it?
For background, the quote has been slightly exaggerated in its translation from French to English. Originally, Marie Antoinette was alleged to have said, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," or "Let them eat brioche." While this sweetened bread is more expensive than an average baguette, it isn't exactly the icing-laden, multi-tiered gateaux you might have imagined the queen had in mind. That said, this hyperbolic translation doesn't change the point, at least from a propagandist standpoint; it still suggests that the French queen was arrogant and out-of-touch with the working class. With callous aristocrats like this in charge, things will never improve for the average French citizen. Vive la révolution!
Related: How many French revolutions were there?
But the "brioche" quote is problematic, too, because there's no reliable
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‘If they take no breadstuff, let them eat cake’!
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Let them eat cake
Quote traditionally attributed to Marie Antoinette
This article is about the phrase. For other uses, see Let them eat cake (disambiguation).
"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche",[1] 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.[2] 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 only attributed to Antoinette decades after her death.[3][4][5]
Origins
[edit]The phrase appears in book six of Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in