"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", supposedly spoken by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread. Since brioche was enriched with butter and eggs, as opposed to ordinary bread, the quote supposedly would reflect the princess's obliviousness to the condition of the people.
While it is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of this phrase ever having been uttered by her. It appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography (whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in 1782). The context of Rousseau's account was his desire for bread, to accompany some wine he had stolen; however, in feeling he was too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he thus recollected the words of a "great princess". As he wrote in Book 6:
Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche."Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions was, on the whole, a very unreliable autobiography.
Zhu Muzhi, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, asserts that Rousseau's version is an alteration of a much older anecdote: "An ancient Chinese emperor who, being told that his subjects didn't have enough rice to eat, replied, 'Why don't they eat meat?'" That emperor was recorded by historians as Emperor Hui of Jin.
Read more about Let Them Eat Cake: Attribution
Famous quotes containing the words eat and/or cake:
“Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
—Bible: Hebrew Genesis 1:29.
But in a later context, God told the disgraced Adam, “and thou shalt eat the herb of the field” (Genesis 3:18)
“The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)