What did Marie Antoinette mean when she said, “Let them eat cake”?
While Marie Antoinette was certainly enough of a bubblehead to have said the phrase in question, there is no evidence that she actually did so, and in any case she did not originate it. The peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions it in his Confessions in connection with an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while working as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up something to eat along with it.) He concludes thusly: “Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: ‘Well, let them eat cake.'” Now, J.-J. may have been embroidering this yarn with a line he had really heard many years later. But even so, at the time he was writing–early 1766–Marie Antoinette was only ten years old and still four years away from her marriage to the future Louis XVI. Wri
