Why did Marie Antoinette supposidly say, “Let them eat cake”?
In fact historians say that she never said it. It was propaganda from those who wanted to bring down the absolute monarchy of the French king. Marie Antoinette made an excellent target for the revolutionaries. She was a foreigner (she was Austrian) well known for her extravagant spending, ridiculed for her little play toy farm (at Versailles) while peasants survived with difficulty. That little bit about ‘let them eat cake’ while people were going hungry because there wasn’t enough bread and the little there was had become too expensive (bread was the staple food) was calculated to goad the French people to a fury, showing how indifferent to the people she was. It worked.
