"Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation to English of the French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche

Brioche

Brioche is a highly enriched French pastry, whose high egg and butter content give it a rich and tender crumb. It is "light and slightly puffy, more or less fine, according to the proportion of butter and eggs" It has a dark, golden, and flaky crust, frequently accentuated by an egg wash applied...

", supposedly spoken by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread. Since brioche was enriched, as opposed to normal bread, the quote supposedly would reflect the princess's obliviousness to the condition of the people.

While they are commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of these words ever having been uttered by her. They appear in Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...

'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.

So he goes to a fancy pastry shop where only enriched pastries like brioche were sold. Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, seeing as Confessions was, on the whole, a very inaccurate autobiography: "The 'facts' he so frankly admits often emerge, in the light of modern scholarship, to be inaccurate, distorted or non-existent"; and his work is the oldest source for the saying.

In Chinese culture, there is (attributed to Emperor Hui of Jin

Emperor Hui of Jin

Emperor Hui of Jin, sim. ch. 晋惠帝, trad. ch. 晉惠帝, py. jìn huì dì, wg. Chin Hui-ti , personal name Sima Zhong , courtesy name Zhengdu , was the second emperor of the Jin Dynasty...

 by the book Zizhi Tongjian

Zizhi Tongjian

The Zizhi Tongjian was a pioneering reference work in Chinese historiography, published in 1084, under the form of a chronicles. In 1065 CE, Emperor Yingzong of Song ordered the great historian Sima Guang to lead with other scholars such as his chief assistants Liu Shu, Liu Ban and Fan Zuyu, the...

) a similar story that involves rice and meat, instead of bread and cake: "an ancient Chinese emperor who, being told that his subjects didn't have enough rice to eat, replied, 'Why don't they eat meat?'".

Attribution

The quotation, as attributed to Marie Antoinette, was claimed to have been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband Louis XVI. Upon being alerted that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche." Although this anecdote, which first appears in a German children's book in 1931, "Pünktchen und Anton" by Erich Kaestner, was never cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

, it did acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper-classes at that time. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly useful phrase to cite because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 per cent of their income, as opposed to 5 per cent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."

However, there is no evidence that Queen Marie-Antoinette ever uttered this phrase. It was first attributed to her by Alphonse Karr in "Les Guepes" of March, 1843. Other objections to the legend of Marie-Antoinette and the cake/brioche centre on arguments concerning the real queen's personality, internal evidence from members of the French royal family, and the date of the saying's origin. For example, the Queen's best-selling English-language biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser

Antonia Fraser

Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE , née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Antonia Fraser...

, wrote in 2002:

However this attribution also has little credibility for Fraser cites as justification for the alternative attribution to the wife of Louis XIV the memoirs of Louis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau's Confessions were written and whose own memoirs were published much later. He does not mention Marie-Antoinette in his account, but states that the saying was an old legend, and that within the family it was always believed that the saying belonged to the Spanish princess who married Louis XIV in the 1660s. Thus Louis XVIII is as likely as others to have had his recollection affected by the quick spreading and distorting of Rousseau's original remark.

As Fraser points out in her biography, Marie-Antoinette was a generous patroness of charity and moved by the plight of the poor when it was brought to her attention, thus making the statement out-of-character for her. This makes it unlikely that Marie-Antoinette ever said this.

A second point is that there were no actual famine

Famine

A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...

s during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, which occurred, first, in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation (11 June 1775), and again in 1788, the year before the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots, known as the Flour War

Flour War

The Flour War of 1775 was an uprising caused by the excessive price of bread in France before the French Revolution. Early in the season for wheat harvesting and flour production, the government enacted fewer price controls than later in the year, leaving prices to the free market. This caused...

, la guerre des farines, a name given at the time of their occurrence, that took place in the northern, eastern and western parts of France. Letters from Marie-Antoinette to her family in Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 at this time reveal an attitude totally different to the Let them eat cake mentality:-
There is a further problem with the dates surrounding the attribution, in that Marie-Antoinette was not only too young but not even in France when it was first published. Rousseau's Confessions were finished in 1769 and, as Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles from Austria in 1770, at the age of fourteen, the young Austrian Archduchess, unknown to him at the time of writing his work, could not be the "great princess" mentioned by Rousseau.

One factor that is important to understand when studying how this phrase came to be attributed to Marie Antoinette is the increasing unpopularity of the Queen in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. During her marriage to Louis XVI, her perceived frivolousness and her very real extravagance were often cited as factors that only worsened France's dire financial straits. Her Austrian birth and femininity were also a major factor in a country where xenophobia

Xenophobia

Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange". It comes from the Greek words ξένος , meaning "stranger," "foreigner" and φόβος , meaning "fear."...

 and chauvinism

Chauvinism

Chauvinism, in its original and primary meaning, is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a belief in national superiority and glory. It is an eponym of a possibly fictional French soldier Nicolas Chauvin who was credited with many superhuman feats in the Napoleonic wars.By extension it has come...

 still played major parts in national politics. In fact, many anti-monarchists were so convinced (albeit incorrectly) that it was Marie Antoinette who had single-handedly ruined France's finances that they nicknamed her Madame Déficit. In addition, anti-royalists libellists printed stories and articles that attacked the royal family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious events and outright lies. Therefore, with such strong sentiments of dissatisfaction and anger towards the king and queen, it is quite possible that a discontented individual fabricated the scenario and "put the words in the mouth of Marie Antoinette".

Finally, another theory is that, after the revolution, in popular myth, the phrase had been attributed to various princesses of the French royal family, and that the legend "stuck" on Marie-Antoinette because she was, in effect, the last "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had, for example, been attributed to two of Louis XV's daughters, Madame Sophie and Madame Victoire.