"Let them eat cake" is a slander against Marie-Antoinette, and an especially heinous one because she took a very active role in trying to relieve the famine in France.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributed the words to "a great princess" in his "Confessions" which was written about three years before Marie-Antoinette arrived in France in 1770. So she couldn't have been the original source of the quote.
The situation gets more interesting than that. Under French law, bakers were obliged to sell certain bread products at a fixed price. To prevent the obvious trick of baking only a few cheap rolls then using the bulk of the flour to make expensive products, the law obligated the bakers to sell more expensive products at the cheaper price if the cheap rolls ran out.
"Let them eat cake" was far from a sign of indifference or ignorance, it was a very humanitarian call: the bread shortage could be alleviated if the law was enforced against profiteering bakers.
But alas history is written by the victors, and the French Revolutionaries had a vested interest in making Marie-Antoinette seem foolish and callous.
Slashdot Mirror
"Let them eat cake" is a slander against Marie-Antoinette, and an especially heinous one because she took a very active role in trying to relieve the famine in France.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributed the words to "a great princess" in his "Confessions" which was written about three years before Marie-Antoinette arrived in France in 1770. So she couldn't have been the original source of the quote.
The situation gets more interesting than that. Under French law, bakers were obliged to sell certain bread products at a fixed price. To prevent the obvious trick of baking only a few cheap rolls then using the bulk of the flour to make expensive products, the law obligated the bakers to sell more expensive products at the cheaper price if the cheap rolls ran out.
"Let them eat cake" was far from a sign of indifference or ignorance, it was a very humanitarian call: the bread shortage could be alleviated if the law was enforced against profiteering bakers.
But alas history is written by the victors, and the French Revolutionaries had a vested interest in making Marie-Antoinette seem foolish and callous.
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Steven