Although anti-monarchists never cited the anecdote during the French Revolution, it acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to denounce the upper classes of the Ancien Régime as oblivious and rapacious. But it was not attributed to her until half a century later. The phrase was supposedly said by Marie Antoinette in 1789, during one of the famines in France during the reign of her husband, King Louis XVI. Rousseau does not name the 'great princess', and he may have invented the anecdote altogether, as the Confessions is not considered entirely factual. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a 'great princess': Īt length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: 'Then let them eat brioches.' Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. While the phrase is commonly attributed to Marie Antoinette, it was coined by 1765, when she was 9 years old and had never been to France, and it was only attributed to her decades after her death. The quote is taken to reflect either the princess's frivolous disregard for the starving peasants or her poor understanding of their plight. The French phrase mentions brioche, a bread enriched with butter and eggs, considered a luxury food. ' Let them eat cake' is the traditional translation of the French phrase ' Qu'ils mangent de la brioche', said to have been spoken in the 18th century by 'a great princess' upon being told that the peasants had no bread.

Marie Antoinette, to whom ' qu'ils mangent de la brioche' is traditionally, but incorrectly, attributed

Marie antoinette by antonia fraser