Is this Marie Antoinette in reverse?She lost her head for saying:”Let Them Eat Cake”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
RE: She lost her head for saying:”Let Them Eat Cake”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Actually, there is NO record of Marie Antoinette ever saying that. The poor Queen has been portrayed as a cold, heartless bitch throughout history with no historical justification whatsoever.
From Wikipedia:
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’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.”
Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: “Let them eat 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.