"Let them eat cake."?

Question

1. Who said it?
2. What was the context?
3. What does it mean? (literally)

Answer 1

1. Supposedly, French noblewoman Marie Antoinette.
2. The peasants were rebelling, partly because the nobles took everything of value for themselves. They were starving. Marie was told that the peasants had no bread, and she reportedly made her famous remark.
3. It means that she was so out of touch with the lives of the people that since she saw no poverty, she couldn't conceive that there was any, despite the opulence of her own life. She believed that her live of privilege came at no cost.

Answer 2

Dear Yahoo!:
Who said, "Let them eat cake"?
Boulanger


Dear Boulanger:
We're not entirely sure who said "Let them eat cake," but we can tell you that it wasn't Marie Antoinette. This flippant phrase about consuming pastry is commonly attributed to the frivolous queen in the days leading up to the French Revolution. Supposedly, she spoke these words upon hearing how the peasantry had no bread to eat. But biographers and historians have found no evidence that Marie uttered these words or anything like them.
Our old pal Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope explains the quotation was first written by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Confessions. Actually, Rousseau wrote "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," which essentially means "let them eat a type of egg-based bread" (not quite cake, but still a bit extravagant). Rousseau claimed that "a great princess" told the peasants to eat cake/brioche when she heard they had no bread.

But Rousseau wrote this in early 1766, when Marie Antoinette was only 10 years old, still living in her native Austria and not yet married to King Louis XVI. So it's highly unlikely that Marie uttered the pompous phrase. Perhaps Rousseau invented them to illustrate the divide between royalty and the poor -- which is certainly how the phrase has been used ever since.

However, "Let them eat brioche" isn't quite as cold a sentiment as you might imagine. At the time, French law required bakers to sell fancy breads at the same low price as the plain breads if they ran out of the latter. The goal was to prevent bakers from making very little cheap bread and then profiting off the fancy, expensive bread. Whoever really said "Let them eat brioche" may have meant that the bakery laws should be enforced so the poor could eat the fancy bread if there wasn't enough plain bread to go around.

A recent biographer claims that "Let them eat cake" was actually spoken by Marie-Therese, wife of France's Louis XIV, 100 years before Marie Antoinette, but we couldn't find anything online to corroborate this. Ultimately, we will probably never know who uttered this infamous phrase.

Answer 3

While Marie Antoinette was certainly enough of a bubblehead to have said the phrase in question, there is no evidence that she actually did so, and in any case she did not originate it. The peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions it in his Confessions in connection with an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while working as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up something to eat along with it.) He concludes thusly: "Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: 'Well, let them eat cake.'"

Answer 4

I can't help you with the names of French Royalty but the French people were starving on the streets while the French upper classes were living priveledged lives. When someone told the queen that the people didn't have bread to eat, she said let them eat cake as if they should just eat something else. The point is that the queen had no idea how bad it was for the population. This lead to the French Revolution. That's what I know!

Answer 5

Marie Antoinette people couldnt afford bread so she said let them eat cake, and it literally means let them eat cake. People dispute however if she actually said it some people think it was some kind of PR person, she got the credit anyway!

Answer 6

Marie Antoinette in France in speaking of the poor. Cake was a food for the poor. The poor were protesting being poor and wanting reform. Marie eventually paid for the remark and her attitude by losing her head to the guillitine. So "Let them eat cake: is like saying let the underdog starve.

Answer 7

1) Marie Antonete (Spell?)
2) People told her that peasants didn't have any bread to eat.
3) She wasn't very smart, and completely ignorant about the situation of poverty caused by her husband Louis XVI with his lavish life style and told them that since that didn't have any bread, they could eat cake. She didn't realize that the lack of bread was from poverty, and that they would definitely not have any cake either. This was right before the French Revolution against the monarchy of France. It really ticked the peasants off.

Answer 8

1. Marie Antionette
2. She was told the people were starving and needed food so she said "let them eat cake"
3. That is literally what it meant, she thought they were rich like her and she had become so jaded and apart from the people she thought they could go out and eat whatever, they just weren't. So she said "let them eat cake"

Answer 9

Marie Antoinette

the infamous quotation "let them eat cake," the word "cake" did not refer to the familiar dessert item that the modern-day French call le gateau. The operative term was brioche, a flour-and-water paste that was "caked" onto the interiors of the ovens and baking pans of the professional boulangers of the era. (The modern equivalent is the oil-and-flour mixture applied to non-Teflon cake pans.) At the end of the day, the baker would scrape the leavings from his pans and ovens and set them outside the door for the benefit of beggars and scavengers. Thus, the lady in question was simply giving practical, if somewhat flippant, advice to her poor subjects: If one cannot afford the bourgeois bread, he can avail himself of the poor man's "cake."

Answer 10

Attributed to Marie Antoinette, around the time of the French Revolution.

She had been told by her courtiers "The peasants have no bread." to which she replied "Let them eat cake."

Oddly enough, it means pretty much exactly what it sounds like it means. But with more haughtiness and lack of concern than most people give it.

Answer 11

1. Marie Antoinette (sp?)
2. The French were demanding food, ie bread. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think cake was less expensive then... But don't quote me on that, I could be wrong.
3. See above...