# Let them eat cake **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [August 31, 2005, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/let-them-eat-cake/319458 "2005-08-31T18:03:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Happy4u](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a9adbd/32.png) [@Happy4u](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy4u)\ **Post date:** [August 31, 2005, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/let-them-eat-cake/319458/1 "2005-08-31T18:03:20Z")
[Straight Dope Classics “Let them Eat Cake”](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html) The original article needs upating, as the link has been neglected on straightdope but not other services on [http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20021122.html](http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20021122.html) “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.” Also, from the original article: “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.)” I’m not sure of France, but this practice was common in colonial British America, (and presumeably England) and the paste was called “cake,” as was just about anything solid created with grain and heat. If it was an untruth used as propaganda at the time, it would have at least seemed more likely to contemporary English speakers than it does now. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2005, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/let-them-eat-cake/319458/2 "2005-09-04T22:33:10Z")
> [@Happy4u](#): > > [ 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). . But “brioche” is also the word supposedly used by Marie-Antoinette… ---
**Author:** ![Tammi\_Terrell](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7ba0ec/32.png) [@Tammi\_Terrell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tammi_Terrell)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2005, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/let-them-eat-cake/319458/3 "2005-09-15T02:11:12Z")
> [@Happy4u](#): > > [Straight Dope Classics “Let them Eat Cake”](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html) > The original article needs upating, as the link has been neglected on straightdope but not other services If you’re suggesting that it would be helpful to amend the Straight Dope page to include precisely what Rousseau wrote (“qu’ils mangent de la brioche”) and not just an English version of what he wrote (“well, let them eat cake”), I agree, if only to shed light on the appearance from this period of one common French form of this response. (Balzac, for example, made use of Rousseau’s “brioche” retort in at least three works written between 1823 and 1837. [1]) (By the way, a couple recent message-board discussions of that analysis can be found [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=326048) and [here](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=132957).) > [@Happy4u](#): > > Also, from the original article: “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.)” I’m not sure of France, but this practice was common in colonial British America, (and presumeably England) and the paste was called “cake,” as was just about anything solid created with grain and heat. If it was an untruth used as propaganda at the time, it would have at least seemed more likely to contemporary English speakers than it does now. I’ll note, though, that the _OED_ fails to provide such a special (and historical) usage of “cake” (as a paste or lining) in British English or colonial North American English with respect to the preparation of ovens and pans for baking. More to the point, however, [N.D.G.](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_334.html), Cecil’s one-time correspondent, maintained that > [@](#): > > [a]t the time that whoever-she-was uttered 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. > > […] > > However, by the time Marie Antoinette ascended the throne, brioche had acquired its current meaning–a fancy pastry item which, like le gateau, was priced far beyond the means of any but the wealthiest classes. The anti-Marie propagandists were well aware that their compatriots, most of whom were uneducated in either history or semantics, would swallow the story whole, so to speak, and not get the joke. French dictionaries compiled at various points in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries [2] back up Cecil’s contention that brioche “is a sort of crusty bun, typically containing milk, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and whatnot.” None of these dictionaries hold that brioche was “a flour-and-water paste that was ‘caked’ onto the interiors of the ovens and baking pans of the professional boulangers.” I’ll note, though, that I think that the Straight Dope analysis would also benefit from a further explanation of the significance of the following bit of information, > [@](#): > > Writer Alphonse Karr in 1843 claimed that the line originated with a certain Duchess of Tuscany in 1760 or earlier, and that it was attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789 by radical agitators who were trying to turn the populace against her. Because I believe that Cecil’s article fails to make clear two things of relevance with regards to Karr’s observation. As Rousseau had done with his unnamed princess, Karr (1808-1890) also used the term “brioche” in his attribution of this phrase to Marie Antoinette (albeit as rumor). Folklorists Véronique Campion-Vincent and Christine Shojaei Kawan [3] provide a portion of Karr’s anecdote (in its original French), > [@](#): > > Karr, Alphonse: _Les guêpes_. Paris (March 1843), 85: “On se rappelle quelle indignation on excita, dans le temps, contre le malheureuse reine Marie-Antoinette, – en faisant courer le bruit – que, entendant dire que le peuple était malheureux et qu’ils n’avait pas de pain, – elle avait répondu: eh bien! qu’il mange de la brioche.” Also relevant, but left unsaid in Cecil’s article (perhaps one has to read between the lines to see it), is that Karr’s attribution of “qu’il mange de la brioche” to Marie Antoinette (even as rumor) seems to be the earliest extant coupling of this infamous remark with this particular Bourbon queen. Campion-Vincent and Shojaei Kawan report that they found no instance from around the time of the Revolution or during the Terror of the attribution of “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (or similar) to Marie Antoinette, not > [@](#): > > a single word about it in Marie-Antoinette biographies and in historical works on the French Revolution, [not] even in passages mentioning pamphlets, satires, songs and epigrams put in circulation against the queen. Nothing, they report, in the “lampoons and pamphlets against Marie-Antoinette” or in the Revolutionary press. Furthermore, historians specializing in the Revolutionary press whom one of the authors contacted “knew of no reference to the brioche story in their references.” (Note, however, that Joseph Foulon’s [alleged use](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=6397590&postcount=8) of “let them eat hay” [or similar] had gotten mention in the American press within a couple months of his execution in the summer of 1789.) Campion-Vincent and Shojaei Kawan consequently note that > [@](#): > > [t]he first evidence we could find that links Marie-Antoinette with the celebrated remark appears half a century after the Revolution, in 1843, in the writings of the French author Alphonse Karr who already labels it as a rumour put into circulation against the queen. Naturally, it’s possible that the rumor that Marie Antoinette herself had responded “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (or similar) to the news that the people had no bread _had_ circulated by word of mouth during the Revolution or in the years thereafter. Perhaps the rumor originated with “radical agitators,” as Cecil indicates Karr had observed, or perhaps it was set loose by members of French nobility who had their own issues with the Austrian queen. In any event, though, since mention of this attribution (however false) doesn’t seem to have been written down in some pamphlet, diary, newspaper piece, or similar document of the period, it seems to me that we really have no contemporaneous evidence that such a rumor involving Marie Antoinette was afloat during the late 19th-century, only a contention made 50 years after the Queen’s execution that at least some of her subjects had attributed “they should eat _brioche_” to her. – Tammi Terrell [1] _[La] Dernière fée_ (1823), _Physiologie du mariage_ (1829); _[La] Messe de l’ Athée_ (1837). [2] Dictionaries from the late-17th through the mid-19th centuries describe brioche as “sorte de gasteau pestry ordinairement avec des oeufs, du lait & du beure” (1694); “sorte de gâteau” (1762 & 1787-1788); and “sorte de pâtisserie” (1798 & 1832-1835). In those same dictionaries, “gâteau” had (as in English) many meanings, the predominant of which described various forms of "patisserie,” but none had specialized uses with regard to the linings of ovens or baking pans. (The _Dictionnaire de L’Académie française_, 1st Edition [1694]; the _Dictionnaire de L’Académie française_, 4th Edition [1762]; Jean-François Feraud. _Dictionaire critique de la langue française_, Marseille, Mossy, 1787-1788; _Dictionnaire de L’Académie française_, 5th Edition [1798]; and _Dictionnaire de L’Académie française_, 6th Edition [1832-5].) [3] Véronique Campion-Vincent and Christine Shojaei Kawan. Marie Antoinette and Her Famous Saying: Three Levels of Communication, Three Modes of Accusation and Two Troubled Centuries. _Fabula_ 41(1/2): 13-37, 2000. The paper was reproduced in French as, Marie-Antoinette et son célèbre dire: deux scénographies et deux siècles de désordres, trois niveaux de communication et trois modes accusatoires. _Annales historiques de la Révolution française_ 327(1): 29-56, 2002. This analysis of the (incorrect) attribution of “let them eat cake” to Marie Antoinette and, more generally, of the appearance of this form of tale throughout various Western and Eastern cultures since, apparently, ca. 1100, is an exhaustive catalogue of all sorts of variants (including quite a few involving named males and females from 18th-century France). In fact, the authors point out that this sort of anecdote has its own tale type number (AT 1446), to which Stith Thompson gave the title “_Let them eat cake_. The queen has been told that the peasants have no bread.” Campion-Vincent and Shojaei Kawan explain that while most of the internationally known variants compiled by Thompson and others don’t necessarily involve a female member of royalty, nor do they have to involve a scarcity of bread specifically, Thompson accorded this tale type this title simply because the queen/bread/cake theme seemed the most recognizable to 20th-century readers/listeners.