What Does 'Let Them Eat Cake' Mean? It Predates the Queen

Stealing the wine was easy for Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the bread was the hard part. The wine, a cloudy white from Arbois, belonged to Jean Bonnot de Mably, provost of the regional police in Lyon, who hired Rousseau in 1740 to tutor his two small sons. Rousseau boasted he could clear it, spoiled only its looks, and began taking bottles to his room.

He could never drink without eating. Sending a footman for bread would give him away, and a gentleman with a sword at his side could not be seen buying a loaf. So, he writes in the Confessions, he remembered the answer of “a great princess” on being told that the peasants had no bread: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” He bought brioche, though on some outings he walked past thirty pastry cooks before he dared go into one.

What does ‘let them eat cake’ mean?

“Let them eat cake” means a callous dismissal of hardship by someone too comfortable to understand it, and is now quoted against anyone powerful who seems out of touch. The French original, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, is pinned on Marie Antoinette, but there is no evidence she said it, and by Rousseau’s account it predates her birth.

Rousseau’s scene is fifteen years older than the queen

The Lyon municipal library dates his post in the Mably household to 1740-1741, some fifteen years before Marie Antoinette was born in Vienna on 2 November 1755. It is the same arithmetic that rules out the New Orleans egg-cup origin of the word cocktail, whose bitters were created more than fifty years after the drink’s name first appeared in print.

He wrote the scene down in the mid-1760s, while she was still a child in Austria, and the first six books of the Confessions were published in 1782, four years after his death.

Alphonse Karr printed the rumour and doubted it

In a 2002 study in the Annales historiques de la Revolution francaise, the scholars Veronique Campion-Vincent and Christine Shojaei Kawan traced the saying’s career. The first written link to the queen they found appears “fifty years after her death”, in 1843, in the writing of the journalist Alphonse Karr.

Karr had in fact raised it about a year and a half before that. In November 1841 his satirical monthly, Les Guepes, recalled “le mot vrai ou faux qu’on rapporte de Marie-Antoinette”, the saying, true or false, that is told of her.

By April 1843 he had found the same saying told of a duchess of Tuscany in “a book dated 1760”, which seemed to him to prove, more or less, that she never said it and that it had been “found again and put into circulation against her”. He did not say which book.

Her brother-in-law told it about another queen

On the night of 20 June 1791, as the royal family made its failed run for Varennes, Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte de Provence, escaped by another route. He later reigned as Louis XVIII, and his account of the journey, published in Paris in 1823, includes a meal at a post house between Soissons and Laon.

They had a meat pie and some Bordeaux, he writes, but had forgotten the bread. Eating the crust with the pie, “we thought of Queen Marie-Therese”, who once answered pity for poor people with no bread: “But, my God, why don’t they eat the pie crust?”

That queen was Louis XIV’s Spanish-born wife, not Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. The king’s own brother, running from the Revolution, told the joke about a queen dead for 108 years, and his sister-in-law is nowhere in it.

By the time the account was published, though, Marie Antoinette had become a royalist martyr. The 2002 study suggests he could no longer pin an unkind remark on her, and notes that as Comte de Provence he had himself helped circulate scandalous songs and pamphlets about her. One of her bedchamber women, Madame Campan, later briefed Napoleon on what that post involved when he set up his imperial court.

China tells the same story about an emperor

The Book of Jin, the official history of China’s Jin dynasty, compiled in 648, says that when the empire fell into famine and chaos and the common people were starving to death, Emperor Hui, who reigned from 290 to 307, asked: “Why don’t they eat meat porridge?” His obliviousness, the chronicler adds, was all of this kind.

The plot even has a catalogue number. Folklorists file it as tale type 1446 in the Aarne-Thompson classification, under the title “Let them eat cake”, and the 2002 study finds versions in 16th-century German texts, including a joke collection by Martin Montanus.

Text	Written	Who says it	What the hungry should eat
Book of Jin	648, of a reign from 290 to 307	Emperor Hui	Meat porridge
An unnamed book, per Karr	1760	A duchess of Tuscany	Brioche, as “the same saying”
Rousseau, Confessions	Mid-1760s, of 1740-41	”A great princess”	Brioche
Louis XVIII, memoir	Published 1823, of 1791	Queen Marie-Therese, died 1683	Pie crust
Karr, Les Guepes	1841 and 1843	Marie Antoinette, “true or false”	Brioche

The cake is a translation, and the brioche law is unsourced

Rousseau wrote brioche, which Etymonline defines as an “enriched type of French bread” and records in English only from 1824. Cake is the English tradition, and even one translation cannot settle on a word: the 1903 edition on Project Gutenberg renders the princess’s line “Then let them eat pastry!” and, a few lines later, calls Rousseau’s purchase “the dear little cake”. Translators have planted stranger ideas: a 17th-century Latin version of a Norse poem turned its drinking horns into the Viking skull cups still attached to the toast skol.

A rescue story for the queen also circulates. French law supposedly made bakers sell brioche at the price of plain bread whenever plain bread ran out, which would turn the line into sensible advice.

CulinaryLore and a baking blog repeat it, and a 2014 post on the Global Policy Journal’s blog claims the reverse, that brioche sat outside the price ceilings. None of the three cites an ordinance or a historian, which leaves the story as unsourced as the papal plague decree offered to explain why we say bless you.

The pamphlets that hated her never used the line

By the Revolution, the Palace of Versailles records, the queen had become “the target of pamphlets, libels and caricatures”, her spending “scrutinised and often exaggerated”.

The pamphlets of her own lifetime accused Marie Antoinette of drunkenness, indecency, orgies and incest. Not one line in them, Campion-Vincent and Shojaei Kawan found, gives her the brioche remark.

Her biographer Antonia Fraser, speaking to NPR in 2006, called it “a royal chestnut” and explained why it attached itself to her anyway: “I think why it stuck to Marie Antoinette is because it confirmed people’s prejudices.”

Take the queen out and the line goes back to what it was in the Confessions, a joke Rousseau told against himself. Short of bread and too proud to be seen buying it, he followed the princess’s advice to the letter and bought brioche. Strictly FYI.