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Let Them Eat Cake

There is perhaps no greater slogan contrived to express the divide between the rich and the poor than that attributed to the Queen of France at the time of the French Revolution.
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.
In the United States of America, the land of Freedom Fries, it is now said, "Let them eat cupcakes."
Posted by abnu on Monday, July 04, 2005 @ 7:41 AM [ + ]

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