Who Said Let Them Eat Cake
Did Marie Antoinette really say 'Let them eat cake'?
Did Marie Antoinette actually utter the infamous words, "Let them consume cake"?
The quick respond to this question is a simple "no." Marie Antoinette, the terminal pre-revolutionary queen of France, did not say "Let them swallow cake" when confronted with news that Parisian peasants were so badly poor they couldn't afford bread. The better question, mayhap, is: Why do we think she said it?
For groundwork, the quote has been slightly exaggerated in its translation from French to English. Originally, Marie Antoinette was declared to have said, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," or "Let them eat brioche." While this sweetened bread is more expensive than an average baguette, it isn't exactly the icing-laden, multi-tiered gateaux you lot might have imagined the queen had in mind. That said, this hyperbolic translation doesn't change the bespeak, at least from a propagandist standpoint; information technology still suggests that the French queen was big-headed and out-of-touch with the working course. With callous aristocrats like this in charge, things will never meliorate for the average French denizen. Vive la révolution!
Related: How many French revolutions were at that place?
But the "brioche" quote is problematic, too, because there's no reliable evidence that the queen e'er said it. "Marie Antoinette never uttered these words or anything else forth these lines," said Denise Maior-Barron, an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University in California, whose enquiry examines contemporary portrayals of Marie Antoinette's character. "As for Louis, he is present in all the films that characteristic Marie Antoinette, merely depicted as a meek, pathetic consort. Another gross misrepresentation indeed."
France has endured no shortage of revolutions. The first, in 1789, ended very badly for Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI. The following century then saw the country flip bomb between monarchies and republics, with each side fighting a propaganda war in improver to armed skirmishes. It was during i of these afterward revolutions, long subsequently Marie Antoinette's execution, that the misquote offset came to pass.
"It did not come to exist misattributed to Marie Antoinette during the 18th century, merely during the Third French Republic starting in 1870, when a careful program of reconstructing the historical past took place," Maior-Barron told Live Science.
In the 1870s, the republicans, who successfully dethroned Napoléon III after he conclusively lost a war confronting Prussia, were building on a longstanding campaign to undermine Marie Antoinette'due south legacy and reputation. "The masterminds of the French Revolution destroyed the French monarchy past continually attacking, and eventually destroying, its well-nigh important symbols: the king and the queen of France," Maior-Barron said. "For this reason the 'Let them consume block' blazon of clichés persist."
This century-long endeavour to tarnish Marie Antoinette wasn't only about securing the republican cause, however; it was also tinged with sexism — afterwards all, her reputation seems to have taken far more of a beating than that her married man, who was actually in accuse of France.
"The French Revolution tried to exclude women from political ability," said Robert Gildea, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
While women were far from liberated when Louis Sixteen was on the throne, it was theoretically possible for the wives and mistresses of kings or other important officials to hold power — albeit unofficially. The revolutionaries, however, sought to further disenfranchise women from the national conversation. Marie Antoinette wasn't the simply woman to lose her head during France's first transition to a republic. "Olympe de Gouges, who wrote the 'Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen,' was also guillotined," Gildea told Live Science.
Related: Why does the letter 'S' look like an 'F' in old manuscripts?
In the preamble to the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was defendant of wielding too much power over her married man, Gildea explained. In lite of this, it's easy to come across how propagandists were motivated to engage in a character assassination of Marie Antoinette, and the rumor manufacturing plant surrounding her name certainly flourished effectually the time of the first revolution while she was nevertheless alive. "She was accused of having male person and female lovers and even of an incestuous human relationship with her son," Gildea said.
In fact, the "brioche" quote wasn't fifty-fifty original, and even had a history of being used confronting noble women. The philosopher and writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work later on influenced the revolution, may have been the kickoff person to pen the phrase in 1767. "'Let them eat brioche' is initially found in i of Jean-Jacques Rousseau'southward novels, in which he attributed this line to 1 of his fictitious characters belonging to the 18th-century French aristocracy," Maior-Barron said.
In Marie Antoinette's case, still, the queen'south slanderers may accept been motivated by more simply pure sexism — she also presented a very real threat to the republicans. Marie Antoinette was born into the powerful Habsburg Austrian royal family unit earlier she married Louis. When the armed insurrections against the French crown began to option upwards steam, she wrote to her brothers back home to try and get them to invade France and save the monarchy. "When these powers did invade French republic, Marie Antoinette was seen as a traitor," Gildea said.
In the end, the Habsburgs failed to cease the revolution, Marie Antoinette was decapitated and the victors were left to write the history books.
Originally published on Live Science.
Who Said Let Them Eat Cake,
Source: https://www.livescience.com/let-the-eat-cake.html
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