Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Marie Antoinette say "Let them eat cake?"
While the phrase is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette,[1] there is no record of her having said it. It appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography (whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in 1782). The context of Rousseau's account was his desire to have some bread to accompany some wine he had stolen; however, feeling he was too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess":[2]
Barker, Nancy N., Let Them Eat Cake: The Mythical Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution, Historian, Summer 1993, 55:4:709. Campion-Vincent, Véronique and Shojaei Kawan, Christine, 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, 2002, p.327
The attribution also has little credibility. Fraser cites as justification for the alternative attribution to the wife of Louis XIV the memoirs of Louis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau's Confessions were written and whose own memoirs were published much later. He does not mention Marie Antoinette in his account, but states that the saying was an old legend, and that within the family it was always believed that the saying belonged to the Spanish princess who married Louis XIV in the 1660s. Thus, Louis XVIII is as likely as others to have had his recollection affected by the quick spreading and distorting of Rousseau's original remark.
There is a further problem with the dates surrounding the attribution, in that Marie Antoinette was not only too young but also outside France when it was written. Although only published in 1782, Rousseau's Confessions were finished in 1769. Marie Antoinette, aged 14, didn't arrive at Versailles from Austria until 1770. She was unknown to him at the time of writing his work so she could not have been the "great princess" mentioned by Rousseau.[10]
Let Them Eat Cake is a British sitcom that aired on BBC One in 1999. Starring Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, it is one of the few programmes in which French and Saunders have appeared which they did not create themselves.
"Let Them Eat Cake" is the tenth episode of the fifth season of "House" and the ninety-sixth episode overall. It originally aired on December 2, 2008.
In "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy", there's a cartoon called "Marie Antoinette's Notepad". In this, Marie writes something down on a piece of paper, then she scratches it out. Then she begins writing again, only for her to scratch it out. Then she thinks, and writes something down. She puts the quill back in its container and she looks satisfied. Then the paper shows that she has written and scratched out "Let them eat shit" and "Let them eat pussy", and the last line says "Let them eat cake."
Napoleon spoke of history as being a fable which had been agreed upon:– ""la fable convenue qu'on appellera l'histoire"". Great figures of the past have stories told about them which grow in the telling, and so become myths and legends which may dominate or displace the more prosaic historical facts about them. For example, some ancient chroniclers said that the Emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but Tacitus disputed this by saying the stories were just malicious rumours. Similarly, there is no good evidence that Marie-Antoinette ever said "let them eat cake", or that Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry.
When investigating how this phrase came to be attributed to Marie Antoinette, it is important to understand the increasing unpopularity of the Queen in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. During her marriage to Louis XVI, her perceived frivolousness and her very real extravagance were often cited as factors that only worsened France's dire financial straits.[11] Her Austrian birth and sex were also a major factor in a country where xenophobia and chauvinism were beginning to play major parts in national politics.[12] In fact, many anti-monarchists were so convinced (albeit incorrectly) that it was Marie Antoinette who had single-handedly ruined France's finances that they nicknamed her Madame Déficit.[13] In addition, anti-royalist libellistes printed stories and articles that attacked the royal family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious events, and outright lies. Therefore, with such strong sentiments of dissatisfaction and anger towards the King and Queen, it is quite possible that a discontented individual fabricated the scenario and put the words into the mouth of Marie Antoinette.
A second point is that there were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, which occurred, first, in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation (11 June 1775), and again in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots, known as the Flour War, la guerre des farines, a name given at the time of their occurrence, that took place in the northern, eastern and western parts of France. Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family in Austria at this time reveal an attitude totally different to the Let them eat cake mentality.[9]
Another hypothesis is that after the revolution, the phrase was attributed to various princesses of the French royal family, and that the legend stuck on Marie Antoinette because she was, in effect, the last "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had, for example, been previously attributed to two of Louis XV's daughters: Madame Sophie and Madame Victoire.
Let them eat cake may also refer to:
From 1995-2018, Eastern State Penitentiary recognised Bastille Day (July 14) with a yearly celebration involving Tastykake. A woman dressed as Marie Antoinette and her fellow re-enactors would throw as many as 2,000 packs of Tastykakes from the towers of the penitentiary to the public below while "Antoinette" said, "If the people have no bread, I say, 'let them eat Tastykake!'"
[Let them eat cake] was said 100 years before her by Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV. It was a callous and ignorant statement and she, Marie Antoinette, was neither.
The phrase "Let them eat cake" is often attributed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché. This phrase originally appeared in Book VI of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work "Les Confessions", finished in 1767 and published in 1782: ""Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d'une grande princesse à qui l'on disait que les paysans n'avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"" ("Finally I recalled the stop-gap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: 'Let them eat brioche). Rousseau ascribes these words to a "great princess", but the purported writing date precedes Marie Antoinette's arrival in France. Some think that he invented it altogether.
Duncan Macpherson was well known for his ruthless style. Terry Mosher refers to him as the "king of the third wave." One of Macpherson's most celebrated cartoons featured John Diefenbaker as Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake," after Diefenbaker cancelled the Avro Arrow project and its 14,000 jobs. Pierre Berton said this cartoon was "the beginning, I think, of the country's disillusionment with the Diefenbaker government...scarcely anybody had taken a crack at Diefenbaker until then."
The quotation, first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1843, was claimed to have been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI. Upon being told that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche."[4] Although this anecdote was never cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution, it did acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories, when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper classes at that time. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly useful phrase to cite because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 percent of their income, as opposed to 5 percent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest."[5]
At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches."
Mercury commented he wrote the lyrics before the melody and music, whereas normally he would do the opposite. He stated that the song was about a high-class call girl, although it has been suggested that he wrote the song about EMI promoter Eric Hall. The song's first verse quotes a phrase falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette: "" 'Let them eat cake,' she says, Just like Marie Antoinette". The song marked a departure from the heavier material of the band's first two albums, as well as the beginning of a more stylistically diverse approach in songwriting. At the same time, "Killer Queen" retained the essence of Queen's trademark sound, particularly in its meticulous vocal harmonies. 
In his first term, as a member of the Environment and Public Health Committee he played an important role in negotiating amendments to the Chocolate Directive, which would finally enable British dairy milk cocolate to be sold throughout the EU. Meanwhile, fed up with the limp response from the UK (Labour) Government back home to the continued boycott of British beef by France for blatantly protectionist reasons, he joined ten other colleagues in a demonstration in Paris in autumn 1999. They carried a banner with the slogan ' Marie Antoinette said Let them eat cake, British Conservative MEPs say let them eat British beef. This made headlines literally across the world, with articles referring to a new breed of MEP prepared to get out of their offices and take direct action.
In his novel Ange Pitou (1853), Alexandre Dumas attributes the quote to one of Marie Antoinette's favourites, the Duchess of Polignac.
The popular quote often misattributed to her, "Let them eat cake", was referenced in the 39 Clues book "One False Note".
Joan Rivers' book "I Hate Everyone... Starting With Me", contains a quote by Marie Antoinette saying "Let her eat shit". Costco then refused to sell the book because of the explicit language.
The album's title comes from the phrase "Let them eat cake" (supposedly said by Marie Antoinette). The use of the word jellybeans is in reference to Ronald Reagan, who was known to consider them his favorite candy.
However, there is no evidence that Queen Marie Antoinette ever uttered this phrase. It was first attributed to her by Alphonse Karr in Les Guêpes of March 1843.[6] Other objections to the legend of Marie Antoinette and the cake/brioche comment centre on arguments concerning the queen's personality, internal evidence from members of the French royal family and the date of the saying's origin. For example, the Queen's English-language biographer wrote in 2002:[7]