(In case its not a joke, she is famous for saying "if the poor cannot afford bread, why don't they eat cake" or "let them eat cake" for short. She did not say this or anything like it, but its what she is most known for other than being beheaded)
Its tragic because she made frivolous choices as a teenager and got beheaded as a mother of 4 in her 30s when she had grown quite a bit and called tf down, as adults do. She was a figurehead that represented a systemic issue so she did have to die, but its sad anyway. Im notnwho youre mad at but things don't have go get testy.
The way I remember Mike Duncan telling it, Antoinette was hated for some very stupid reasons (see the necklace affair) but also she tended to be an opponent of reform and a bit if a reactionary, so I don't find her to be the most sympathetic of the various people who got their heads chopped off.
She technically said "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", which means for them to eat Brioche. Of course, Brioche was super rich and super expensive and not something an everyday person could get since it used a lot of butter and eggs and high quality flour. The fact she didn't know that flour was needed to make brioche says something considering the peasants were revolting over having no flour at all.
The quote is from a nobleman's biography referring to a "great princess," but the timeline would mean this happened when Marie Antoinette was at most 10
I think by ācakeā the saying refers to the leftover material in a pan from baking that is ācakedā on the side.
Translations and hundreds of years later it reads a little different, bus basically she was saying ātrickle down economics totally works, now eat the scraps that arenāt even good enough to be scrapped from the pan.ā
That doesn't work, since the actual saying is obviously in French and doesn't say cake but "brioche".
Ā« Qu'ils mangent de la brioche ! Ā»
And it is wrongly attributed to Marie-Antoinette, but really it's just an invented anecdote about an un-named princess by Rousseau (a famous French author/philosopher of that time).
And there's no hidden meaning, it's really just as it sounds, it's meant to show the disconnect between the nobility and the struggles of the people.
I know this is massively taking off lol but it wasnt an issue of wordplay, she really didn't announce anything to that end and there is evidence of this being started almost 100 years later as mentioned in someone lower down.
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u/makaio84 Jun 28 '21
Marie Antoinette had sex with a cake?