"Let Them Eat Cake"
The Queen of France in the late 18th Century was Marie Antoinette. Legend has it that when she was told that her people were dying of starvation and didn’t even have bread to eat she responded by saying “Let them eat cake!”. Cake in those days was either expensive bread or poor quality bread (no one knows for sure)…but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it sounded rude and unsympathetic. Many saw this event as evidence of stupidity or a cold remark from someone who knew nothing about poverty. The truth is that Marie Antoinette may not have said it at all. Nonetheless, let’s examine what effect something like this could have had on the French population of the time period.
The Queen of France was bored. Try as she might, Marie Antoinette ( 1755-93) found insufficient diversion in her life at the great court of Versailles. When she was fourteen, she had married a member of the Bourbon family and the heir to the French throne, the future Louis XVI. By the age of nineteen, she was queen of the most prosperous state in continental Europe. Still, she was bored. Her life, she complained to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, was “futile” and “meaningless”. Maria Theresa advised the unhappy queen to suffer in silence or risk unpleasant consequences.
Sometimes mothers know best. As head of the Habsburg Family Empire, Maria Theresa understood more about politics than her youngest child. She understood that people have little sympathy with the boredom of a monarch, especially a foreign-born woman that was now the queen of France. But Marie Antoinette chose to ignore her mother’s advice and continued to look for ways to amuse herself that eventually had unpleasant consequences.
Unpopular as a foreigner from the time she arrived in France, Marie Antoinette suffered a further decline in her reputation as gossip spread about her gambling and affairs at court. The public heard exaggerated accounts of the fortunes she spent on clothing and jewelry. In 1785 she was linked to a cardinal in the Catholic Church in a nasty scandal over a gift of a diamond necklace. In spite of her innocence, rumors of corruption and infidelity surrounded her name. Nicknamed "Madame Deficit (in debt)," she came to represent all that was considered wrong with having a king.
She continued to insist, "I am afraid of being bored." To amuse herself, she ordered a life-size play village built on the grounds of Versailles, complete with cottages, a chapel. a mill, and a running stream. Then, dressed in silks and muslins (a white type of cloth) she and royal friends would play make believe for whole days pretending they were people of this picturesque “village”. Her romantic view of country life helped pass the time, but it did little to bring her closer to the struggling peasants who made up the majority of the people of her empire. .
Marie Antoinette's problems need not have mattered much. Monarchs before her had been considered weak and extravagant. The difference was that her lifestyle became public at a time when the ideas of the public affected political life. Rulers, even those believed to be put in charge by God, were open to be criticized because of the growth of the press that reported everything! Kings, their ministers, and their spouses were held accountable…a dangerous thing for any absolute monarch.
This Austrian-born queen may or may not have been more shallow or wasteful than other queens but that didn’t matter…what mattered was that people came to see her that way. The queen's reputation sank when it was reported that she dismissed the suffering of her starving people with the sarcastic remark "Let them eat cake!" What better evidence could there be of the queen's insensitivity than these heartless words?
Actually, Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake," but everyone thought she did. This was the kind of horrible behavior that people expected from the monarchy in 1789. The truth is that Marie Antoinette understood the suffering of her starving subjects, as her old correspondence indicates. She actually had a great side and even adopted kids of servants that had died and raised them as her own! The truth is that it was probably a courtier at Versailles that was the real source of the brutal remark, but the truth did not matter. Marie Antoinette and her husband were already seen as guilty by the public for all the political, social, and financial crises that plagued France.
In October 1793, Marie Antoinette was put on trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal and found guilty of treason. She was stripped of all the luxurious possessions and forced to dress in another costume. Dressed as a poor working woman, her hair was cut; she mounted the guillotine and was eventually executed.
Rising Enlightenment ideas influenced the areas of political representation, participation in government and equality. If a queen could change places with a milkmaid, people thought, why should not a milkmaid be able to change places with a queen?