The phrase appears in book six of Rousseau's autobiographical
Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess": Rousseau does not name the "great princess", and he may have invented the anecdote altogether, as the
Confessions is not considered entirely factual.
Attribution to Marie Antoinette The phrase is alleged to have been said by
Marie Antoinette, queen consort of France, during one of the bread shortages during the reign of her husband,
Louis XVI. However, it was not attributed to her until half a century after her death. Anti-monarchists during the
French Revolution never cited this anecdote, but it nevertheless acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to denounce the upper classes of the
Ancien Régime as oblivious and rapacious. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly powerful phrase 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." Rousseau's first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published when she was 26, eight years after she became queen. The increasing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette in the final years before the outbreak of the French Revolution also likely influenced many to attribute the phrase to her. During her marriage to Louis XVI, her critics often cited her perceived frivolousness and very real extravagance as factors that significantly worsened France's dire financial straits. Her Austrian birth and her sex also diminished her credibility further in a country where
xenophobia and
chauvinism were beginning to exert major influence in national politics. While the causes of France's economic woes extended far beyond the royal family's spending, anti-monarchist polemics demonized Marie Antoinette as
Madame Déficit, who had single-handedly ruined France's finances. These
libellistes printed stories and articles vilifying her family and their courtiers with exaggerations, fictitious anecdotes, and outright lies. In the tempestuous political climate, it would have been a natural slander to put the famous words into the mouth of the widely scorned queen. The phrase was attributed to Marie Antoinette by
Alphonse Karr in
Les Guêpes of March 1843. Objections to the legend of Marie Antoinette and the 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. According to
Antonia Fraser, the notorious story of the ignorant princess was first said 100 years
before Marie Antoinette in relation to
Maria Theresa, the wife of
Louis XIV, citing the memoirs of
Louis XVIII, who was only fourteen when Rousseau's
Confessions were written and whose own memoirs were published much later. This makes it even more unlikely that Marie Antoinette ever said the phrase. A second consideration is that there were no actual
famines during the reign of
Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, the first in April–May 1775, a few weeks before the king's
coronation on 11 June 1775, and the second in 1788, the year before the
French Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots that took place in northern, eastern and western France, known at the time as the
Flour War (
guerre des farines). Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family in
Austria at this time reveal an attitude largely contrary to the spirit of
Let them eat brioche: Another problem with the dates surrounding the attribution is that when the phrase first appeared, Marie Antoinette was not only too young to have said it, but living outside France as well. Although published in 1782, Rousseau's
Confessions were finished thirteen years prior in 1769. Marie Antoinette, only fourteen years old at the time, would not arrive at Versailles from Austria until 1770. Since she was completely unknown to him at the time of writing, she could not have possibly been the "great princess" he mentioned.
Other attributions Another hypothesis is that after the revolution, the phrase, which was initially attributed to a great variety of princesses of the French royal family, eventually stuck on Marie Antoinette because she was in effect the last and best-remembered "great princess" of Versailles. The myth had also been previously attributed to two of
Louis XV’s daughters:
Madame Sophie and
Madame Victoire. In his 1853 novel
Ange Pitou,
Alexandre Dumas attributes the quote to one of Marie Antoinette's favourites, the
Duchess of Polignac. == Similar phrases ==