Let them eat cake

A Marie-Antoinette double on Remuera Road, as part of a belated Bastille Day celebration.

I stand corrected. Marie-Antoinette never uttered these words: "Qu'ils mangent des brioches". They appear in 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, in feeling he was too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he thus recollected the words of a "great princess".

As he wrote in Book 6:

"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."

Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions was, on the whole, a very unreliable autobiography.