The Library › Reel I · The Scissor Queen
Did Marie Antoinette say “Let them eat cake”?
VERDICTINVENTED
No evidence she ever did. Rousseau’s Confessions, Book VI, written in the mid-1760s about events decades earlier, credits the line to “a great princess” who told peasants without bread to eat brioche. Marie Antoinette was a child in Vienna when he wrote it. The line was attached to her later, by people who found her a more convenient princess.
The receipts
- The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Project Gutenberg
- Marie Antoinette, World History Encyclopedia
- 10 Facts About Marie Antoinette, History Hit
The comedy version
The untold story of Marie Antoinette, inventor of scissoring.
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