Marie Antoinette said 'let them eat cake'

What actually happened

Rousseau's phrase is "qu'ils mangent de la brioche," and brioche is enriched bread rather than cake, which matters because the original jab was about an aristocrat who could not conceive of a household without a bread cupboard. Rousseau attributes it to no one in particular, and the anecdote was already a stock story about out-of-touch nobility before her birth.

It was pinned to her later. Revolutionary pamphleteers ran a sustained campaign against the foreign queen, producing pornographic libels and invented quotations, and "let them eat cake" was attached to her by the 1840s, decades after her execution. Historians including Antonia Fraser have noted that the sentiment contradicts her documented behavior: her letters show awareness of the bread crisis, and she funded charities during food shortages.

She remains a fair subject of criticism as a symbol of Versailles extravagance during a fiscal catastrophe. But the single most-quoted sentence of her life is one she did not say, and the correction has been standard in the scholarship for a long time.