TheMissingN wrote:"Let them eat cake!"
Supposedly said by Queen Marie-Antoinette (the wife of King Louis XVI of France), after hearing that the French people had no more bread to eat. The quote is typically taken as an example of the inability of the nobility to relate the lower classes during the French Revolution. However, the quote first appears in an anecdote told by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about an unnamed princess. At the time of writing, Marie-Antionette was only nine.
Yours, etc.
Alexander
Also, if I remember correctly, it's not only misquoted in who said it, but in what was said. The original is "let them eat brioche". The context is as follows. In Paris in the 1700s feeding people was an important part of the governing, as hungry poor people tended to riot (a choise of somewhat risky rioting and starving isn't a hard one), and bread was the mainstream of food for the poor. For this a number of laws were passed about bread manufacturing, such as what you could put in the bread (talkum, sawdust and chalk were all common addatives before), how much it should weigh (selling underweight bread could be considered counterfiting of weight and warranted harsh penalties, thus "bakers dozen", 13 breads to make sure the batch weight over the required limit) and that every baker should make enough cheaper breads for the poor people to buy. If a baker ran out of the cheap bread he was required, by law, to sell more expensive (and more white, white bread was considered finer, thus adding of talkum, alum etc) bread to the poor at the price of the more common bread. This more expensive bread was called brioche. So what that unnamed princess was actually saying that since cheap bread was unavaivable, because of one thing or another, bakers should sell the poor the more fine brioche at the same price, as required by law. If anything this is a statement is pro common people, not a elitist, snobby statement showing now uninformed the princess was.