<P> While the phrase is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of her having said it . It appears in book six of 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, feeling he was too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess": </P> <P> At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches ." </P> <P> Rousseau does not name the "great princess" and he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions cannot be read as strictly factual . </P> <P> The quotation, first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1843, was claimed to have been uttered during one of the famines that occurred in France during the reign of her husband, Louis XVI . Upon being told that the people were suffering due to widespread bread shortages, the Queen is said to have replied, "Then let them eat brioche ." Although this anecdote was never cited by opponents of the monarchy at the time of the French Revolution, it did acquire great symbolic importance in subsequent histories, when pro-revolutionary historians sought to demonstrate the obliviousness and selfishness of the French upper classes at that time . As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly useful phrase to cite 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 ." </P>

Who said 'let them eat cake'