"Let them eat cake."

History The Smithsonian has an excellent survey of Marie Antoinette which demonstrates that much of the popular knowledge we have of the monarch is inaccurate:
"Whatever Marie Antoinette's faults—in addition to her renowned extravagance, she was unable to comprehend the French people's thirst for democracy—she did not respond to news that starving Parisians had no bread by saying: "Let them eat cake." According to Fraser, this monumental indifference was first ascribed, probably also apocryphally, to Maria Theresa, the Spanish princess who married Louis XIV more than a century before Marie Antoinette set foot in France."
Much as a love Sofia Coppola's biopic (in hindsight -- I hated it on first viewing), as the later sections of this article demonstrate it does a great discervice to the French monarch's mind. She was a rather more complex character politically than Kirsten Dunst's portrayal allows.

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