Let Them Eat Cake Was Never Said by Marie Antoinette
A cake is a sweet baked food. Its most famous quotation was written before she arrived in France.
A cake is a sweet baked food made from flour, sugar, fat and eggs. *Let them eat cake* is almost certainly not Marie Antoinette's. Rousseau records the remark in his *Confessions*, written around 1765, attributing it to an unnamed great princess — Marie Antoinette was nine years old and still in Austria. The French is *qu'ils mangent de la brioche*, so it was not even cake. *A piece of cake* meaning something easy is 1930s RAF slang.
- A sweet baked food. *A birthday cake.*
- A flat compact mass. *A cake of soap.*
- A piece of cake — easy. *A piece of cake.*
- Have your cake and eat it — want both. *Have it both ways.*
- Old Norse — *kaka*. *The source.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | cake | A cake. |
| Plural | cakes | Cakes. |
| Verb | cake | Caked. |
| Adjective | caked | Caked in mud. |
| Old Norse | kaka | A cake. |
- She baked a chocolate cake.Food.
- His boots were caked in mud.Verb.
- The exam was a piece of cake.Idiom.
Cake idioms
- A piece of cake — easy, from 1930s Royal Air Force slang
- The icing on the cake — a welcome extra
- Have your cake and eat it — want two incompatible things
- Take the cake — be the most remarkable, usually badly
- Cakewalk — an easy victory, from a nineteenth-century dance contest
Old Norse *kaka*, a cake, related to German *Kuchen*.
Did Marie Antoinette say let them eat cake?
Almost certainly not. Rousseau recorded the line around 1765, when she was nine and living in Austria, and attributed it to an unnamed princess.
Where does a piece of cake come from?
Royal Air Force slang of the 1930s, for a mission expected to be easy.