Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said 'Let them eat cake'. Rousseau attributed the line to 'a great princess' around 1765, when the future queen was nine and living in Vienna.
The events
- Rousseau's Confessions published1782 · Geneva. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography appeared after his death, in 1782. In it he recalls 'a great princess' telling breadless peasants to eat brioche — lines written around 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine.
- Storming of the Bastille1789 · Paris. On 14 July, insurgent Parisians stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison and symbol of royal absolutism. It marked the start of the French Revolution, which proclaimed liberty, equality and the rights of man.
More amazing facts
- 1761 Lomonosov discovered the atmosphere of Venus.
- 1762 The sandwich is named after an earl.
- 1766 Catherine II bought the hard-up Diderot's library, let him keep the books, made him their salaried librarian — and paid his salary 50 years in advance.
- 1768 · 1796 Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox 28 years before Jenner's vaccine.
- 1769 · 1820 Antarctica was first sighted only in 1820, by the Bellingshausen–Lazarev expedition — by then Watt's steam engine was already half a century old.
- 1769 · 1815 The victor and the vanquished of Waterloo were the same age: Wellington was born on 1 May 1769, Napoleon on 15 August that same year.