While Marie Antoinette was certainly enough of a bubblehead to have said the phrase in question, there is no evidence that she actually did so, and in any case she did not originate it. The peasants-have-no-bread story was in common currency at least since the 1760s as an illustration of the decadence of the aristocracy. The political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau mentions it in his Confessions in connection with an incident that occurred in 1740. (He stole wine while working as a tutor in Lyons and then had problems trying to scrounge up something to eat along with it.) He concludes thusly: "Finally I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: 'Well, let them eat cake.'" Now, J.-J. may have been embroidering this yarn with a line he had really heard many years later. But even so, at the time he was writing--early 1766--Marie Antoinette was only ten years old and still four years away from her marriage to the future Louis XVI. Writer Alphonse Karr in 1843 claimed that the line originated with a certain Duchess of Tuscany in 1760 or earlier, and that it was attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789 by radical agitators who were trying to turn the populace against her.

if memory serves me correct it was something to do with the bread shortage so she replied "let them eat cake". I may be wrong?

It's generally accepted that this quote was wrongly attributed to Marie Antoinette.Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 12-volume autobiographical work Confessions, was written in 1770. In Book 6, which was written around 1767, he recalls: At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, "Then let them eat pastry!" Marie-Antoinette arrived at Versailles from her native Austria in 1770, two or three years after Rousseau had written the above passage. Whoever the 'great princess' was, it wasn't Marie-Antoinette.

The story goes that when someone complained that the peasants had no bread to eat, she replied "Let them eat cake." i.e. it never crossed her mind that they had NOTHING to eat, not just a lack of bread. Or, she really really really didn't care that they were starving.

Cos cake tastes better then bread

She didn't say it.

She was being ironic. The French hated her -(she was Austrian). But then they hate everyone.

It was a story to emphasise how out-of-touch the French aristocracy were with the common people. The idea being that Marie Antoinette assumed the peasantry lived like her, that they had everything they needed, and therefore if they had no bread they could easily switch to something else.

She was being facetious. The people were screaming for bread, as wheat was in short supply. Her response was "(if there is no bread)...Let them eat cake". She lost her head to the guillotine shortly thereafter. +2