"Let Them Eat Cake" wasn't such a bad idea

Karl Muth unpacks the political economy of the famous old saying.

Marie Antoinette gets a difficult reputation, not least for her alleged “let them eat cake” comments – a contextless translation of “qu'ils mangent de la brioche” that disregards the reasonable, noninterventionist, liberal orientation the phrase likely originally carried.

Marie’s time was not unlike our own, a time of recession, shortage, and a miniscule middle class. The middle class that did exist in France, as with the current middle class in America, existed as the beneficiaries of massive government subsidies at every level, legacy price floors, an artificially-cheap housing market, and complex tax incentives. There is a temptation to imagine that bureaucracy and complexity are ever-increasing things and that, as a function of this, earlier times were simpler times – this is simply untrue; the legislative realities (particularly when it came to tax policy and subsidies) of eighteenth century France were as nuanced and confounding as any today (so notorious in its complexity, in fact, that Sir Alured Clarke, a learned Etonian soldier turned diplomat, upon being appointed Acting Governor-General of India, commented that it would be “best to avoid the growth of government to a French degree” in 1798).

Forgetting the facts that Marie’s statement 1) probably was never uttered, 2) would have been said in Austria if it was in fact said at the time it was attributed, and 3) is unlike other quotations attributed correctly to Marie… let’s examine why the statement enjoyed credibility among contemporary commentators and historians. It is important to note that the statement was never treated by French commentators as, for instance, American commentators treated the (factually impossible) non-comment by Sarah Palin that Russia was visible from her house (itself a misquote of Palin’s comments).

As unimaginable as it may be today, Marie’s quote actually made sense as a policy comment.

France was in a deep recession at the time, a recession so deep that tax revenues in tribute due to her as Dauphin of France were cut three times between her engagement and her wedding. There is no question Marie knew of the financial woes of France, her concern for the fiscal viability of France is seen in numerous letters and in her refusal of a lavish diamond necklace offered to her twice by Louis XVI (she remarked, publicly, that the money would be better spent on a vaisseaux de Premier Rang – a “first rate” ship, the equivalent to British Ships of the Line or Spanish War Galleons). Marie gave up six palaces (two of right and four on offer) upon taking her position as Dauphin and refused to hold court in the 3ème arrondissement (many historians believe she never set foot in the “small palace” built for her on the right bank), thinking it too posh.

To understand the context for Marie’s alleged comment, one must first understand the tax policy of anterevolutionary France toward carbohydrates. The law dictated no fewer than four tiers of bread, some of which were taxed, some of which were subsidised, and some of which were subject to price ceilings. To want the basic bread (veux du pain) was seen as a sign of terrible poverty. This bread, was, however, subject to price ceilings. One copper piece, a fraction of a franc, would purchase this bread at a hand’s weight (about half a kilo). This was almost undoubtedly below the production cost of the good, so bakers preferred not to produce the basic pain, on which they would (by mechanism of statute) lose money on each loaf. The next tier of bread, the brioche, was still affordable to the very poor and often provided by the church to indigents sleeping beneath its eaves, as we learn from the writings of Jacques Delille (most famously) and others.

Instead of producing bread so cheaply that they were certain to lose money on every loaf, bakers would mostly produce the other three tiers of bread. The tier of bread above the basic pain (le pain paysan) was the brioche (brioche de marchand), which was not subject to these price ceilings (but also subject to no subsidies). The irony in this silly regulatory structure, of course - as with most privatisations of welfare mechanisms - is that the bakers "eat" (pun intended) the cost of the price-ceilinged bread, meaning they must charge a higher price for the brioche to cover their (unsubsidised) losses on le pain paysan. So Marie’s comment to let them eat brioche should be construed to mean, “let them consume market price carbohydrates,” or let them eat bread that has no price ceiling attached to its retail price. More elaborately, it should be construed to mean, “If there is no artificially cheap bread available, let them buy the next-cheapest bread, which is available at the still-reasonable market price.” And, further, that if there were no artificially cheap bread (a policy that predated Marie's presence in politics by decades) in the first place, bread would actually be more affordable for most people in France.

The government did not, it is important to note, guarantee the availability of an unlimited quantity of bread at the ceiling-limited price. Instead, it guaranteed that whenever the cheapest bread was available, it would be available at or below a fixed price. There might be scenarios (and undoubtedly were scenarios) where a given bakery had no more bread available subject to the price ceiling; in these scenarios, a person might have complained of a shortage (a popular lamentation of the day), but there was actually no shortage of bread (or no substantial shortage of bread) in France during this time, there simply was a limited quantity of the cheapest kind of bread at the artificially-cheap price.

Marie’s comment did not, then, show disdain for the poor. It showed disapproval for price supports and price ceilings, subsidies, and interventionist microeconomic activity by the state; a disapproval I share. Marie’s comment today might be something like, “If there are no government-subsidised Tesla Model S cars available, let them buy Audi S7s.” In the culinary category, it might be something like, “Oh, there’s no Coca-Cola available sweetened with government-subsidised high fructose corn syrup? Let them drink Mexican-made Coca-Cola sweetened with sugarcane.”

Today, we do not limit the cost of a basic loaf of bread. We have replaced these price ceilings with more troubling interventionist policies, dubious in their effectiveness and opaque in their beneficiaries. The Americans have tariffs and price controls that encourage people to grow corn that will not be eaten, to destroy sugar rather than exporting it, to make olive oil in California, to purchase cigars from the Dominican Republic, to purchase pickup trucks made in Texas, to export watermelon, and even to buy calf leather from Wisconsin rather than Saskatchewan.

As the bureaucrats of Washington and Westminster grind forward at what used to be called a glacial pace (given the acceleration of glacial movement and the retarding of legislative progress, calling the pace of activity in Washington or Westminster “glacial” would be an insult to the comparatively athletic motion of glaciers), a new cycle of lobbyists is preparing to ask – over posh autumn café lunches – for favours, subsidies, price guarantees, and government spending to further distort and advantage their clients’ position in the marketplace.

And I believe it would be manifestly reasonable to ask people, from the American soybean peddlers to the British power utilities to their consumers, to finally eat market-rate cake. Perhaps Marie was, along with all of her other unexpected identities, a closet liberal.