21 December 2016

Marie Antoinette, via Mike Kimball, and a tattoo of her on my left thigh.

It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture.



Nobody said, "Let them eat cake."

Marie Antoinette was believed to have said, "Let them eat brioche," but it was a fiction.

Zhu Muzhi, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, asserts that Rousseau's version is an alteration of a much older anecdote:

An ancient Chinese emperor who, being told that his subjects didn't have enough rice to eat, replied, "Why don't they eat meat?" The phrase was attributed to Emperor Hui of Jin in Zizhi Tongjian.

There were no actual famines during the reign of King Louis XVI and only two incidents of serious bread shortages, which occurred, first in April–May, 1775, a few weeks before the king's coronation—11 June 1775—and again in 1788, the year before the French Revolution. The 1775 shortages led to a series of riots, known as the Flour War, la guerre des farines—a name given at the time of their occurrence—that took place in the northern, eastern, and western parts of France.

Letters from Marie Antoinette to her family in Austria at this time reveal an attitude totally different to the, "Let them eat cake" mentality.

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