Whenever I am doing work or just painting casually, I like to listen to music and podcasts to fill the emptiness in the surroundings. While painting the final piece for the last project, I came across an episode of a history podcast that talks about the French Revolution. In the podcast, the host discusses a lot of the rumours and assumptions people had for Antoinette at the time, many of which contradict one another. “If the people have no bread, let them eat cake.” This was probably one of the most famous quotes attributed to Marie Antoinette, yet the phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765, when Antoinette was just nine years old, meaning that it is impossible for the quote to have originated from Marie, and she most likely never said it, either. This led me into thinking was Marie just a scapegoat of her time? The history could be wrong to portray her as a villain? Most people assume French Revolution to be a result of Marie’s extravagant behaviour, to what extent does this speak the truth?
