Media in the New Millennium

Posted by Lisa Greim

The phone rang at 9 a.m. Saturday. It was my high school friend Michael, calling from Switzerland to ask me to interpret a dream.

“My Aunt Lucy used to call and tell people she dreamed about them, and she usually got it right and that was odd, because she was kind of a hermit,” he said. “So I have to honor that.”

"Marie Antoinette en chemise," Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, 1783 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s the dream: “You had written an article and posted it on Facebook, and you were very proud of it,” he said. “I don’t remember what the article was about, but the title was ‘Let Them Eat Op-Eds.’”

Long pause. “What does that mean?”

It meant that Michael’s subconscious had just written me a great head for a blog post. But I thought about it a little bit and here’s what I came up with.

In 2009, we have no shortage of opinions to draw from, found on blogs, TV comedy shows, talk radio, interview programs and in print. But verifiable facts are thin on the ground, and a discouraging percentage of Americans seem unable to tell one from the other.

This lack of reading comprehension is being exploited by everybody from the banner ads that say “You’ve Just Won a Laptop!” to the people who claim that the proposed public health insurance option will cover illegal immigrants but not taxpaying American citizens.

You can look it up. Everybody knows it’s true.

Everybody also knows that the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, famously said of peasants who were rioting for bread, “Let them eat cake!” (In French: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”) Except that there’s no record of Marie Antoinette ever saying that. And brioche is not cake, it’s pastry.

Marie Antoinette’s biographer, Lady Antonia Fraser, has found no evidence she said “Let them eat cake” or anything like it. Fraser speculates that Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, may have said ‘Que ne mangent-ils de la croûte de pâté?’ (‘Why don’t they eat pastry?”) more than 100 years earlier.

The probable source of the phrase was philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his 12-volume autobiography, Rousseau attributes the quote to an unnamed grande princesse. But Rousseau published his Confessions a year before 14-year-old Maria Antonia arrived from Austria to marry the Dauphin Louis Auguste. Two biographers, Leo Damrosch and Paul Johnson, point out that Rousseau’s memory is not to be trusted. He was neither a journalist nor a historian, and mentally ill besides.

But the Jacobins loved him, so it’s likely that some propagandist combined Rousseau’s anecdote with the general hatred of the monarchy, spiced it up with details of the Queen’s lavish lifestyle and published the story in broadsides known as libelles (from the Latin for “little book,” but, ahem).

“Let them eat cake” lives on because it was catchy, not because it was true.

See how boring that was? I had to look stuff up, take notes, translate French and Latin, and put in all the italics and accent marks. I also had to remember what I learned in three semesters of European history and from actually reading Fraser’s book[i].

It’s so much more fun to repeat what you heard on the bus this morning, and when challenged, smile and say, “Everybody knows the other side lies. I know the REAL TRUTH.”

If they don’t have facts, let them eat op-eds. When they finally notice the difference, it will be too late.

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