Ed Helms
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Darn it.
Which is a very rude thing to say when people are starving and they can't get bread.
She didn't say it.
I'm so sorry.
I was going to be all smarty pants and be like, but she did it.
And you jumped on that.
And kudos to you for knowing that.
It originally appeared in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which he wrote in 1766.
Marie Antoinette was 10 years old and she was living in Austria.
So obviously...
So it's early 1791.
This is before the revolution had gone full, just like guillotine chopping everybody's heads off.
And France is now experimenting with this brand new idea, the constitutional monarchy, where the king will share power with the population.
And spoiler alert, King Louis did not like this.
The people were rising up and he was feeling very threatened by all of this.
So by June of that year, the revolutionaries were finishing up their shiny new constitution, codifying all of this.
And King Louis, ever the people pleaser, was out there pretending to be totally chill about it.
He was like, yeah, let's have parliament run things.
I'll just be like a figurehead, a decorative monarch, a bit of a like just a human chandelier, if you will, hanging over.
Over France.