Getting fresh up the Roman

Roman Road market is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – and the Council has just announced that fresh food stalls will be joining the market on Saturdays. Roman Road is a traditional East London street market and most traders sell women’s clothing and homeware, which has attracted a diverse community of shoppers. Now the Council hopes that even more shoppers will drop by to pick up their meat and veg, as well as dairy produce and bakery items.

The bakery produce staff with the chalked sign saying “Let them eat brioche”.

Sadly, one of the bakery stalls seemed to be displaying a rather warped sense of humour. The phrase “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” is often translated as “Let them eat cake” and is widely attributed to Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and wife of Louis XVI. She is supposed to have made the statement when she heard that the peasants were rioting because of a bread shortage – just before the bread riots turned into fullscale revolution, which saw both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette executed by the masses.

Historians dispute whether Marie Antoinette actually said the words attributed to her, with Antonia Fraser, for example, insisting that the phrase was uttered by Marie-Therese, wife of Louis XIV. If there was no flour to make bread, there wouldn’t have been any to make cake – which was anyway very much a food consumed by the wealthy in society, not the poor. The quote is therefore often used to symbolise how little the wealthy and powerful understand the everyday lives of ordinary people.

The Roman Road bakery displays a chalked sign, saying “let them eat brioche”. It was probably put there light heartedly, probably just to encourage people to try brioche and the other patisserie items on sale. The authors may well have thought they were just pinching a quote and putting “brioche” in as a new twist on the original – without realising that “brioche” was the original. However, to anyone who realises that the phrase was first used by an ignorant and insensitive monarch who did not care if her subjects had food to eat, today’s sign in Roman Road is not exuberant so much as chilling. Many people are in “food poverty” (or, put more plainly, cannot afford to buy enough to eat. Many mothers go to bed hungry because they have fed their children that day, and huge numbers of people still rely on food banks. Let us eat brioche? If only…

•The Roman Road Street Market runs from 10am to 4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays and from 9am to 5pm on Saturdays. To find out more go to: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/markets

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