Let Them Eat Cake & The Tennis Court Oath, ThreadZoomMash Performance Piece, 18 November 2021

A few weeks ago, I played an especially close and exciting real tennis tournament match at Lord’s, emerging victorious – in straight sets but by the narrowest of margins in each set.

Exhausted but happy, I stopped at Porchester Waitrose on my way home, to pick up bread and other comestibles for my supper.

But I discovered the in-house bakery covered in tarpaulin, with signs reading, “No Entry” and “Due to a leak in our ceiling we have had to close down this area…”

Opposite the bakery were mostly bare shelves, where normally the bread would be. But one shelf was fully stocked, bulging with packs of brioche loaves and brioche rolls.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, I said to myself. In the circumstances; who wouldn’t?

The English expression. “let them eat cake” is, in fact, a loose translation of the phrase, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”.

I don’t like the loose, English translation. Brioche is, in my opinion, a rich form of bread. Classified as viennoiserie, brioche is almost pastry, but not a piece of cake.

Bread, pastry, biscuit, cake; these distinctions might seem trivial or inconsequential. Yet, in the early 1990s case of McVities v HMRC,  the very VAT status of Jaffa Cakes hinged on whether that particular delicacy should be defined as a cake (zero-rated) or a chocolate-covered biscuit (standard rated). The tribunal ruled that the product had nine characteristics, some cake, some biscuit, but on balance determined it to be a cake.

Two hundred years earlier, Marie Antoinette’s place in history was determined, formally, at the hands of the French Revolutionary Tribunal. Unfortunately for Marie Antoinette, her informal reputation is entwined with the phrase “let them eat cake” or “qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, despite the fact that there is no evidence that she ever used the phrase and a great deal of evidence that she couldn’t possibly have originated it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the phrase in his Confessions, attributing the anecdote to an unnamed “great princess”.  Rousseau wrote Confessions between 1765 and 1769, when Marie Antoinette was still a nipper and before she had ever been to France.

Rousseau might even have made up the anecdote. Another possibility is that the anecdote originated with Marie Theresa of Spain, about 100 years earlier.

Marie Theresa was consort to Louis XIV, The Sun King, during an extremely lavish era – when Versailles was transformed from a hunting lodge into the opulent palace we now associate with Versailles.

Marie Theresa died in 1683, before the Versailles tennis court was completed, but her son, Louis, The Grand Dauphin, played an inaugural game on that court in 1686. 

Roll the clock forward a hundred years again, to 1789. The Versailles tennis court played a crucial role in the French Revolution. In June 1789, the Third Estate or National Assembly of commoners, found themselves locked out of the chamber by order of the King.

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, suggested that they congregate instead in the nearby Royal Tennis Court of Versailles, where they swore a collective oath, similar in style to the US Declaration of Independence, “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established”. 576 of the 577 members of the assembly took the oath.

The Tennis Court Oath was a seminal moment in the progress of the French Revolution. Ironically, though, the tennis court oath neither benefitted the reputation of tennis nor that of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Jeu de paume, as the French call real tennis, virtually died out in France in the aftermath of the French revolution.  In tennis’s 17^th and 18^th century heyday, there were hundreds of courts in Paris alone. 

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a doctor who opposed capital punishment. He advocated the use of a quick, painless blade mechanism, but only in preference to the more torturous methods of execution commonly used.  It was much to the doctor’s chagrin that the deadly mechanism acquired his name. There is an urban myth that Dr Guillotin was himself thus decapitated during the reign of terror. It is true that A Dr Guillotin met that fate, but not Dr Joseph-Ignance Guillotin, who was imprisoned, but survived the reign of terror by the skin of his teeth.

I mused on all these matters that evening, a few weeks ago, while munching my brioche and reflecting on winning a tennis match by the skin of my teeth.

The oath I had heard on the tennis court that evening was the single expletive, “shit”, used by my opponent so many times, he got a warning from the marker (umpire).  I wondered how many of the 576 subscribers to the original Tennis Court Oath were reduced to such lesser, expletive oaths, soon after their revolutionary gesture.

Changing the social order, like brioche, is not a piece a cake.