Bring out the brioches

In my piece yesterday I brought up the French Revolution. Interesting subject that tried to change the way people thought - moving from a society dominated by the rich and powerful, attempting to raise up the people in the middle while placating the people at the bottom (sound familiar, anyone?).

I often think that Marie-Antoinette, the allegedly haughty arrogant Queen of France, who was much despised by the French public at large, got a bad press.

On hearing the plight of the starving peasants who had no bread to eat, tradition has it that she uttered the phrase "Let them eat cake".

The phrase actually pre-dates her marriage by four years (and was made by someone else entirely - she was 10 at the time), so whether she actually repeated the phrase is uncertain.

And the actual phrase was "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"!.

Brioche is not actually cake. It is a type of bread. I quote from a recipe (!) on the site of the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk) - "A slightly sweet, French yeast bread, rich with butter and eggs. The traditional shape has a fluted bottom and a topknot and is made in a special mould".

So bread of a better quality (which they could never have afforded), not actually cake!

Among other things to remember with Marie-Antoinette are firstly that she was actually Austrian (Princess Maria Antonia of the House of Habsburg), so whether she was quite as fluent in French (even if she obviously had learned the language) and could master its phraseology with the same wit and wisdom that she could manage with German is an open question. I personally can speak both French and German for example, but my sense of humour does not work so well in either as in English.

And she was married at the age of 14 (royalty used to pull this trick quite frequently in 17th and 18th century Europe - if they tried that now, think of the media response!), so she had to mature in a foreign country with all that involved.

You know the problems with immigrants!

Anyway looking down your noses (maybe that should read "their noses") at the lower classes is not an attitude restricted to the nobility in the past. It has passed down to all sorts of politicians round the world in the past fifty years whether it is Mitt Romney and his 47% (a quarter of whom will actually still vote for him!)  or Margaret(-Antoinette) Thatcher in the UK who used to talk in grandiose terms of the "British people", while seemingly uninterested in the poor and the unwashed and the mass unemployed that she left behind in creating a country where the robber bankers could make fortunes, and the speculators could cheat to their heart's content.

Oh, and we don't like rules (some of these people might get found out for the crooks that they are, even though we have legalised a lot of dubious practices), and as the EU likes rules, we don't like the EU.

Wahnsinn!

I am surprised still that during the 1980s she didn't have agents wandering round the ridiculously de-industrialised high unemployment areas dishing out trays full of brioches!

In Germany they have not managed to produce many politicians who produce this sort of nonsense. They tend to be more careful what they say (whether they think along those lines, I would leave you to guess). They have raised the sum of money available to the poorest members of society (some 15-16% of the people living here apparently) in a programme called Hartz IV again next year, though the amount will hardly be adequate. The electricity companies have also announced their price rises for next year. The rise is way above the rate of inflation, and is frankly becoming a joke. Shop around for a cheaper supplier (privatised competition works?) - you won't find one.

Try living without electricity?

We have slashed our gas heating costs by turning the heating down to a minimum except upon the coldest days, but saving electricity? It is, from a practical point of view, far more difficult. And remember that this impacts commercial premises as well, so production costs are obliged to rise driving up everyone's cost of living further!

I will repeat what I have said before. Firstly we need to raise people's standard of living, at all levels maybe but particularly at the bottom (create aspirations, do not inflict criticism! And we need jobs that pay a living wage, not unemployment or cheap labour!). Secondly we need to make costs affordable - create a way that people can live within their means. Rapidly rising costs in areas over which people have no control are IMHO indicative of the failure of the so-called "market economy".

Continue down the road down which we are going and the results are going to be drastic. There probably will not be enough brioches to go round for starters!