The phrase let them eat cake is widely attached to Marie Antoinette, supposedly said when she heard that French peasants had no bread. Historians say she did not say it. The line first appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was only a child, and there it refers to a great princess, not to her. The phrase was not linked to her name until 1843, decades after the French Revolution. By then she had become a symbol of royal indifference, and the story fit that reputation. The myth survives because it neatly sums up the gap between the monarchy and the poor.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.