The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The Treaty of Paris was not yet quite wet with ink. The victorious army parade was at an end; the flowers were wilting on the Parisian boulevards, the patriot pamphlets were lying on the pavements. The great national victory was accomplished. And now with the clear light of the morning after the celebration came the reckoning.

Louis sat in the office of Necker, the room more like some mausoleum than any ministry. There was naught to exult over here, nothing to remind one of the triumphs that still echoed through the corridors of Versailles. There were only figures, stiff, icy, unbending. The War Finance Minister, worn down the better part of ten years by the War, unfolded on his vast mahogany desk a new chart. It was not projection nor estimate. It was the ultimate accounting, the ghastly tally of their great victory.

The numbers were ghastly. Louis had fought his war with cold-blooded efficiency and avoided the horrendous wastage of previous wars, but the cost was nevertheless staggering. The total bill for the restricted war, plus the covert subsidization through Roderigue Hortalez and the full-scale Jamaica Gambit, exceeded 1.3 billion livres. The new-fangled Liberty Bonds had raised a record sum, to the credit of the ingenuity of Beaumarchais and the civic-mindedness of the citizenry, but they covered slightly less than one-half the cost. The balance was financed with high-interest loans from the same money men that Necker had warned him about.

The national debt, until recently a crisis culminating to the war, had now grown into the gargantuan monstrosity of close to unimaginable proportions. It had nearly doubled.

"We have won, Your Majesty," announced Necker, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. He indicated one final ghastly shape on the chart. "And we are, for all practical intents and purposes, bankrupt. The annual interest on this new debt now exceeds the entire annual revenue of the Crown on the land tax, the salt tax, and on all other duties collectively. We can't afford the debt any more, let along the army, the fleet, or the state operations. We can't borrow any more. Within two years' time, at the rate we are currently spending money, the treasury will be drained and we will have to default on our loans. The consequence of that... would be unthinkable."

Louis sat there motionless, his face set. He was not surprised. He had caught sight of this moment on the future horizon when he first glanced through the kingdom's ledgers. He took a risk, accomplished some tremendous success, bought himself time and massive political capital. But the essential disease of the French state form remained. Success hadn't cured it; it simply set its lethal pathology into sharper focus.

He had envisioned this moment, nurturing the most radical, the most dangerous sketch for the plan. He knew that the victory and the unprecedented support he now enjoyed afforded him the thin, brief window he required to take the chance on the impossible.

"All right. But there is a solution, Minister," he added softly but firmly.

Necker looked up with his face weighted with skeptical weariness. "Another bond? Another loan from the Dutch? There is nothing left, Your Majesty..."

"No more loan," Louis stated, rising to the window and gazing through it at the immaculately trimmed gardens of Versailles, the exact, manufactured world created on the back of an unsustainably false foundation. "But a new tax."

"A new tax on the Third Estate is impossible!" cried Necker instantly. "It will cause revolution."

"Yes," answered Louis, turning to him once more. "My taxes will not originate with the Third Estate."

He allowed the silence to linger for just one moment until he unveiled his final, most radical gamble, the one to replace the Baron's trial and the Jamaica invasion in its sheer, revolutionary scope.

"For hundreds of years, Minister, the foundation of the finances of this kingdom has been false: a convenient, time-honored, and eventually lethal lie. The lie is that the land—the very source of all wealth within this nation—has no fundamental duty to the Crown; the lie is that the two wealthiest, most privileged classes of France, the Nobility and the Clergy, that together own nearly half the land and all the heritable wealth, ought to pay nearly nothing to the maintenance of the nation or its defense in times of war."

He halted a bit, his eyes as hard as granite. "That lie ends today."

He laid it all out. It was not some complex pattern of financial instruments; it was one brutally elegant and simple reform. A universal land tax.

"We shall publish a royal edict," he went on, his voice low and fervid. "It shall abolish all the existing land taxes, all the exemptions for the provinces, all the feudal exemptions. It shall yield to one tax and one only, one that shall extend to all acres of land France-wide, whosoever the owner may be. The possessions of a Duke, the farm of a Bishop, the garden of a tradesman—each bit of land shall pay according to its value, and each bit of land shall pay at the same, lone rate."

Necker sat there with his mouth agape. He was completely, utterly at a loss for words. This was not reform. This was not some new policy. This was a revolution from the very throne. It was a direct challenge to the very heart of the most essential, most zealously guarded privilege that, for one thousand years, had defined French society.

"They will not accept it," gasped Necker at last, his voice trembling with horror and awe. "The Parlements will not enroll the edict. They will decree it illegal, a violation of the ancient privileges of the nobility. The clergy will decree it sinful, a sacrilege against the property of the Almighty himself. The nobles... they will see it as the coup de grâce of a despot, the attempt to exterminate them root and branch. Your Majesty, it will not be a political struggle. It will mean civil war."

"Yes," replied Louis, his face expressionless. "It most certainly will."

He looked out the window again, his eyes sweeping the opulent palace, the vast, perfect gardens—a world fashioned and maintained for the enjoyment of the very nation he was about to wage war against. He'd defeated his foreign enemy. He'd bested the British, secured his borders, and saved his American friend. But the true enemy all along had lived right there, inside his house, at his table, whispering down his corridors.

"We defeated the British," he spoke softly to himself. "Now the true war is starting."

The HUD, having for months observed his rising popularity, now led him to the tough call, a rehearsal of the decree to be issued. The numbers were the most drastic he had ever to deal with.

PROPOSED EDICT: The Universal Land Tax.

IMPACT ANALYSIS:

Popularity (Third Estate): +70%. (They see the King as their ultimate champion.)

Popularity (Nobility): -100%. (STATUS: REBELLIOUS).

Popularity (Clergy): -100%. (STATUS: HERETICAL).

STABILITY OF THE REALM (Short-Term): -80%.

CIVIL WAR PROBABILITY: HIGH.

REVOLUTION RISK (if successful): -90%.

REVOLUTION RISK (if fails): 100%.

He had found success overseas to deliberately spark a conflagration at home. It was the great gamble, the final toss of the accountant monarch to settle the ledger of the nation, at any costs they might.