NOVEL WEB Chapter 40: The Shot Heard 'Round Versailles
Peace celebrations were but a distant recollection, the parchment writing of a peace treaty a ratified fact. The war had been fought and won, the new American nation forged, the British defeated. The true war, though, the one that had been simmering since that first day as king, waited just down the road for Louis. The cannon he would fire wasn't one made of cannon nor one fashioned of musket, but a mere piece of vellum: a royal decree calling for a common land tax.
He called his Royal Council to the opulent Council Chamber, that very place where before they had bellowed for war with England. There was no sense of national ardor today, but stunned, horrified silence as Louis presented his plan. He did not bother to dull the shock with verbal diplomacy nor with sugary wheedling words. He presented his decree as a surgeon presents a knife—a bitter, indispensable instrument to cut out a lethal malignancy.
"Gentlemen," Louis began to say, his voice firm and clear, ringing out in the silent room. "I have shown you Minister Necker's last account of the war. You have seen with your own eyes. France has been victorious, and France is destroyed. The valor of our men and women at sea and upon land has bought us peace and security abroad. Now a sacrifice is necessary within this realm to ensure the very foundations of this realm itself."
He paused, his eye running over the faces before him—the nobles with their perukes, the cardinals with their scarlet garments. "The Third Estate, the French nation, can give no more. They have paid with their taxes and sons for this victory. To ask anything further of them would be nothing more than a cruelty and injustice. The burden must then fall where riches are to be found. I have prepared an edict for a general tax upon land. One equitable rate to be imposed upon all French lands, without exception and without exemption. The First and Second Estates, who by far are the proprietors of French soil, must now do their duty as patriots and pay for the preservation of the realm conquered by their fathers and blessed by God."
For a brief period, there was only the sound of respiration. The nobles and priests who were present gazed at him as if he'd started to utter tongues. They were taken aback to such a degree that they were not able to utter anything.
Then the shock splintered, and a convulsive wave of indignation shook the room.
The Archbishop of Paris, whose face was quickly turning red like the color of his robes, beat his fist upon the board. "This is an abomination!" he stormed, his voice convulsed with indignation. "A attack upon Holy Mother Church's sacred, ancient prerogatives! The properties of The Church are not a commercial investment, Your Majesty! They are God's properties, bestowed for the salvation of souls, for the poor's welfare, for instructing The Faithful! To tax them like a public tavern, like a brothel, is sacrilege! A sin upon God!"
Before the Archbishop had finished his sentence, Vergennes had risen from his seat, his face one of stiff, repressed fury. The abased minister no longer existed; there stood before the Archbishop the master of a class whose very existence was being called into question.
"Your Majesty," he stated, his voice icy with frost, "in one decree you are attempting to unilaterally do away with a thousand years of French law, French tradition, and French honor. The exemption of the nobles from paying the taille is not a privilege to be removed at a king's whim. It is a sacred compact, an integral law of this kingdom. We paid for it with the blood of our fathers upon a thousand battlefields. We paid our dues with blood that others paid with money. That is the fabric upon which this nation rests! To change this now is to spit upon the graves of our fathers and to declare that our honor is a commodity to be sold!"
Whispers of indignant agreement filled the air. Louis listened, his face unmoved. He had been expecting this to happen; he had been expecting all the protests he was facing.
"Your Grace," he declared, standing before the Archbishop with ghastly calm, "the properties of the Church are vast and productive. They will be taxed upon that productivity, not upon that sacredness. God, I am certain, is not entitled to a tax exemption. And Minister de Vergennes," he continued, standing before the foreign minister, "your ancestors paid with their blood to defend a kingdom that will shortly expire from debt. The sacrifice will be wasted if we allow the state to perish. A genuine patriot pays as he must to save a nation. The means of payment change as time goes."
He stood up, ending the debate. "Your words have been heard. My mind is made up." With a brusque nod, he formally ordered that the edict be taken to the Parlement of Paris to be registered, one formal legal process whereby to give force of law to it.
He himself had fired the first shot. The battle thus went to its first line of defense: the Parlement. This was no representative body such as a modern parliament. It was Paris's supreme court of law, a college composed not of elected representatives, but all of "nobles of the robe"—purchasers of, inheritors of, and appointees to, judicial offices—aristocrats who were custodians of noble privilege by right of law, and who were a formidable barrier.
As one could have expected, the Parlement would not inscribe the edict. They did this publicly and defiantly via an official remonstrance, a legal protest mimeographed and distributed all over Paris. It was a political tract of eloquence, penned by that passionate rhetorician d'Eprémesnil, that very lawyer who had been so abjectly defeated at Clugny's trial and who burned with vengeance.
The remonstrance cleverly avoided bickering over money. Instead, it positioned the Parlement as the great defenders of French liberty against an aggressive, tyrannical king. It emphasized "ancient rights," the "fundamental laws of the kingdom," and the possibility of "royal despotism." It was a challenge to Louis's authority line for line.
As the suit raged, Louis unleashed his own crusader. Beaumarchais, who had now become a grand master of public advocacy, launched a massive attack against the propaganda. His secretly-owned print shops operated day and night.
New broadsheets flooded Paris streets, with direct and simple writing. One, The Accountant's Bill, asked this question directly: "Who paid for winning against the British? The sailors, the soldiers, the shopkeepers, the peasants! YOU did! Who refuses to pay to make up for the bill? The most affluent nobles and bishops of this country! Is this just?"
Sarcastic, satiric cartoons filled print shops' windows. One depicted a perspiring, obese bishop and a rumpled, powdered marquis crouching together on a hoard of gold coins locking the treasury door with a bar as a hungry family of peasants stared at them, lamenting. Another depicted the deputies of Parlement as whiskered foxs sitting up to a henhouse with a sign that read "Privilege."
Beaumarchais even quoted the Parlement's own words against them. He published a satirical dialogue that mischievously turns the great American revolutionary cliché around thus: "What is this uproar that we hear of from the noble Parlement?" remarks one of the characters. "They cry 'No taxation without representation!' But then they must intend no taxation of those who are represented, and no representation to those who are taxed! How very free that is!"
The impact was electric. The ordinary Parisians who were already bitter and hostile to the perquisites of the nobles were wholeheartedly and enthusiastically with the King. They saw him as being one man who bravely opposed the selfish and untruthful aristocrats. But public sentiment mattered not at all within the gilded corridors of the Parlement. The political and juridical powers all belonged to them.
The lines were drawn. On one side were the people and the King; on the other were all of noble and ecclesiastical privilege, arrayed behind the great legal fortress of the Parlement. A constitutional stalemate was under way, a stand-off between will of the King and ancient regime law. And Louis could see that if he did not discover a way to penetrate it, the war he had just commenced would be finished before it ever got under way.