The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

With the inevitable coming together of the orders, a tired, fragile peace descended over Versailles. The active fighting of the weeks just gone fell silent, and the vast, grinding work of building a new France out of the ruins began. The National Assembly became a body of a thousand and two combined men and began its work. The initial, thrilling era of the revolution was brought to a close; the grim, building era began.

Louis, true to his word, plunged into the work. He assumed a new role, the only role fitted to him: the Chairman of the Board of the French Revolution. He shook off the massive pomp of the Royal Session and appeared at the mundane meetings of the Assembly in a stern, business-like coat. He sat neither on his throne, waived from the hall, the most signal emblem of the new order, nor on his throne pedestal, even further away from the hall. He occupied a humble chair alongside the president of the Assembly, not as king over his subjects, but as chief executive over his board of directors.

He soon found his modern rational mind to be a valuable asset. The Assembly was a group of talented orators and passionate idealists but also a volatile body that tended to get lost in incomprehensible abstract disputations over the philosophical character of the "general will" as espoused by Rousseau. Where others like Robespierre and Sieyès delivered magnificent orations on its metaphysical character, Louis would humbly but obstinately steer the discussion back to the gritty realities of administration.

"Gentlemen, your words are so fine," he would interrupt after a long and abstract disquisition on the nature of sovereignty. "Your 'general will' is a brilliant notion. But how do we make it operational in the tax code? How do we make it serve us in overhauling the disastrous salt tax? Let us assign a committee to dwell on the philosophical essentials, while we, here and now, deal with the practicalities. We have a nation to feed and a budget to harmonize."

He used the HUD to not predict outcomes, but to guide the debate, to run through the potential impact of various constitutional provisions. He became the master moderator, the voice of cool practicality amidst the tidal wave of revolutionary passion. He was, in his own mind, building his ideal government: a strong, elected legislative body responsible for domestic issues and legislation but still with the King exercising vast executive powers, particularly over the military, foreign relations, and the right of absolute veto. He was attempting to create a modern, efficient state, a mix of the British parliamentary system and the strong American-style presidential system but with the pomp and circumstance of constitutional French monarchy.

While Versailles was lost in its vast intellectual project, the political crisis was unraveling the precarious supply chains that fed the capital. The cost of bread, the wellspring of popular irritation, began to increase once more. The loaf that cost eight sous in the spring cost twelve, fourteen. For the working poor of the city, for whom the bread was not food but the whole content of the belly, it was a death warrant.

Out of this climate of panic and hunger arose a new kind of leader, leaders who operated well beyond the National Assembly's proper, legalistic debates. In the gardens of the Palais-Royal, the Duc d'Orléans' private sanctum and a forum free from the royal censor's hand, radical journalists and politicians began whipping Parisian mobs into frenzies.

These were the kind of men who listened to the young stuttering but brilliant lawyer Camille Desmoulins and the crazy, sewer-dwelling journalist Jean-Paul Marat. These people spoke a much more potent language than constitutional ideology. These people spoke of plots and conspiracies. These people strongly suspected the King's true intentions and believed his alliance with the Assembly was merely a temporary stratagem. These people believed the nobles and the Queen in particular—"l'Autrichienne," the Austrian—were traitors who would stop at nothing to topple the people's victory.

Their whispered paranoid rumors fell on willing ears among the Paris crowd. Gossip nourished by surviving spokesmen of the Old Guard spread from mouth to mouth. The most terrifying and most efficient rumor was that the King was gathering his most trusted—and most exotic—regiments and marching on Paris to smash the Assembly militarily and arrest the nationalist delegates.

The news was anything but entirely unsubstantiated. Louis, afraid of the mounting rioting in the capital, had actually authorized the movement of several Swiss and German mercenary troops to the outskirts of the city. To his own conscience, it was a prudent, defensive act, a police action to preserve the peace and rescue the Assembly from potential riot violence. But to the terrified and starved Parisians, it seemed the signal for a bloodbath.

The city began to look like a powder keg and the very air crackled with an unseen spark.

Louis was absorbed in the complex game of chess-like constitutional argumentation at Versailles and dangerously out of touch with just how combustible things in the capital had become. He was busy in a late-night session with the constitutional commission of the Assembly fighting a most unusual and productive battle with Mirabeau and Sieyès over the structure of the future courts. He was in good spirits, in control of the situation. He believed that he was doing just fine with his top-down, orderly revolution.

The illusion was shattered as the doors of the committee room were thrown open and the Marquis de Lafayette walked in. He was no stylish Versailles hero. He was disheveled, his uniform mud-spattered, his face pale with panic and weariness. He had just galloped wildly from his command as the newly appointed commander of the National Guard in Paris, the people's militia mobilized by the Assembly to keep the peace.

"Your Majesty!" panted Lafayette. He was driven hard to utter the words. All argument ceased. All eyes in the room stared. "The city... the city is out of control!"

"What has happened, Marquis?" Louis asked, rising from his seat, a shiver of fear running through him.

"All the reports of the movement of the troops have excited the people to a state of madness," declared Lafayette, his words with desperate grimness. "They think that you mean to murder them. The populace has been stirred to passion by the demagogues of the Palais-Royal. The mobs beset the premises of the gunmakers and take what arm they can capture. A complete regiment of the French Guards have deserted and joined the people!"

He controlled a ragged breath, the next words searing with a fearful dread.

"They talk of assaulting the Hôtel des Invalides in order to seize the thirty thousand muskets from its cellar vaults. And... and from thence..." He hesitated, as the very words were poisons and death. "They are marching on the Bastille."

A speechless shock fell on the room. The Bastille. The vast, black fortress on Paris's east side. A prison, yes, but the absolute, physical embodiment of royal absolutism, of arbitrary governance, of the despotism of the monarchy. The prison to which the monarchy had sentenced its enemies to be lost to the world.

Louis lost his footing. His scrupulously managed, top-down, intellectual "King's Revolution" was about to be snatched from his grasp and exchanged for a bloody, anarchic popular insurrection. The revolution was no longer his to manage. It was about to burst out of the committee corridors and into the street and its immediate target was the most potent symbol of his own power.

The HUD, otherwise keeping tab on the agonizingly slow pace of constitutional deliberations, now erupted in a series of blood-red alerts.

CRISIS ALERT: The Storming of the Bastille - IMMINENT.

City of Paris: STATUS: ANARCHY.

Control over Revolution: SLIPPING RAPIDLY.