The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The day after the Bastille had fallen, the palace of Versailles was thrown into a panic of fear. The bloody, harsh news of Paris had shattered the closed world of the court. The heads on pikes were more than an atrocious spectacle; they were a sign, and it had been comprehended in stark clearness. The revolution was no longer matter of debate or political calculation. It had bared its teeth.

A wild exodus began. The youngest brother of the king, the ultra-conservative Comte d'Artois, was among the first to go. His carriage, stuffed with luggage, creaked out of the palace courtyard in the pre-dawn darkness for the comparative safety of the Austrian Netherlands. The Prince de Condé, the clan of Polignac, and file of other high nobles of the Old Guard followed. They were among the first of the émigrés, rushing away from what they were sure was a sinking ship, convinced the king was insane and the country was lost to bloody mob rule.

Before he departed, Artois made one last, desperate appeal to Louis. He found the King in the chapel, where Louis had gone not to pray, but to find a moment of silence amidst the mounting uproar.

"Come with us, Louis, for the love of God!" Artois urged, in a hysterical whisper. He gripped his brother's forearm and gazed at him in terror. "The monarchy is at an end in Paris. Those men are not men, they're beasts! They've once had a taste of gore, and they'll be hungry for it. They'll kill you. They'll slay your wife and children. We have to find an army garrison that is loyal in the east, at Metz. We can raise an army, summon the loyal provinces, and march back and wreak destruction on these traitors and reestablish order!"

Louis thought of a moment of escape, of salvation. A while later that morning, Marie Antoinette, white-faced and distraught, more afraid for her children than for anything else, made the same, but more modest, appeal.

"We don't have to go outside the country, Louis," she urged, her voice calm and restrained despite the tremble of her hands. "But Versailles is no longer safe. It is an island in an unfriendly sea. Let us engage in a strategic withdrawal. To Rambouillet, perhaps, or Fontainebleau. A temporary expedient, until riots in the city work themselves out."

Louis listened to the pair of them, desperately wanting with part of himself to be able to agree. The imagery of severed heads was seared into his mind. His modern sensibilities, his belief in order, process, and the rule of law were sickened deeply. The urge to run, to get his family out of all of this newborn viciousness, was all but overwhelming.

Yet, he had lain awake all of a long sleepless night wrestling with that very urge, and he had come to a grim, unchangeable decision. He could not run.

He looked at his brother in panic. "If I run, Charles," he said in subdued but iron-hard tones, "I am not the French King. I become the King of Coblenz, a foreign visitor at an unfamiliar court, petitioner for troops with which to seize my home country. I am simply another political faction, leader of a civil war. The moment I depart Paris, I lose the throne. I have no pretense left. The monarchy dies not on the city streets, but on the road to the frontier."

He gazed at his wife, his face unwinding. "And we could not retreat to Rambouillet, my love. That would be deemed the opening salvo of fleeing. It would be deemed fear, weakness. It would be the confirmation of each of those conspiracy theories those extremists are peddling. They would say that we were gathering troops for a counter-attack, and it would give them the excuse they would like to march on us here."

He took her hands in his. "My power, what is left of it, is not in the army or the loyal provinces. It is in the belief I remain as the leader of the nation. And the nation's heart, whether we like it or not, is in Paris now. I must go there."

"They'll kill you," whispered Marie, her eyes brimming with tears.

"They might," he admitted, the sentence feeling like ice in his stomach. "But if I run, they will definitely kill the monarchy. That is my only card. I need to face the beast that I have made. I need to try and tame it, at least convince it that I am not waging war on it."

It had not been a decision of courage or conscience, but of the hard-eyed practicality of a man with no choice.

The journey to Paris the next morning was the scariest day of his life. He did not travel in the splendid, golden coach of state, but in a more modest carriage, with subdued royal insignia. He was not accompanied by his elite, foreign Swiss Guards, whose presence would be an effrontery, but by the citizen-soldiers of Lafayette's Paris National Guard. He was a king being marched into his capital by the revolution's army.

The roads were thronged with people. Not the cheering, appreciative crowds of earlier triumphs, nor the sullen, hostile crowds of the palace. These were subdued, watching crowds. Peasants, merchants, and workmen stood on either side of the roadside, their faces unchanging, their eyes a blur of curiosity, suspicion, and strange, proprietorial concern. They were watching their king, the man whose actions had brought all of this about, come to tell them what had happened.

He arrived at the gates of Paris, the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall that had become the de facto capital of the revolution. The square had been packed with an immense, immobile crowd. He was not greeted by courtiers bowing low, but by the self-styled mayor, Jean Sylvain Bailly, the very same who had headed the government of the Tennis Court Oath, and the members of the city committee of revolution. They did not bow. They gazed at him with suspicious eyes of men who had recently seized power and were staring at the symbol of the very power they had toppled.

Bailly, with a cushion of velvet, approached him. Upon the cushion, however, lay not a key of the city. It was an unadorned rosette of fabric, a cockade of blue and red, the ancient colors of the city of Paris, the new insignia of the revolution.

"Sire," answered Bailly in formal language. "The people of Paris offer you this symbol of their affection. It is the national sign of the French people."

Louis recognized that was a test. It would be a lethal insult to refuse. To accept would be to ratify their rebellion. He had no choice. He took the cockade.

Graping at what seemed at the instant of inspired intuition, Lafayette, as always the man of symbols, advanced. He took away the red and blue rosette off the hand of the King. He took away a white ribbon off of some of the adjacent guard's coat—the unmistakable, ancient white of the House of Bourbon. He folded it trimly and left it at the center of the Parisian colors. Red and blue, of Paris, embracing the white of monarchy.

"The nation, the law, and the king!" Lafayette cried out, his voice ringing long. The new three-colored cockade was attached to the hat of the King. The tricolor had been born.

Draped in this strange new symbol, a cloth crown on his head, Louis was escorted out on the main balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. He stepped out into the light and looked down over the ocean of impassive faces in the square below. These were the men and women who had marched a man's head on a pike through those very streets just two days before. He was their king, and he was, in fact, their prisoner. He had to convince them, or he would never leave that building with his life.

The silence became thick and heavy. It would be fruitless on his part to enter into long political rhetoric. They did not want words. They wanted an act of acknowledgment, of submission.

He inhaled deeply, and with all the force of his lungs, he shouted the only things he had to say, the things of the new France, not of the past.

"Long live the Nation! Vive la Nation!"

The voice echoed off stone buildings. The crowd of spectators waited, huge, simultaneous intake of breath. For what seemed an eternity of terror, no reply. Then, down deep in the crowd, a lone voice uncertainly echoed, "Vive le Roi!"

Another added their voice, then a dozen, then a hundred, until a rough but growing cheer erupted out of the square. He had passed the test. He had survived undertaking the journey to the very heart of the revolution. He had taken their symbol, and they, at least temporarily, had taken him.

And yet as he stood on that balcony in their colors, he knew the truth. He was no longer the revolution's commander. He was no longer even the leader. He was its captive symbol, astride a tiger that he could not anymore attempt to tame, his very existence tied to the mercurial vengeance of the very mob he had long wanted to lead.

POWER DYNAMIC SHIFT: King's Authority - Eclipsed by Paris Commune.

ROLE: Absolute Monarch -> Constitutional Monarch -> Captive Symbol.

New Objective: SURVIVE.