The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The new Committee of Public Accounts was, upon first appearance, the dullest, most sedate of them all of France's committees. Its task was to sit in a small, gloomy room of some back wing at Versailles, amongst heaps of yellowed, bound-in-leather account books reeking of mildew and decay. The process was an eye-glazing bout of grubbing through centuries of unreadable bookkeeping, a world of unreadable script and erratic accounting.

The committee was a miniature of the new France. It consisted of some sulky, embittered noblemen and bishops there as a matter of political convenience and sitting through the sessions looking as if they were bored to death at the entire proceedings as an impolite affront to themselves. It consisted also of a score of enthusiastic and capable deputies from the Third Estate—men from the bar and the merchant navy actively patriotic but largely innocent of the labyrinthine politics of royal finance.

And at the head of the table sat King Louis XVI. For him this room was never prison of boredom but his native territory. He was a man consumed. He had rid himself of the last vestiges of royal pomp. He would arrive at dawn, sleeves already up, and work through the night, goaded by coffee and an icy, consuming spirit of mission. He was no longer some monarch dabbler at finance but an accountant who happened to be monarch and he was alive.

He began by teaching his committee members the fundamentals of his work. "Forget what you think you know," he cautioned them on the first day, gesturing at the messy piles of ledgers. "You are here, and here only, to conduct a forensic investigation. You are looking for the lies the numbers tell."

He detailed what to look for, red flags of waste and fraud as ancient as the 18th century as they were as the 21st. He cited ghost payrolls, irregularly made and awarded contracts, ambiguous and unsubstantial expenses, unnecessary offices and duplication of jurisdiction. The bourgeois members of the committee, themselves businessmen, sat with wide eyes and rapid understanding. The nobles simply sat looking bored and confused.

Through Louis's constant goading, the audit began yielding its first bitter harvest. They uncovered a world of waste and corruption boggling in its scale and impudence. But it was all systematic, death by a thousand cuts. Louis realized he would lose the next political war if he came up with nothing better than an accounting of systematic wastage. He required an icon. He needed one ideal, one outraged, one completely indefensible example of how rotten the old regime was and he could hold aloft as a club.

There were simply too many records available to be shared around. It would take years to manually cross-check them all. This was where Louis's distinct advantage made an entry. The HUD was of little utility for intensive analysis, but it was like magic to selective search. He began treating it like a holy search engine, destined to search for the needle in the thousand haystacks.

Late one night, alone in the committee room, he relaxed and focused, casting a question into his own mind. What would be the most wasteful and publicly intolerable type of royal expenditure?

The HUD, once dormant, sprang to life, blue text contrasting against the yellowed parchment like surface of his desk.

QUERY RECEIVED. ANALYZING…

TARGET CATEGORY IDENTIFIED: VENAL OFFICES.

DESCRIPTION: Government and court positions sold by the Crown and now viewed as the personal, heritable property of aristocratic families. The officeholders draw fees and salaries but work little or not at all. Is an immense diversion of state revenues and primary source of institutional corruption.

Louis knew of the venal offices, of course, but he wanted something tangible, an outrageous example. He defined his question. Show me the most absurd and costly individual office.

The HUD spent time to process the request and then presented its result.

TARGET IDENTIFIED: The Royal Guild of Wig Powder Inspectors and Controllers of the King's Wardrobe.

Annual Cost to Treasury (in lost fees & salaries): 300,000 livres.

Official Duties: To inspect the quality of the powdered wigs used at court and to approve the selection of the King's ceremonial buttons.

Actual Work Performed: The office has not formally met in over fifty years. Its duties are purely ceremonial and entirely defunct.

Current Hereditary Beneficiary: The Duc de Polignac.

Louis stared at the text, his face slowly creasing into a feral smile. The Duc de Polignac. A high-flying libertine, favorite of the Queen's original court, and, most of all, one of the first and most conspicuous émigrés. A man who had deserted France and was, as he sat there now, concocting some foreign-backed counter-revolution from his exile at Turin. It was perfect. It was like a gift hurled into his lap on a silver plate.

The next day, he didn't just inform the committee of the discovery. He informed the entire National Assembly. He chose his moment with care, waiting until the public galleries were crowded with people from Paris. He made no impassioned address. He presented the findings dry-eyed, as an auditor reports findings.

"Gentlemen of the Assembly," he began, speaking slowly and calmly. "Your Committee of Public Accounts has already brought to light the... curious system of finances of the Ancien Régime. We've spent some time studying the system of venal offices, by which public offices are sold and resold as private property."

He paused, and the delegates grumbled to themselves. "I could provide you with an enormous inventory of these appointments, a dry litany of unnecessary tax gatherers and sinecured harbor inspectors. But one special case, though, perhaps better illustrates the nature of the problem we deal with."

He gestured with one sheet of paper. "Our search has brought to light an inherited office known as the Royal Guild of Wig Powder Inspectors. The holder of this office enjoys a generous salary and has the privilege of taking his share of the fees of all wig makers of Paris. His duty is to look after the quality of the wig powder used at court."

There was an undertone of perplexed, amused laughter from the representatives of the Third Estate.

"This office," continued Louis, speaking as flatly as he was able, "costs the people of France something like three hundred thousand livres per year. That's an amount, I can say, that could supply over a thousand families of peasants with provisions for one year."

The laughter ceased at once and the public galleries burst into an enraged growl.

"We have also discovered, from our investigation, that this guild has never, indeed, met or made an official inspection for over fifty years. And we also discovered that its current, hereditary occupant is the Duc de Polignac, a man who, as you also know, has deserted this country and now plots with foreign powers with the aim of overthrowing this very Assembly."

He let the silence linger for just one moment, one perfect, dramatic beat.

"So then, gentlemen, to sum up: at the very time when the people of Paris this summer were starving for bread, the state, and with it the people, were paying the salaries of a thousand peasants' income per annum to a traitor, for labour which does not exist. This is only one example from thousands. Here the question is not whether we can afford to continue treating like this. The question is how we can afford not to bring an immediate and complete end to it at once."

The shock was seismic. The legend of the "Wig Powder Inspectors" was a sensation. Beaumarchais's presses worked day and night, printing pamphlets describing the story in lurid, satirical detail. Cartoonists indulged themselves, depicting the powdered, wigged Duc de Polignac fleeing France with bundles of money stamped "Wig Powder." The story became an inside joke of Paris, shorthand for all the corrupt, lunatic, and parasitical characteristics of the ancien régime.

The public was enraged. The debate at the Assembly was short and decisive. The motion to abolish all venal offices, an enormous and essential restructuring of the state, passed unanimously. The few nobles courage enough to oppose them were hooted down from the galleries.

Louis had done it. He'd used one tedious line item from an old ledger to line up the political capital for one of his most significant reforms. He'd wielded the audit as a weapon.

Popular Support for Radical Reform: +40%.

Political Power of Ancient Nobility: -30%.

He demonstrated to the Assembly and to the people themselves that he was as much their King as he was their most ruthless and most efficient weapon for fighting the old corruption.