The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The National Assembly was in the condition of a pressure cooker. Louis's extremely ambitious proposal of nationalizing Church property in its entirety and instituting the Assignat had brought the revolution to the most fevered boil it had ever been in. Those pre-vote days were a flurry of emotional oratory, backroom canvassing, and threats of disaster. Even the air in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs was charged with the tension of a people who were holding their breath.

The high clergy, the cardinals and the archbishops in their elaborate robes, were apoplectic. They raged in the speaker's rostrum, their voices thundering in the grand hall. They spoke of the wrath of God, of the everlasting hell that was the reward of a nation that had the audacity to plunder the Holy Mother Church. They warned that to interfere with the property of the Church was to loosen the fabric of a Christian society, to summon the dark days of barbarism and infidelity. Their speeches were monumental, redolent of brimstone and flame, and they terrified the more devout members of the Assembly.

The nobility was dangerously divided. One bloc of hard-line conservative nobles saw the plan as a terrifying attack upon the fundamental right of property. If the King and the Assembly took the Church's property this morning, why not the nobility's property tomorrow? Another, more pragmatic fraction was insidiously in favor. They enjoyed the genius of the plan: it terminated the national debt crisis without visiting upon their own domains the dreaded universal land tax. They welcomed the sacrifice of the Church rather than the bleeding of their own treasuries.

The Third Estate, man for man, was wholeheartedly in support. They saw the Church's sheer riches garnered over the space of one thousand years as the national treasure hoard of the people that was theirs by right. They saw the plan as the stroke of genius it was, that would enrich the state, humble the arrogant Church princes, and give the ordinary Frenchman the chance of owning his own patch of earth.

Louis, observing the ebb and the flow of the debate, knew the vote was far from secure. The passionate speeches of the bishops were wearing thin. The vote of decision, the vote for triumph, was in the largest and most untrustworthy bloc in the Assembly: the plain parish priests. They were men of the pulpit, but men of the people too. They were reverent, but bitter too of the colossal wealth and pride of their own hierarchy.

A night before the vote, Louis knew that he had to secure their support. If it were to come straight from him, it would be construed as royal coercion. Rather, his presence necessitated a private, late night conference of his most faithful, articulate deputies of the Third Estate, the shrewd lawyer Antoine Barnave included. He took them to his study for a secret, late night strategy session.

"The bishops are winning the argument on piety," said Louis, his voice low and persuasive. "They're framing this as an assault on God. We're losing the high ground on morality. We need to redefine the message. We need to provide the curés with a reason to vote in their hearts as well as in their heads, and in their own self-interest."

He used his HUD, the blue screen that was second nature to him springing to life in his mind, to calculate the arguments, to decide the best leverage.

He attempted the first, his party's method.

Argument: "The state must pay for this in order to save the nation."

The HUD estimate was lukewarm.

Outcome: In conflict within themselves between belief in one's nation and belief in one's religion, the sub-clergy shall be divided. Estimated Support: 50%.

It was too much of a risk, tossing of the coin.

He turned the bishops' case around.

Argument: "That is not an assault upon the Church, but upon its material riches."

The projection was worse still.

Outcome: A timorous, defensive-minded case that sounds like an apology. They will see the priests as attempting half-way reforms. Estimated Support: 40%.

Then, in his time of need, Louis found the key. He had to stop talking about the state and start talking about the priesthood itself. He made a new, particular argument.

Argument: "This is directed against the immoral wealth of the cardinals and the bishops who forsook the spiritual role of the clergy. This revenue from these regions is going towards the end that every French parish priest receives a decent, living wage, given by the state, so the clergy is relieved of the obligation to live at the whim of the noble protectors it has been constrained to court. This is the restitution of the honor of the ordinary clergy."

The HUD response was a bright flash of green.

OUTCOME: The lower clergy will see the decree as no attack on their religion, but as long overdue economic fair-play for themselves, at the expense of their pretending superiors. Estimated Support: 85%.

"You must say this," Louis told Barnave, unveiling the new course of action. "Do not say anything about the deficit. Talk about their poverty. Do not say anything about nationalizing Church property; say distributing the Church's hoarded wealth to the men who actually do God's work. Frame this as the triumph of the parish priest, not of the state."

Armed thus with this new, specific message, Barnave and his friends roamed all night unobserved among the delegations of the lower clergy, putting forward their case in private, earnest conversations, not in grand orations.

The vote for the last time was called the next morning. Tension in the hall was a live thing. High clergy sat in stony, confident quietness, confident that they had the loyalty of their subordinates well in control. The vote was a slow, dragging roll call, in which each delegate rose to say "Aye" or "Nay." When the turn of the parish priests came, there was quiet revolution. One after another, they rose, in clear, powerful voices, saying "Aye." Staggered shock and indignation ran as a wave along the benches of the bishops. They had been betrayed by the men who were their subordinates.

The Assignat Decree was carried by a narrow but definite margin. Louis had carried the victory; his financial revolution was secure.

The victory, however, at once fathered upon it a new and vulture-like crisis. The high clergy, foiled in the Assembly, did not yield. They appealed above the Assembly. Before several weeks were gone, it received at Paris a bull from Rome. The Pope, Pius VI, exclaimed against the nationalization of the Church properties as a sacrilegious theft against Heaven. He declared the decree null in the eyes of God and threatened with immediate excommunication every clergyman, and every subject, who should support it.

The French high clergy, having been emboldened by Rome, set out against the revolution in open war. They refused recognition of the authority of the Assembly, described the Assignats as the "devil's currency," and began to preach counter-revolutionary sermons among their flock.

The Assembly, in outrage at this public insubmission, responded with their own draconic measure: The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. It was law designed to shatter the power of the Church for all eternity. It severed the French Church's connection with Rome, branding it as a national church. It directed that all the bishops and clergy would henceforth no longer be appointed by the Church, but would be popularly elected among the citizens of the district—to include Protestants, Jews, atheists, as well as Catholics. And, most controversially, it directed every clergyman in France to take a public oath of loyalty to the new constitution, one that made the nation superior to the Pope.

France was divided in half. The vote on the oath created a schism which ran through each village, each town. Priests who took the oath—the "juring" clergy—were received by the state, were given their new, munificent salaries, and became, in effect, revolution civil servants. Priests who refused—the "non-juring" or "refractory" clergy—were denounced as state enemies. They were stripped of their churches, of pay, of the right to say mass. They went underground, becoming the nucleus of a large counter-revolution, leading their still-loyalist flocks in secret, illegal masses in barns, in forests.

Louis was appalled. He had been looking for an economic answer, and he had unwittingly kindled a religious civil war. He could see the peril at once, the HUD verifying his worst fears with disturbing new figures.

Religious Stability: -60%.

National Unity: FRACTURED.

New Faction Detected: Refractory Clergy. Status: COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY.

Alert: Rural unrest in devout Catholic regions like Brittany and the Vendée: RISING RAPIDLY.

He realized in a deflated heart that in the solving of one problem, another, perhaps even more dangerous one had been created. The battle for the purse of France was at end. The battle for France's conscience was about to begin.