The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The passing of the Assignat Decree was political seismic shock, but the after-shocks were where the hard work began. Nationalizing the Church's property was one thing on paper; requisitioning, auditing, and auctioning for sale an asset that consisted of nearly one tenth of the total landmass of France was a logistical feat of monumental, historically unprecedented scale. It was, as Louis well knew, the largest asset confiscation and sale in the history of Europe, and he was now the chief operating officer.

His Committee of Public Accounts, his one-time tool of investigation, was now the center of administration of the new French state. Subject to the personal and merciless control of Louis, it became the engine of a monumental, national undertaking. Before anything was sold, one acre of land had first to be inventoried. For centuries, the Church's possessions had been made of a patchwork of ancient deeds of title, of feudal settlements, of oral customs. There was no central registry, no master roll.

Louis, with his 21st-century understanding of system and data administration, knew it was too much for them to build their new financial system upon this chaotic foundation. They needed to have the right, whole, and normalized inventory.

"We shall not be dealing in tenuous hopes," he explained to the committee, a new flame of administrative fervor in his eyes. "We shall deal in carefully measured, duly appraised assets. We shall have a new Grand Cadastre, a grand registry of all of the Church's former properties. It will be the finest survey of this kingdom ever undertaken. A new Domesday Book for the new France."

He went about recruiting a new kind of army. No longer would it be made of soldiers, but of surveyors, clerks, and accountants. He called, and the educated bourgeoisie came in crowds. They were the men of the Third Estate, the lawyers and the merchant bourgeoisie who had been kept out of the ancient regime. They were eager to serve the new, willing to utilize their abilities in the noble task of national reconstruction. Louis furnished them with the best surveying equipment, blank forms of his own pattern, standardised, and a clear, categorical mandate.

The scenes in the committee rooms were in contrast to the large, philosophical debates in the central Assembly. Here, there were none of the rights of man debates. There were debates about metrics.

"No vague estimates of the worth of a piece of property!" Louis would insist, prodding at one of the preliminary reports. "I want numerical, standardized data! What is the quality of the soil? Cultivable arable farmland, grazing pasture, productive forest? How far is it from the nearest river or royal road that is navigable? We need to come up with a data-intensive, pattern-based model of value that can be universally applied all across the nation, all the way from the Burgundy vineyards to the Normandy farmland. Each asset must receive a number."

This was the world he knew. When Mirabeau was persuasive in his speeches to the Assembly, Louis was modestly shaping the administration of a modern state.

His particular genius, the HUD, was transformed from a political tool to one of the most sophisticated of the tools of project management. He was able in his thoughts to "zoom out" from one map of France, no longer divided by medieval provinces, but coded in color by stage of his exhaustive survey, to another, so that the vast undertaking could be managed with an amount of control of which no 18th-century monarch could possibly have dreamt.

A mental question would trigger a status report.

REGION: BRITTANY. SURVEY PROGRESS: 25%.

ALERT: Progress stalled due to local resistance. Survey teams have been threatened by peasant mobs, incited by refractory priests who are declaring the survey a 'satanic census.'

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Dispatch a detachment of the National Guard to protect the surveyors and arrest the leading agitators. Launch a targeted propaganda campaign explaining how the sale will benefit local peasants.

He would give the orders immediately, deploying Lafayette's troops and one of the presses of Beaumarchais to the troubled zone.

A second question would reveal another concern.

REGION: BURGUNDY. SURVEY PROGRESS: 80%.

ANOMALY DETECTED: Valuation discrepancies in the Mâcon district. The reported value of several prime vineyards is significantly below market estimates, suggesting potential collusion and corruption by the local survey team.

RECOMMENDATION: Dispatch a team of elite, incorruptible auditors from Necker's office in Paris to conduct a surprise re-evaluation.

He was the consummate controller, mobilizing his army of accountants with the decisiveness of a general relocating troops on the front of battle. He was fighting and winning asilent, methodical war of numbers and logistics.

After months of this exhausting, grueling labor, the first phase was completed. The Grand Cadastre was in being, a multi-volume compendium of information that was the ultimate most exhaustive picture of the national riches ever compiled. Now, the second phase could begin: the largest-ever auction.

The auction sale of the nationalized assets, the biens nationaux, began in the spring. In every one of the great towns, the national government, directed by the National Assembly, began to auction sales of the assets of what had been the Church. This was the largest re-organization of wealth in French history, and it completely re-structured the fabric of the nation.

The sales reports were pursued obsessively by the accountant, Louis, as his grand theory was being executed, and it was succeeding better even than his expectations.

He read in one of the smaller French towns on the periphery of Lyon the story of one of the landless peasant farmers, of a man whose family had worked the same infinitesimal patch of ground for ten generations as tenant of one of the local Benedictine abbey estates. Trembling in his hands, the farmer went into the auction room and with his entire lifetime's earnings, which had been duly transformed by him into the new Assignat currency, purchased the same patch of ground. Out of the town hall, he came no longer as a tenant, but as a free man, as a landed proprietor, his destiny henceforth inextricably tied to the success of the revolution which had brought it into being.

In a city like Bordeaux, the wealthy merchant, the man whose income had come from the West Indies trade, bought the entire of the defunct monastery on the city fringes. He had no intention of using it for prayer, but of converting the sturdy stonework buildings as a gigantic new textile mill venture, one that would employ scores of people. Dead hand of older clerical ownership was being removed by the healthy productive mechanism of new capitalism.

Its financial effect was instantaneous and overwhelming. France's treasury, for the first time in one hundred years, began to bulge. With the Assignats rolling in the money for the sale of the land, the people ceremoniously burned them in the public squares, the powerful image of this was not junk paper of yesterday, this was paper of tangible, measurable value. The national debt, that boogeyman which had threatened to devour the kingdom, was finally being diminished.

But the political effect was even larger. With every piece of land sold, Louis was creating another revolutionist. Those half-million peasants and bourgeoisie who were buying a parcel of the deceased Church estate were the most passionate, uncompromising supporters of the new regime. They had personal, financial interests in the new regime, direct and immediate interests. They would battle to the last breath to prevent the return of the Ancien Régime, for a return of the monarchy and Church would witness the ending of their new title deeds. It would be the end of everything.

Louis had done more than prevent the financial crisis. He had brought his scientific, analytical mind to bear to provide the nation with a heart transplant. He had moved the enormous, inert, unproductive riches of the Church into the hands of the most vigorous and loyal factions of the people. He had, in the signing of his name, in the stroke of his balance sheet, bound the people to his revolution in chains of gold coin, in deeds of land.