The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The revolution, Louis was rapidly learning, was a hydra. He severed one head—the prerogative of the Old Guard, the threat of insolvency, the conspiracy of the émigrés—and two or three fresh ones, more numerous and quarrelsome than the first, seemed to spring up in its place. Defeated or scattered, his external and internal enemies, the mighty, uniting cause that had united the National Assembly began to falter. The once tight bloc of the Third Estate, now merged, as it long had wished, with the humiliated members of the other orders, split asunder under the overwhelming stress of its success. The hard, negative phase of the revolution was over. Now began the immensely more difficult, positive one: building something new from that which had been destroyed.

The National Assembly had become a constitutional convention, and the fault lines of ideology that had been obscured for the purposes of a common enemy now stretched wide apart. What had once been a podium of grand, unifying speeches, the chamber had become a chorus of opposing philosophies. Factions had begun to coalesce, gathering in the cafes and loaned halls of Versailles once the day's sitting had ended, constructing the templates of future political parties.

The Constitutional Monarchists, later simply the Feuillants, under the ever-popular Lafayette and the serious, intellectual Bailly, were Louis's most natural allies. They were men of moderation, but ardent admirers of the British system of government. They desired a strong, bicameral legislature, but a strong king as well, one which would possess a significant executive power, including the final check of an absolute veto over whatever law the legislature should pass. Above all, they too were elitists, believing that the right to vote and hold office should be reserved exclusively to "active citizens," i.e., men of property which had a direct stake, tangible, in the preservation of the kingdom.

Opposite to them were the Radical Democrats, a smaller, compact, but far more vocal group that met in the old Jacobin monastery, a name soon to become synonymous with the most extremist of the revolution's passions. Led by the volcanic, unsympathetic presence of Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins were deeply, innately suspicious of all centralized power, especially royal power. They advocated one, omnipotent unicameral legislature, universal manhood suffrage, and a king that would amount to little more than a cipher, a public official with no real power, if he existed at all.

Between these two extremes existed the largest bloc of them all: the nonaligned center, a vast, marshy kingdom of delegates alternatively known as "The Plain." They were practical, often hesitant men that may go where the case seemed strongest, and they held the balance of the vote.

Louis' role in this new world had to change again. He couldn't be the stubborn reformer or the secret operator anymore. He had to be the leading negotiator, the power broker, the man who could put together a stable, centrist coalition and impose coherence on this whirlwind to a conclusive end. He had to make sure that his revolution didn't devour itself.

The first tremendous brawl concerned the crucial matter of the King's authority: the veto. It was the linchpin of the whole constitutional debate. The Jacobins, through fiery speeches, attacked the very existence of a veto as a remnant of despotism. "How can the General Will of one man overthrow the sacrosanct General Will of twenty-five million?" exclaimed Robespierre, his voice sour with zeal. "It is a dagger at the people's sovereignty!"

The Monarchists, however, replied that the only thing that served as an effective barrier against the legislature becoming some new kind of tyranny, a "dictatorship of the Assembly" which would pass every possible radical law without check or balance, was an effective veto power.

Louis recognized that both sides were wrong. An absolute veto, as the English King possessed, was a figment of power. It was a nuclear option—so powerful that to ever actually exercise it would cause such a constitutional ruckus that it would, de facto, bring the entire government to a standstill. A king that possessed an absolute veto would, de facto, be too afraid to ever actually exercise it. But a king that had no veto whatsoever would be a puppet, simply a 'rubber-stamp' for whatever the legislature desired to do on a whim.

He needed a third way, a new, practical compromise. His mind, steeped in a future history of checks and balances, knew exactly what it should be. He only needed to convince that group of 18th-century Frenchmen to make it.

He got to work behind the scenes, not by royal fiat, but through time-consuming, painstaking negotiation. He used the HUD not for grand strategic predictions, but as a detailed legislative estimate, a way of modeling the political outcomes of different proposals.

He presented the Monarchists' case first.

PROPOSAL: Absolute Royal Veto.

Jacobin Support: 0%. The Plain Support: 20%. Feuillant Support: 100%.

Chance of Passage: LOW.

Projected Long-Term Stability: POOR. Every use of the veto will trigger a major political crisis and gridlock the government.

Then he carried out the Jacobins' motion.

PROPOSAL: No Royal Veto.

Jacobin Support: 100%. The Plain Support: 30%. Feuillant Support: 5%.

Chance of Passage: LOW.

Projected Outcome: Creates an all-powerful legislature with no executive check. High risk of radicalization. Executive Power: CRIPPLED.

Next, he devised his own, secret proposal, one which he had borrowed from the still-unwritten American constitution. He called it the "suspensive veto."

PROPOSAL: Suspensive Veto (The King may veto a law. The Assembly may override the veto with a two-thirds majority vote in two consecutive legislative sessions).

Jacobin Support: 40% (They will denounce it as too strong, but it is a compromise they can grudgingly accept over an absolute veto).

The Plain Support: 90% (They will see it as a reasonable, moderate, and clever compromise).

Feuillant Support: 70% (They will argue it is too weak, but will accept it as a workable alternative to no veto at all).

Chance of Passage: HIGH.

Projected Long-Term Stability: GOOD. Creates a functional system of checks and balances.

The facts were evident. Suspensive veto was the solution. He only had to make the Assembly believe that it originated from them.

He began a private lobbying campaign. He had a private dinner for Lafayette and the other Feuillant leaders. He didn't tell them what to do; he debated them as a friend. "Gentlemen," he convinced, "an absolute veto is a sword so burdensome that you'll never be able to lift it. A power that you'll never exercise without causing a national crisis isn't power but a weakness disguised as strength. A limited, respected veto, one that causes the legislature to reconsider but ultimately may be overcome by an obstinate supermajority—that, my friends, is a far better and more enduring instrument. It encourages compromise, not confrontation."

Then he had Necker spread out, before the leaders of the Plain, some financially complex models. The models, in cold, hard figures, demonstrated that a system of absolute veto would be vulnerable to deadlock that could induce economic stalemate, but that his system, on the contrary, represented the most effective and stable long-term economic planning form.

He would form an overwhelming coalition from the center outward, isolating the radical Jacobins entirely. He framed their option of "no veto" as unrealistic and extremist, an fringe idea beyond the bounds of responsible government.

The final debate on the Assembly floor had been a piece of political theater stage-managed from the sidelines by Louis himself. One of the foremost delegates of the Plain, a man Louis had himself instructed, rose and proposed the "suspensive veto" as a "new, exclusively French solution, a compromise which reconciles the wisdom of the King with the independence of the people."

The Jacobins were indignant, but they had been outmaneuvered. The Feuillants, already convinced by Louis, proclaimed their reluctant but patriotic support of the compromise. The Plain voted as one large, homogeneous block. The suspensive veto was voted by an overwhelming majority.

It was a historical success for Louis's vision of a secure, modern state. It was a success that he had engineered, though, not through the might of a monarch, but through the wit of a modern political broker: number-crunching, backroom negotiation, and the skillful building of consensus. He had exercised his foresight of a future political science to guide his 18th-century kingdom towards a stabler, stronger future. He was, he decided, no longer merely balancing the country's books. He was building its user manual.