The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

As Paris fumed with the fervor of the pamphleteering war, a quieter but no less enduring revolution was raging across France. The King's proclamation had called, not just an election, but a national consultation. Across every city, every town, every country village, the people were convoked to compile their cahiers de doléances—their lists of grievances—to be taken by them to the King, when the Estates-General should assemble. It was a national ledger of sufferings, a general accountancy of a thousand year's stored-up injustice.

For the first time in their history, France's average citizens were being formally asked what was wrong with their country. And with a long-silenced voice, they were just starting to talk.

Louis, to his more traditional ministers, unexpectedly had copies of these cahiers from around the kingdom sent to his own study at Versailles, rather than to the archives. He wanted to look at them himself. He wanted to receive the raw data. It began as political justification—a desire to be informed of the grievances he could wield to his benefit against the nobility—but very soon became a very humbling and very disturbing education.

The cahiers arrived by cartload, a paper mountain smelling of humid churches, aging town halls, and the distant, earthy smell of country. They were written in a thousand variant handwriting styles, from city lawyers' courteous script to village clergymen's sloppy, phonetic scratches as they rendered their illiterate peasants' orally composed texts.

Louis shut himself up for weeks, reading them several hours a day. The meeting shook him to his core. He no longer read Necker's lifeless, ideal abstractions. He was reading his twenty-five million subjects whom he ruled, their breathing, bleeding, suffering world.

From a country parish in the Dordogne, a cahier written on coarse, cheap paper spoke with the simple, emotional voice of the peasant. The villagers grumbled that they were not disturbed by great matters of state. They grumbled that the lord's hunts did damage to their newly sown fields with no quarter given. They grumbled that his pigeons ate their seed, and killing any of the lord's birds resulted in a sojourn in jail. They urged the King to do something about the odious gabelle, the salt tax, which obliged them to buy their salt from the royal monopoly at a scandalous price, so they could neither season their food nor preserve it against next winter. They grumbled against the corvée, compulsory, un-free labor they owed to the lord to work on highways they did not travel. It was a litany of trifling, crushing, daily oppressions, multiplied by millions, that constituted a system of heartless tyranny.

Out of a booming port city such as Bordeaux, the grievances were similar in scope but built from the same anger. The city merchants' and lawyers' cahier was written with the formal prose of commerce and law. They complained of a end to the labyrinthine internal tariffs and customs duties that made it more lucrative to ship wine from Paris to China than from Lyon to Paris. They called for a single, national code of laws, complaining of a system where each time you got across a river, the law changed. And they complained bitterly of their so-called "glass ceiling"—the fact that the most prestigious positions throughout the army, Church, and government, were reserved to men of noble blood, regardless of their talent or their abilities. They were the driving engine of national prosperity, but they were treated as second-class citizens.

Louis also read cahiers from his other two estates, and they spoke their own account of a system bitterly torn against itself. The cahier from Dauphiné's parish priests was infused with unexpected anger, but it was directed, amazingly, not against their Third Estate colleagues, but against their own superiors. They were indignant with the vast fortunes and luxurious lifestyles of archbishops and cardinals who led princely lives at Versailles, but who they, the real priests who ministered to the people, lived wretchedly on a tiny allowance. They complained of a more equal distribution of the Church's vast treasures.

Coming from the provincial nobility, the hobereaux or "sparrow-hawks," were complaints of a very different sort. Men with ancient titles but little land or money, they grumbled bitterly against the pride and power of those great courtier families of Versailles, the Polignacs and the Rohans, who held the King's favor, appropriating to themselves all the better pensions, army commissions, and church appointments. They felt deserted, their ancient honor cast aside in favor of those gold-plated marionettes who populated the court.

Louis read day after day. He read how a country's families were torn asunder by a bad harvest and the arrival of the cruel private tax collectors known as the Farmers-General. He read how a nation with something approaching three hundred diverse local legal codes was a legal nightmare. He read how eagerly a constitution was desired, a codified body of laws applicable to everyone, even to the King.

The cumulative effect of all these thousands of voices was vast. It changed Louis. His initial goal, that with which he awoke as a scared accountant, was fiscal and egotistically driven largely. He had to cure the bankruptcy to save his own hide. His later conflicts with the Parlement and Old Guard were political, a large game of chess with power. But his task was taking a new turn. It was taking a moral campaign.

The sheer extent of the injustice, the systemic, bitter viciousness of it all, scandalized his progressive conscience to its core. This wasn't a slow, clumsy system; it was an immoral one. He had summoned the voice of the people as a political tool to use against the nobles. Now, he felt a crushing, paralyzing sense of responsibility to that voice.

He tried to relate it to Marie Antoinette one evening, his study littered with the open cahiers.

"It's worse than I could have possibly imagined," he told her, his voice gentle. "I did know how poor the money was. But this..." He waved toward the wad of vellums. "This is a loss to humans, to those account books. It's a nation built with a foundation of accepted casual brutality. A man can have his means taken from him by a nobleman's hunt, and he can do nothing. A merchant can be destroyed by a patchwork of mad local taxation. A man with talents can never advance by his own talents alone,"

He looked at her, his eyes blazing with a new fervor. "We don't need a new tax, Antoinette. I am coming to think that we need a new country."

This newly established moral conscience scared and exhilarated him. His work was no longer simply a question of forestalling a revolution to save his own skin. It was a question of being its leader. He needed to smash this corrupt structure, just not for being bankrupt, but for being immoral. He started with an accountant's eye view, balancing ledgers. He was becoming, to his own deepest shock, a standard-bearer of the people, not to gain political ascendancy, but because he could no longer help but read their stories.