The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

Louis's royal proclamation had been a bolt from the blue, and in the days that followed, the politics of Versailles was destroyed in the storm that ensued. The Third Estate, emboldened and empowered beyond their most sanguine hopes, moved with remarkable promptness. They voted, formally, to take the name "National Assembly," a designation that expanded with the radical implication that they, and they alone, represented the absolute will of the people of France. They extended a formal, public invitation to the delegates of the other two orders to come in and become members of them, not as the distinct estates, but as fellow citizens.

The response was immediate and fractured. The First Estate, the clergy, split down the middle. The vast majority of the simple parish priests, among whom the affections had always been with the common people they served so devotedly, deserted their superiors. In a series of stormy, tearful scenes, they rose and crossed the floor of the large hall, leaving the slender benches of the First Estate to sit among the triumphant delegates in black. Their defection was a moral victory of gargantuan proportions.

A smaller but symbolically significant contingent of liberal nobles likewise followed. The Marquis de Lafayette, true to his form, was among the first, his noble standing lending untold credence to the new Assembly. He was later followed in limited numbers by others, including the powerful Duc d'Orléans, Louis's own nephew, a man whose hatred for the King was less ideological but rather his own enormous aspirations.

But this was a trickle, not a deluge. The overwhelming majority of the Second Estate, and the whole high clergy, were in their own rebellion. They were shocked, outraged, and in essence not wanting to accept the new reality of the King. Under the leadership of the indignant Comte d'Artois and a politically reinstated Vergennes, they referred to the King's proclamation on voting as an unconstitutional violation of the old constitution of the kingdom. They referred to the so-termed "National Assembly" as an unconstitutional, treasonous assembly.

Their strategy was that of interference and boycott. They would not attend the sessions in the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, therefore robbing the Assembly of the united whole national support for which it hoped. They, on the other hand, instituted their own independent, defiant assemblies in other rooms of the palace—nobles in a sumptuously furnished salon, bishops in a grave, tapestry-hung chamber. They would try to establish a rival government, to demonstrate that the new regime of the King was not workable and that the old orders could not be abolished peremptorily through the will of the monarch.

Vergennes, the accomplished student of guerre douce, was the backstage strategist of the subversion campaign. His goal was to sow chaos, to immobilize the new Assembly, and to force Louis to confess his mistake and dissolve the entire Estates-General. He used his well-built influence within the court, a web of favors and affections won during a whole life, in conducting a silent war against the Assembly.

Requested key documents from the royal archives would be miraculously "lost" by a dedicated clerk. Important communications would be "misplaced" by a page. The business of the Assembly itself was plagued with a succession of infuriating and unmistakeably deliberate "maintenance hitches." On a steamy June day, a team of workmen began deafeningly discordant repair work in the roof directly above the grand hall, so that the delegates could not hear their own speeches. On another, a broken pipe inundated part of the hall with foul-odored water.

The most dangerous of the work of Vergennes, however, was done in secret. He began to hold quiet meetings with major army commanders, old-fashioned noblemen shocked at the course of affairs. He spoke not of treason. He spoke of duty, of honor, of the seeds of disorder. He sowed doubt regarding the good faith of this new radical Assembly, and the unspoken suggestion that the very King himself might be ill, a captive of bad advice from such as Necker. He was discreetly planting the seeds of a military coup, should the need materialize. He was planning for a coup.

Louis was well aware of all that. His small but loyal spy system appraised him of the plots of Vergennes. He was in a wretched dilemma. Defeat of the seditious nobles would involve the use of force, of being the despot they accused him of being. Not doing that would be to allow them to discredit and destroy his grand scheme from within. He tried to induce them to reason, sending for small groups of major nobles to secret audiences, but they could not be reasoned with. They met his arguments of financial necessity with furious accusations of treason.

The crisis was driven to the boiling point the morning of the 20th of June. The weather had been bad, and the delegates of the National Assembly walked through a steady rain. When they arrived, they could go no further. The enormous oak doors of the hall closed and secured. A line of the royal guards stood before them, their faces impassive, their halberds locked together to block the entrance.

A rushed pen-and-paper sign was pinned up on the door. It declared the hall officially closed for several days, due to the need for "emergency repairs" and to prepare the venue for a "Royal Session" that the King would be holding the forthcoming week.

It was a public, blatant lie. The hall had been satisfactory the day before. This was a blatant act of sabotage, a power play on the part of the Old Guard. They had badgered the Grand Master of Ceremonies, a sympathetic man, into having the doors closed on a technicality, hoping the delegates, with nowhere to meet, would scatter. They hoped to break the momentum of the Assembly, to scatter them and assert the priority of the court's power.

It was a grave error.

The representatives of the Third Estate, called to the meeting, were thrust into panic, bewilderment, and, in the end, unanimous, seething wrath. They could not see the move as a exercise in red tape on the part of a court official. They spotted the closed doors, the armed attendants, and they made the only plausible assumption: the King had turned out to be traitorous. Having pinned their hopes so long on them, he had turned against them and would now disband their Assembly.

The confidence Louis had so painstakingly built up among them was destroyed in an instant. The tone turned nasty. There were shouts of "Treason!" and "Tyranny!" in the courtyard. A crowd was forming. Some of the more radical delegates began to speak of marching on the palace itself. The scene was spiraling out of control, likely to turn into a riot. It was a pivotal, dangerous moment, the revolution on the point of consuming its own father.