The Accountant Becomes Louis XVI to Save His Neck

The cavernous hall of the royal tennis court was a tinderbox of indignation. The room stank with the smell of damp wool, perspiration, and the sharp, metallic sting of revolutionary indignation. Six hundred delegates, the handpicked emissaries of the French people, jammed the hall, the original panic at being locked out of their own salon having turned to a concerted, indignant rage. Mirabeau's challenge lingered in the air, a direct and historic indictment hurled at the feet of the King who faced them. Has the King of France declared war on his own people?

Louis stood on the threshold, a solitary figure framed by the gray, rainy light. He looked at the sea of hostile, suspicious faces. He could feel their sense of betrayal like a physical force. Every instinct he possessed as a 21st-century man, an analyst accustomed to de-escalating tense corporate meetings, screamed at him that this was the pivotal moment. A single wrong word, a single gesture of royal arrogance, and this angry assembly would become a mob. A mob that would march on the palace. The revolution would turn bloody, and he would be cast not as its leader, but as its first victim.

He knew a simple denial was not enough. Words were cheap. The locked door was a hard, physical fact. He needed a gesture, a grand, symbolic act that was so audacious, so completely outside the bounds of their expectations, that it would shatter their suspicion and reclaim the narrative in a single stroke.

Ignoring the silent, frightened imploring of his few servants, Louis stepped forward. And again. He walked alone, away from the security of the door and toward the center of the gathering. He walked with a slow, measured confidence, his eyes sweeping the delegates. He was not a king looking over his troops; he was a leader walking into the midst of his people. He consciously came down from his ideological high ground and placed himself on their ground, amidst them, vulnerable. The delegates stepped back involuntarily, making a small, silent ring about him.

"Gentlemen," he started, his voice not a regal decree but the rational, even-toned speech of a man speaking to his equals. It was aimed to be heard in the farthest reaches of the room. "Seems there's been a serious and perilous misunderstanding. One conjured out of a locked door and nourished from centuries of tragic history between the people and the Crown."

He stopped and turned to face Mirabeau directly. "To answer your question, Monsieur de Mirabeau: No. The King has not declared war on his people. On the contrary. The King has come to join them."

A gasp of perplexity swept the room.

Louis' voice rose, making sure it was loud enough to be heard. "Your hall's lock was not my command! It was not my desire! It was sabotage!" he said in a voice now filled with hard, controlled rage. "It was a desperate act of cowardice on the part of the foes of reform—our common foes—who hoped we would be torn apart, who hoped that they could make you think that I turned against you. Those who sought to suffocate this mighty national rebirth in its infancy. Those people shall never do so."

He waited for that to register and then turned to the man standing on the temporary platform, the president of the Assembly, Jean Sylvain Bailly. He glanced down at the hastily written sheet of paper in Bailly's hand—our oath.

"You have taken an oath here today," Louis declared, his own voice sounding now with a new strength of conviction. "You have taken an oath to not be parted from each other until you have provided this kingdom with what it so desperately requires: a constitution, on firm ground. It is an excellent, a much-needed, a worthy objective."

He then proceeded to do the unthinkable. He lifted his own right hand, echoing the act they all had performed just a short hour beforehand. The whole gathering appeared to gasp simultaneously.

"Now," said Louis, his voice echoing with the weight of history, "I shall take an oath from you."

He looked out at the sea of stunned faces, at Robespierre's intense stare, at the calculating eyes of the Abbé Sieyès, at the hopeful gaze of the simple country lawyers.

"I, Louis, by the grace of God and the constitutional law of the State, King of France," he said, deliberately and emphatically altering the ancient phrase of the monarchy, "do solemnly swear to unite with you, the National Assembly, in your grand and sacred work. I swear to defend and guard the legitimacy of this Assembly against all its internal and external enemies. And I swear that I shall never desist, that I shall consider my own duty incomplete, until our common objective—a new and just constitution for the kingdom of France on the model of the principles of reason, order, and the rights of the nation—is achieved and settled for all time."

For a long, profound moment, the only sound in the tennis court was the drumming of the rain on the high roof. The six hundred delegates were frozen, poleaxed by the sheer, mind-altering audacity of what their King had just done. He had not just pardoned their act of rebellion. He had not just endorsed it. He had joined it. He had taken their oath and made it his own. He had, in a single, brilliant stroke of political theater, transformed himself from the object of their suspicion into their sworn protector, their fellow revolutionary.

The stillness was broken. One of the delegates in the back produced a choking, tear-studded cry of "Vive le Roi!" It was contagious. Some other voice seized on the cry and another and another until the huge hall was rocked with a tidal wave of speech. It was not the stilted, scripted enthusiasm of the court. It was a raw, emotional, animal roaring of the relief and the gratitude and the ecstatic, tear-studded joy. The men openly wept and kissed people nearby and faces once so grim with fury now shone with almost fanatical zeal. The people were yelling something entirely new and revolutionary that never heretofore anybody thought to utter: "Vive le Roi de la Nation! Long live the King of the Nation!"

Mirabeau gazed at Louis, his habitual skeptical face set in an expression of deep, unqualified admiration. This was not the timid, indecisive king he had pictured. This was a politician of masterful ability, a man who had gazed into the abysmal depths of declared revolt and had subdued it with a movement of indescribable genius.

Louis was in the midst of the jubilant, tearful crowd, his arm still aloft. He'd done it. He'd looked the crisis in the eye and triumphed. He'd transformed their greatest act of insurrection into his greatest act of glory. The HUD, once flashing red with warnings, was now a blinding, unbroken green.

RELATIONSHIP: National Assembly +100 (STATUS: ALLIED).

Personal Authority: +50.

Control over Revolution: REASSERTED.

He had bound the Assembly to him, not with the chains of monarchical powers, but with the far stronger links of a common oath, a common purpose. He was not the King who had summoned them. He was the First Revolutionary of France, in his own sight and theirs. The question that now loomed over him, even amidst the cheers and the ecstasy of triumph, was a dreadful one: what would the Second and Third revolutionaries demand of him?