Orléans wasn't wrong. Declaring war on the aristocracy was exactly what I had done. But in a revolution, if you're not the one declaring war, you're the one being declared against.
The backlash was immediate. And it was biblical.
My proclamation hit the noble houses of France like a thunderbolt. For centuries, they had been the undisputed masters of the kingdom, their power checked only by the King. I had just invited the peasants into their private clubhouse and told them they now had an equal vote.
My brother, Provence, wasted no time. He united the outraged nobility and the terrified high clergy into a single, furious bloc. They convened an emergency "Assembly of Notables"—an unsanctioned, borderline illegal gathering of the most powerful men in the country.
Their conclusion was unanimous. The King's proclamation was an illegal act, a violation of the sacred, ancient traditions of France. They drafted a formal Protestation, a document dripping with outrage and veiled threats, and openly called for all loyal nobles and clergy to boycott the elections for my new Estates-General.
They were trying to nullify my revolution by simply refusing to participate in it.
The break was complete. They had drawn their line in the sand. Fine. Now I would draw mine.
Provence himself led the delegation to Versailles to deliver their formal protest. They demanded an audience. I was in my study with Marie when the request came.
"Let them wait," I said.
An hour later, I sent a footman to accept the scroll. I didn't even unroll it. I set it on the corner of my desk like a piece of junk mail.
Then I took a piece of my own stationary and wrote a simple, one-sentence reply. I handed it to the footman. "Give this to my brother."
The note simply said: The elections will proceed as decreed. The future of France is no longer for sale.
The footman later told me that when Provence read the note, the color drained from his face. He had expected a negotiation, an argument, a shouting match. He never expected to be dismissed. Like he didn't matter.
I had the grand doors of the council chamber closed in his stunned, furious face. The war was now open. Public. And I had no allies left among the powerful.
But as the privileged classes revolted, the rest of France rejoiced.
As part of the election process, I had included a historic provision. Every town, every city, every guild, was invited to draft a cahier de doléances—a book of grievances—to be brought by their new representatives to Versailles. It was a national suggestion box.
The response was a flood. An avalanche. Thousands upon thousands of notebooks, filled with the hopes and fears and frustrations of a nation, began pouring into the palace.
The sheer volume was overwhelming. My ministers wanted to assign a hundred clerks to summarize them into a neat, sanitized report.
"No," I said. "I'll read them myself."
And I did. Every night, Marie and I sat in the Royal Library, a place that had become our private sanctuary, our strategic command center. We had a small team of trusted junior clerks to help us sort and categorize, but we read the originals.
It was a brutal, humbling education. The ledgers had shown me a kingdom in financial ruin. The cahiers showed me a people in pain.
I was no longer dealing with abstract numbers. I was reading the words of a father from a village in Brittany, begging for an end to the corvée, the forced, unpaid labor on the king's roads that took him away from his own farm for weeks at a time. I read a petition from the seamstresses of Paris, asking for the right to form their own guild, to be free from the oppressive control of the male merchants.
Marie read one, her voice soft with a sadness that cut me to the core. "This one is from a village near Lyon," she said. "They ask for only one thing. For the salt tax to be abolished, so their children can have preserved meat for the winter."
The gabelle. A tax so hated, so unfair, that it had caused riots for centuries. I took a note. "Put it on the list," I said, my voice thick. "Top priority."
We worked late into the nights, the two of us, the King and Queen of France, hunched over a massive table covered in hundreds of simple, handwritten notebooks. Our fingers became smudged with ink. We were no longer royalty. We were paralegals, wading through the testimony of a nation's suffering.
This was the real constitution of France. Not some fancy document written by lawyers in Paris. This was a list of a thousand broken things, a thousand injustices, a thousand quiet despairs. And I had to find a way to fix them.
But to fix them, I needed allies inside the Estates-General itself. The nobles and clergy would be a wall of opposition. I needed a champion for the Third Estate. A leader. An articulate, passionate voice who could take my reforms and make them his own.
I tasked my network—Orléans's spies, my own loyal guards, my few friendly ministers—to scour the election results. I wanted a list of the most promising candidates being elected across the country. I was a campaign manager, scouting for talent. I was looking for someone smart, principled, and—most importantly—not yet famous enough to be uncontrollable.
The list came to my desk a week later. It was filled with lawyers, doctors, merchants, and a surprising number of parish priests who had sided with their flocks over their bishops. I scanned the names. I saw a few that history would later make infamous—Mirabeau, Sieyès—but I dismissed them. Too ambitious. Too opportunistic.
Then, my eyes landed on one name. It was neatly printed, with a short biography beside it.
My blood ran cold. I felt a literal chill, a prickle of ice at the back of my neck.
"What is it, Louis?" Marie asked, seeing the look on my face.
I read the name aloud, the syllables feeling like poison in my mouth. "Maximilien Robespierre."
The biography was concise. A lawyer from the provincial town of Arras. Known for his pro bono defense of the poor and his passionate speeches against the death penalty. They called him "The Incorruptible." His election platform, the summary noted, was a near-perfect match for the reforms I had been planning based on the cahiers.
Oh, God. No. Anyone but him.
This was the man who, in the original timeline, would become the architect of the Reign of Terror. The man who would sign my death warrant. The man who would drown France in blood in the name of a twisted, fanatical virtue.
But he was also, right now, in this moment, the perfect man for the job. Principled. Passionate. Fiercely intelligent.
Could I use the devil to fight the demons? Could I ally with my own future executioner to save my own neck? Could I control a man like that?
The risk was monumental. But the potential reward...
I had to try. I couldn't meet with him directly. That was too dangerous, for both of us. It would mark him as the "King's man" and destroy his credibility. I needed to be more subtle. I needed a go-between.
My eyes scanned the list again. I found another name. Jean-Sylvain Bailly. A respected astronomer and academic from Paris. A moderate, a man of science and reason, who was emerging as a natural leader among the Parisian delegates. He was the perfect intermediary.
I arranged a secret, late-night meeting. Not in my study, not in the throne room. I met Bailly in the Royal Library. It wasn't a king summoning a subject. It was a meeting of two intellectuals, surrounded by the accumulated knowledge of the world.
When he arrived, I was sitting at a reading table, a copy of one of Bailly's own published pamphlets on astronomy open before me.
He was suspicious, I could see it in his wary eyes. "Your Majesty," he said, his bow stiff and formal. "The people of the Third Estate are honored by your reforms, but they are... wary of the Crown's intentions."
"Then let me be clear, Monsieur Bailly," I said, standing to greet him as an equal. "My intention is to work with the Third Estate to build a new France. A constitutional monarchy, where the law is the same for a duke as it is for a baker." I gestured to the mountains of cahiers stacked on the tables around us. "But I cannot do it alone. The forces of tradition are strong. I need leaders within the Third Estate. Men of principle. Men like you." I paused. "And men like that lawyer from Arras..."
I let the name hang in the air. I was the angel investor, looking for a CEO to run my new startup. I was offering them real power, a chance to make history. All I was asking for in return was to keep my head attached to my body.
Bailly stared at me, his scientist's mind processing the incredible implications of what I was proposing. A king, actively seeking an alliance with revolutionaries to dismantle the very system that gave him his power.
He slowly, finally, nodded. "I believe you are sincere, Your Majesty," he said. "I will speak with my colleagues. I will tell them the King is with us."
He left, convinced. I had done it. I had forged a secret alliance with the leadership of the Third Estate. I was no longer fighting the revolution. I was actively guiding it from behind the throne.
Marie, who had been waiting in a nearby alcove, stepped out of the shadows. Her eyes were shining. "You did it," she whispered. "You've turned them into your allies."
Before I could reply, the library doors opened again. It was Captain De La Tour. His face was grim, his expression urgent.
"Your Majesty," he said, his voice low. "A dispatch just arrived from the border. Your brother, the Comte d'Artois. He has broken his exile."
The cold dread was back, instant and suffocating. "Where is he?"
The Captain took a deep breath. "He crossed the border this morning, Your Majesty. Into the Austrian Netherlands." His voice dropped, heavy with dread.
"He has gone to seek foreign aid to, in his words, 'liberate his brother the King from the Parisian mob.'"
I stared at him, the full, horrifying implication crashing down on me.
My brother hadn't just run away.
He was trying to start a war.