The war in the Vendée had, for weeks, been a source of profound anxiety in Paris, a bleeding wound on the map of France. The initial, humiliating defeat had been a political catastrophe, a daily source of ammunition for the Jacobin press. But since Louis had made the cold-blooded decision to unleash General de Custine, an unnerving quiet had fallen. The frantic dispatches telling of ambushes and collapsing morale had ceased. They were replaced by a steady, methodical silence that was, in its own way, just as frightening.
Today, the silence broke. A military courier arrived at the Tuileries, a hard-bitten cavalry officer caked in the dust of a multi-day ride. He had bypassed the formal channels of the Ministry of War, his orders clear that his dispatch was for the King's eyes only. He was ushered into Louis's study, where he presented a heavy, wax-sealed leather portfolio. It was the first comprehensive report from the commander of the Army of the West.
Louis broke the seal, his movements precise and calm. As he began to read, his face settled into the stony, impassive mask he now wore when dealing with matters of state. He was no longer a man reading about a war; he was a chief executive reviewing a deeply problematic but successful corporate project. His HUD, however, processed the cold, military prose and translated it into the brutal reality of the campaign.
General de Custine's report was a testament to ruthless, horrifying efficiency. It began not with tales of heroic charges, but with a map. The General, a man who thought in terms of geometry and control, had utterly rejected the previous strategy of plunging into the treacherous maze of the bocage. Instead, he had instituted a strategy he called "La Grille"—The Grid.
His troops were methodically constructing a vast network of fortified blockhouses and signal towers along every major road and river, creating a perimeter of iron and wood around the heart of the rebellion. This was not a war of maneuver; it was a siege of an entire region. From this perimeter, his columns moved inward, not to fight battles, but to enforce the 'cordon sanitaire'—a burned-earth belt, five kilometers deep, that was being systematically cleared of all resources that could sustain the rebel army.
The report detailed the results with dispassionate pride:
"Crops in the designated zone have been burned to the ground. All livestock has been seized and driven east to supply the army. Wells have been salted. Mills have been dismantled. The operational capacity of the insurgents has been severely degraded…"
Louis read on, his expression unchanging. The HUD provided its own annotation.
ANALYSIS: Counter-insurgency strategy 'La Grille' is proving effective at denying resources and mobility to enemy forces. Rebel attacks on army supply lines have decreased by 60%. Insurgent momentum is broken.
Militarily, it was an undeniable success. Louis's calculated gamble, his choice of a ruthless professional over an idealistic hero, had been the correct one. He had stopped the bleeding.
But then he turned the page and came to the appendix. It was titled, with chilling bureaucratic neutrality, "Record of Pacification Incidents." This was the butcher's bill. In these pages, General de Custine detailed the human cost of his grid strategy. He described, with the same dispassionate precision, an event that had taken place in a large village named Chanzeaux, which had been identified as a key recruitment center for the rebels.
"Following an ambush on a reconnaissance patrol near the village, in which three soldiers were killed, a reprisal action was deemed necessary to ensure future compliance. A battalion under the command of Colonel de la Roche entered Chanzeaux at dawn. The village was sealed. As a punitive measure, in accordance with established counter-guerrilla doctrine, every tenth man of military age was selected from the village roster and summarily executed by firing squad. The village priest, though not a confirmed refractory, was hanged from the steeple of the church as a clear and visible deterrent to other clerical agitators in the sector…"
The report continued in this vein, a sterile litany of sanctioned brutality. It framed these actions not as atrocities, but as "regrettable but necessary measures to discourage collaboration and ensure the security of the army's rear."
Louis put the report down on his desk. He had known, when he appointed Custine, that he was unleashing a dog. He had not expected to be handed such a meticulously detailed account of every bite. A part of him, the lingering ghost of Arthur Miller, was intellectually horrified. But the King, the man who now inhabited his skin, felt a colder, more pragmatic emotion. He had ordered a dirty war, and this was what a dirty war looked like. It was the cost of doing business. He had wanted results, and Custine had delivered them.
He knew, however, that the political implications were a different matter entirely. He summoned Antoine Barnave. His chief political operator needed to see this, to understand the reality of the war he was defending in his newspapers.
Barnave arrived and read the report, his face growing paler with every page. When he reached the appendix detailing the Chanzeaux massacre, he looked up at Louis, his eyes wide with horror.
"Your Majesty," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "This… this is a catastrophe."
"Militarily, it is a success," Louis countered, his voice flat. "The rebellion is being strangled."
"Militarily, perhaps!" Barnave said, finding his voice, which rose with passion and despair. "But politically? This is a gift to the Jacobins, delivered on a silver platter! If even a whisper of this account ever becomes public, you are no longer the King defending the unity of the Nation from a handful of fanatics. You become the 'Butcher King of the Vendée.' You become a new Herod, a monster slaughtering his own people. Every moderate, every decent man of property who has supported us, will abandon us in horror!"
Barnave paced the room, running a hand through his hair. "We have been painting the Vendeans as savage fanatics in L'Ami des Lois. It has been working! But we cannot defend this! This is not war; it is organized murder! You must order Custine to stop. This brutality will lose us the support of all of France!"
Louis listened, his fingers steepled before him. He let Barnave's passionate, moral argument wash over him before responding with the cold, brutal logic that now governed his world.
"And what is the alternative, Monsieur Barnave?" he asked, his voice dangerously quiet. "To rein him in is to lose the war. To lose the war is to show weakness. To show weakness is to hand absolute power to Robespierre and his friends. Tell me, which is the greater evil? A few hundred dead peasants in one rebellious province, or a guillotine in the Place de la Révolution for all of us? For my wife? For my son? For you?"
It was the first major schism within the small, secret circle of the King's Men. Barnave, the disillusioned idealist, was horrified by the brutal methods being used to save the constitutional system he still believed in. Louis, the hardened pragmatist, saw those methods as the only possible path to survival. They stared at each other across the desk, the bloody report lying between them like a corpse.
Their tense argument was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. A secretary entered, his face ashen, holding a freshly printed newspaper. It was not one of the major papers. It was a small, radical news-sheet called Le Révélateur, a paper known for its inflammatory rhetoric and its deep connections to the Cordeliers Club.
"Forgive the intrusion, Your Majesty," the secretary stammered. "But this… this just began circulating in the Palais-Royal."
He handed the paper to Louis. The headline, printed in thick, angry letters, screamed across the page: MASSACRE AT CHANZEAUX! KING'S GENERALS EXECUTE HUNDREDS OF UNARMED PATRIOTS!
The article below was a lurid, horrifying account of the reprisal. It was filled with exaggerations—claiming women and children were shot, that the numbers were in the thousands—but it was undeniably rooted in the truth of Custine's own report. It was a "leaked letter from a patriotic officer in the Army of the West," an eyewitness who could no longer stomach the atrocities being committed in the name of the Nation.
The leak was almost certainly a Jacobin fabrication, a clever forgery wrapped around a kernel of terrible truth smuggled out of the Vendée. But it didn't matter. The story was out. The accusation was public. Louis was no longer just fighting a war. He was now losing control of the narrative about that war in the most public and damaging way imaginable. The butcher's bill had just been posted for all of France to see.
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