Louis, imbued with the fervor of his grand design, decided to begin his new revolution not with the grand, expensive projects of canals or banks, but with a foundational reform, a single, decisive blow against the economic structure of the Ancien Régime. He would begin by abolishing the ancient and powerful system of trade guilds in Paris.
To his 21st-century mind, the logic was unassailable. The guilds—the corporations—were medieval relics, cartels that held absolute monopolies over their respective trades. The Goldsmiths' Guild dictated who could work with precious metals. The Printers' Guild controlled every printing press in the city. The Stonemasons' Guild, the Candlemakers' Guild, the Weavers' Guild… together, they formed a rigid, suffocating web of regulations that stifled innovation, restricted competition, and kept prices artificially high for consumers. They were a massive, institutional brake on the free-market economy he envisioned. Their abolition was a necessary prerequisite for a modern, prosperous France.
He tasked Barnave with drafting the legislation. The bill was an elegant piece of Enlightenment philosophy, titled "A Law on the Freedom of Commerce and Industry." It spoke of the natural right of every citizen to practice a trade of their choosing, of the benefits of competition, and of unleashing the productive genius of the French people. On the surface, it was a perfect, rational law, precisely the kind of reform the moderate, bourgeois National Assembly should have passed with a chorus of applause.
Louis had miscalculated. He had forgotten that men are not governed by abstract philosophy, but by vested interests. He had just declared war on the very heart of the Parisian bourgeoisie's power structure.
The backlash was not like the hysterical, violent fury of the Jacobins. It was colder, more organized, and in its own way, far more dangerous. The guilds were not just economic bodies; they were deeply entrenched social and political networks. The masters of the great guilds were immensely powerful figures in Paris. They were the men of property he had courted, the men whose money had funded his Levy for the Defense of Property. They controlled thousands of jobs, they financed political careers, and they had deep, familial connections within the city's bureaucracy and the National Assembly itself.
A delegation of the Grand Masters of the Parisian Guilds, their faces grim and set, demanded an audience with the King. They arrived at the Tuileries not as supplicants, but as grandees, their dark, fur-lined robes a statement of their wealth and ancient authority. These were not wild-eyed sans-culottes with pikes; they were rich, powerful, and deeply conservative men, the very pillars of his new regime.
The spokesman was the Master of the Goldsmiths' Guild, a man named Etienne de Fleury, whose family had controlled the trade in precious metals in Paris since the reign of Louis XIV. His voice, when he spoke, was a model of respectful deference, but his words carried the unmistakable weight of a veiled threat.
"Your Majesty," he began, bowing deeply. "We have come to express our profound confusion and alarm at the proposed new law. You speak of 'freedom.' But what your ministers propose is not freedom; it is chaos. It is the law of the jungle."
He gestured to the other masters, a silent chorus of powerful men. "For centuries, the guilds have been the guardians of the quality of French craftsmanship, a quality that is the envy of the world. We ensure fair prices for the consumer. We provide for our members in their sickness and old age. We train the next generation of artisans through the sacred bond of apprenticeship. To abolish us would be to throw a million skilled Frenchmen into a vicious, unregulated competition. Quality would plummet. The market would be flooded with cheap, shoddy goods. The poor would be exploited by unscrupulous factory owners with no loyalty to their workers or their craft. You would not be freeing commerce, Your Majesty. You would be destroying the very social fabric of Paris."
They were brilliantly using the paternalistic, conservative language of tradition and social welfare to defend their lucrative monopolies. They were casting themselves as the protectors of the common artisan against the cold, heartless logic of the free market.
Barnave, meanwhile, brought dire news from the Assembly. The law was completely stalled. The guild masters were calling in their markers. Deputies who had lauded the King's wisdom last week were now discovering deep, philosophical objections to the bill. Rumors of lavish dinners and discreetly delivered bags of gold were rampant. The guilds were also waging a masterful propaganda campaign of their own, spreading fear among the thousands of small shopkeepers and artisans of Paris, convincing them that the King's law was a plot by big financiers that would drive them all into ruin.
Louis found himself in a new and unfamiliar kind of war. His enemies were not fanatics with pikes, but wealthy, respected men with deep pockets and powerful friends. He could not use the army against them. He could not have Danton arrest them as traitors. He had to win this with pure political cunning. He had to break their power from within.
He decided to split their ranks. He understood that the guilds were not a monolith. They were a rigid hierarchy. At the top were the masters, a small, wealthy elite who held all the power. Below them were the thousands of journeymen—the skilled, qualified workers who had completed their apprenticeships but who often had to wait for years, or even decades, for the privilege of becoming masters themselves. They were often exploited by the masters, working for low wages with no hope of advancement. They were a disgruntled, powerless majority.
Louis began a secret, covert operation. He had Barnave's agents discreetly seek out the leaders among the journeymen in the largest and most influential guilds—the stonemasons, the carpenters, the printers. He arranged a series of secret meetings in taverns late at night.
He did not attend himself, but he sent a trusted representative with a direct offer from the King. He promised them that the new Law on the Freedom of Commerce and Industry would include provisions designed specifically for them. He promised the creation of a new "Workers' Aid Fund," to be established with the confiscated assets of the old guilds, which would provide unemployment and retirement benefits, a social safety net that the guilds only offered to their favored few. And, most seductively, he promised that the new law would make it easy and cheap for any qualified journeyman to obtain a license and become an independent master of his own shop. He was not just offering them freedom; he was offering them a direct path to the bourgeoisie.
It was a classic, 21st-century political tactic, a piece of sophisticated union-busting. He was breaking a powerful, unified interest group by identifying the fractures within it and appealing directly to the economic self-interest of its disaffected members.
The final act of the drama took place a week later, at a massive, chaotic general meeting of the Parisian trade guilds, held in a cavernous medieval hall. The guild masters had called the meeting to rally a united front against the King's hated law, to organize a city-wide strike that would bring Paris to a standstill.
The Master Goldsmith, Etienne de Fleury, was delivering a thunderous speech, denouncing the King's "tyrannical" law and calling for solidarity.
But then, a man stood up in the middle of the hall. He was a journeyman stonemason, a big, rough-hewn man with a powerful voice, one of the leaders who had met with Barnave's agents.
"Solidarity for whom, Master de Fleury?" he shouted, his voice echoing in the shocked silence. "Solidarity for you, in your fine houses, while we labor for wages you set? You speak of tradition, but the tradition is that we work and you profit! You speak of protecting us, but you protect us from ever owning our own workshops!"
He turned to the hundreds of other journeymen in the hall. "The masters fear this law! But I tell you, we should not! The King's law offers us true freedom! The freedom to be our own masters! The freedom to profit from our own skills! Who are the real tyrants here? The King, who offers us opportunity? Or these men, who would keep us as their servants forever?"
His speech was like a spark in a tinderbox. It electrified the other journeymen. Another stood up, then another. The meeting dissolved into a furious, shouting chaos. It was not a debate between the guilds and the King. It was now a furious brawl between the masters and their own workers. Fists flew. Benches were overturned. The carefully constructed unity of the guilds was shattered in a single, explosive moment.
Louis, from the palace, had successfully and surgically shattered his opposition. But he had also just inadvertently lit the fuse of a new, and perhaps far more dangerous, kind of conflict. He had introduced the language of class warfare into the heart of the Parisian economy, the bitter, violent struggle between capital and labor.