If forestalling the bread riots forestalls the radicals that revolted, why not make a magnificent gesture of selling one of the royal palaces to buy grain for import? At a stroke, Louis satisfies the commoners without sacrificing his powers, pissing off the nobles, and likely gains massively in popularity.
Who would he (or you I suppose) sell it too? Who would have that kind of cash that would also be acceptable for you to buy it? The only people I could think of who COULD have bought one of the royal palaces (for anything other than bargain basement prices) would have been another ruling monarch, or one of the very highest of the upper nobility (both with downsides to selling a French royal palace to).
Doesn’t seem like a really viable solution, to me.
(ETA: Besides, this is similar to the folks who talk about cutting CEO pay. It SEEMS like a lot, but on a billion dollar companies bottom line, even $50 million a year is peanuts)
-XT
I’d know how to get the commoners on my side, or failing, that, keep them down: I’d rely on some lowborn but really talented army officer, like that nice young Colonel Bonaparte. What?
In 1789 Napoleon was a nobody, and a Corsican, Jacobin-supporting nobody at that.
Put in that situation, I would do what any sane person would, and decamp to New Orleans or Monserrat with as much of the royal treasury as I could lay my hands on.
Louisiana was in Spain’s hands at the time. The French didn’t get W. Louisiana back until the days of the Consulate.
I don’t know about selling their chunk of Hispaniola. At least with knowledge of L’Ouverture’s revolt in the future, selling Haiti looks like less of a long-term loss. (And the islands south of Newfoundland aren’t worth all that much.)
I don’t know why people keep talk about fleeing the country, that’s exactly the kind of behavior that got both Louis XVI executed and prior to him Charles I (well, Charles also started a new war after escaping.)
Charles and Louis have a lot in common though, in that all they had to do was accept the power of their enemies and they would have saved their head. It was not a light decision even by some of the radical French to kill their King, same thing with Charles I.
If you were willing to become a limited-power constitutional monarch, you’d remain the “symbol of the French people” and you’d also quickly be removed from the “blame game”, so that any subsequent problems the country has it will be the political leaders in the Estates-General (or National Assembly I guess at some point) who take the fall for them.
However, it was precisely the character of Louis XVI and Charles I that made these moves impossible. Both men genuinely believed they were ordained by God to rule, that it would be a personal failing to abdicate any of their authority to a Parliament (for Charles) or the people (Louis.) Of course, one difference is England had already had a relatively long history of a Parliament with real power, Charles I was an absolutist aberration when compared with even his immediate predecessors. Louis XVI was continuing what had been a relatively long period of royal autocracy in France.
However, I’m quite certain that over a thousand years of built-up cultural respect for the monarchy would have saved Louis if he had been willing to become a limited-power monarch or even a figure head. It was only because the most radical members of the revolution were able to paint him as actively working as a traitor against France itself (because he was doing just that), that there was enough support to execute him.
As for the issue of the Church, Louis XVI would be best to leave that entirely in the hands of the assembly. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was sort of a lightning rod, it was dangerous for everyone. Many Priests and others who opposed the Civil Constitution were killed by angry mobs. At the same time, many angry mobs rose up to fight against the destruction of their traditional religious practices.
You mean that “Lekatt, c’est moi” will lead to a Near Death Experience? 
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Seriously, there is one person who believes in stable government, can sway the nobility, and is regarded with respect bordering on reverence by most of the commoners.
I’d immediately send for Lafayette, listen to his advice, and take it.
Kick off the Reign of Terror myself. Compromise is iffy and dangerous - balancing competing interests is tricky, and coming up with a system both I and the revolutionaries can live with may well be impossible.
Flight is undignified, and a defeat even if I survive - which I may well not, as I’ve none of the skills I’d need to make it work.
If compromise and flight aren’t options, that leaves fighting. Summon loyal military units, boost their pay, and order them to execute the loudest revolutionaries - publicly. Make a festival of it if I can, if not make a horrorshow. Then grab the families of the revolutionaries and execute them - publicly. (Increases the horror, and removes the angry-survivor problem).
Continue the executions while working to bring in emergency grain supplies. When I can buy/borrow/steal them, distribute grain generously to regions loyal to me - or possibly ones that are wavering. Make it clear that cooperation with the State will be rewarded, whilst resistance will be punished with nightmarish ferocity.
(Thing is, it’s pretty clear that the real Louis XVI was a basically decent man who would have never, ever had the heart for this. Absolute monarchy is a bloody business.)
Must kill Robespierre.
Well, Louis tried this in 1792, when he proposed war against Austria, mainly to curry favor with the National Assembly rather than out of any sincere conviction on his part. The problem was that the French defeats in the opening stages of the wars only convinced people that Louis and Marie-Antoinette must have been conspiring with the Austrians against the Revolution. If anything, the wars with Austria and Prussia only increased feelings of resentment against Louis, especially in Paris.
I don’t think there was an awful lot that Louis could have done to prevent the revolution, but there were a lot of things that he did afterward which he really shouldn’t have:
–dismissing his finance minister Jacques Necker, at the height of his popularity in 1789–this incident led to the storming of the Bastille, and the revolution taking a more violent turn.
–making a run for it (the flight to Varennes). This only seemed to confirm rumors that the king and queen were in league with the Austrians to overturn the National Assembly.
–vetoing the National Assembly’s decrees that would punish Catholic priests who refused to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which had put the clergy essentially under the authority of France instead of Rome–priests and bishops would be elected by popular vote, and had to sign a loyalty oath to the French constitution). The decrees, and Louis’s vetoes of them, took place in the summer of 1792, when tensions in Paris were running incredibly high (real fears that the Prussian army was going to invade)–and although Louis had some support in the provinces for sticking up for the pope, the sans-culottes in Paris (and the majority of the deputies of the National Assembly) were adamantly anti-clerical, and saw Louis’s vetoes as yet another act of betrayal.
All of these incidents decreased the king’s popularity, and increased popular suspicion that he was conspiring with the Austrians and Prussians to get himself restored to absolute powers, to the point where the National Assembly decided they just couldn’t trust him any longer.
I’ve played this (as well as heavily edited the article), so any changes I make would likely create a paradox that nullifies my own existence.