He warns the doomed Louis XVI that the country as a whole is a powder keg: “Cast your eyes over the capital of your empire and you will find two classes of citizens. Some, wallowing in wealth, flaunt a luxury which provokes indignation among those not corrupted by it.”41 A paragraph later, the aging philosophe predicts that empires such as his own “cannot endure, without morals and virtue,” then asks the king why he continues to condone the “insatiable greed” of his courtiers, allowing all the “protected men” of his kingdom to shelter themselves from the burden of taxation while the people
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