Louis XVI

Dominant introverted sensing lives in the known and the concrete. It trusts what has been tested by time, takes comfort in routine, and prefers the tangible thing in hand to the abstract possibility in the air. Almost everything that made Louis XVI a poor king and a contented man flowed from this. He loved the daily round of Versailles not for its political theater—which bored and oppressed his wife—but for its predictability: the hunt, the meals, the prayers, the fixed appointments of a fixed existence. He kept a diary recording, with a steward's meticulousness, the day's weather and the number of animals killed in the chase.

The locksmithing was Si in its purest form. A lock is a small, closed, solvable world of springs and tumblers, mastered by patient practice rather than by vision or improvisation. Louis filed and fitted with real skill, repaired clocks, pored over maps, and took a connoisseur's interest in the voyages of exploration he commissioned. These were the pursuits of a temperament that wanted the world to hold still long enough to be learned by heart.

But Si on a throne is a temperament at war with its office, because monarchy in 1789 had ceased to be a settled order and become a problem demanding invention. Louis revered the inherited frame of the French monarchy—its sacral character, its precedents, the coronation oath sworn at Reims—and he could not conceive of himself as anything but its conscientious custodian. When the Revolution demanded that he reimagine the very nature of his power, the demand fell on a mind built to conserve, not to create. Si looks to the past for guidance, and the past had no precedent for what was happening to him.

If Si gave Louis his love of the established world, auxiliary extraverted feeling gave him his goodness—and his weakness. Fe orients toward harmony and the approval of others, toward the avoidance of conflict and the smoothing of friction. In the king it produced a man of real, unaffected kindness. He abolished judicial torture, eased the lot of Protestants and Jews, and was so reluctant to cause pain that he could scarcely bring himself to dismiss a servant. His piety was genuine, his marital fidelity unusual for a Bourbon, his desire to be a good king the most consistent thing about him. He wanted, with his whole heart, to be loved.

But auxiliary Fe in a temperament without a developed will becomes a fatal instrument of appeasement. The same horror of conflict that made Louis humane made him incapable of command. He could not bear to face down the parlements, the privileged orders, the court factions, his own ministers, or his wife. When Turgot's reforms enraged the vested interests, Louis sacrificed Turgot rather than the reforms' enemies; when Necker became controversial, he let him go, recalled him, let him go again—always yielding to whichever pressure was most immediately painful to resist. A king who governs by the wish to please will, in the end, please no one.

The tragedy is that these were the failings of a kind man. A crueler king—an ESTJ or an INTJ with the stomach to wound—might have crushed the privileged resistance and forced the reforms through. Louis could not bring himself to be hated, and so he was destroyed by people who learned they had nothing to fear from his displeasure.

Tertiary introverted thinking in an ISFJ is real but narrow. It works in confined, concrete domains, where it can take apart a mechanism and understand exactly how its parts cohere. In Louis this faculty found its outlet in the workshop: a precise, patient, mechanical mind that could follow the internal logic of a device to the end. He grasped how springs answered to tension and how a wheel-train carried motion, and he derived a satisfaction from such problems that the rest of his duties never gave him.

The poignancy of this Ti is that it could analyze any system except the one he had been born to govern. A lock yields to logic; a kingdom in revolution does not. He could see precisely why a bolt stuck. He could not see why the Estates-General, summoned in 1789 to fix the finances, would instead declare itself a National Assembly and begin writing a constitution. The problem had no parts he could file true.

There is a cruel symbolism, too, in the one famous betrayal of his reign. It was Gamain, the master locksmith who had taught the king his trade, who later revealed to the revolutionary authorities the existence of the armoire de fer—the iron cabinet hidden in a wall at the Tuileries in which Louis had concealed his secret correspondence. The documents inside helped seal his fate at trial. His tertiary Ti had built him a hiding place; its inability to read men as well as it read metal left him exposed.

Inferior extraverted intuition is the ISFJ's great blind spot: the failure to imagine the unprecedented, to read the trend beneath the surface, to grasp that the world might soon be nothing like the world that is. The Si-dominant mind assumes that tomorrow will resemble today because yesterday resembled the day before. No figure in this archive paid a higher price for that blindness than Louis XVI, because the storm gathering around him was the most radical political rupture in modern European history, and he could not see it forming.

On the day the Bastille fell, the fourteenth of July 1789, the king is said to have written a single word in his hunting diary: Rien—“Nothing.” The line was a record of the day's game, not a verdict on the Revolution, but it has survived as a near-perfect emblem of inferior Ne. He genuinely could not feel the magnitude of what was happening. He registered each event only as it arrived, concrete and discrete, and consistently mistook the crest of the wave for a passing disturbance the old order would surely absorb.

The flight to Varennes in 1791 was inferior Ne's one desperate eruption, and it failed as such eruptions tend to. Persuaded that the situation was untenable, Louis agreed to a secret escape—a bold, imaginative gamble entirely foreign to his nature—and the whole scheme ran aground on his temperament's want of feel for contingency. The royal party moved too slowly, kept to too grand a coach, and was recognized and stopped at Varennes, short of the frontier. Dragged back to Paris as a prisoner, tried for treason, and condemned, he met his death at the scaffold in January 1793 with a simple dignity and Christian composure his reign had nowhere shown—the inward, conscientious soul finding, at the last, the one role for which his temperament had always fitted him: to suffer well what he could not master.

Why ISFJ Over ESFJ

The distinction turns on which function leads. An ESFJ king with the same values—the same piety, the same desire to be a good monarch—would have brought to the throne an extraverted feeling that organizes and commands, the instinct of the host who rallies a faction and drives people toward a harmony he himself directs. Louis had no such drive. His was the inward ISFJ goodness that wants only to do its conscientious duty and give no offense, and that flinches from the confrontation and sheer outward force that ruling a fracturing kingdom required. He wished to please, and he could not command.