The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 26, December, 1859

Luckily for Paine, his French admirers stepped in at this critical moment to save him. Mons. Audibert, a municipal officer from Calais, came to announce to him that he was elected to the National Convention for that department. He immediately proceeded to Dover with his French friend. In Dover, the collector of the customs searched their pockets as well as their portmanteaus, in spite of many angry protestations. Finally their papers were returned to them, and they were allowed to embark. Paine was just in time; an order to detain him arrived about twenty minutes after his embarkation.

The trial came on before Lord Kenyon. Erskine appeared for the absent defendant. The Attorney-General used, as his brief, a foolish letter he had received from Paine at Calais, read it to the jury, made a few remarks, and rested his case. The jury found Paine guilty without leaving their seats. Sentence of outlawry was passed upon him. Safe in France, he treated the matter as a capital joke. Some years later he found that it had a disagreeable meaning in it.

The prophet had been translated to another sphere of revolutionary unrest. His influence gradually died away. He dwindled into a mere name. "But the fact remains," to use his own words, "and will hereafter be placed in the history of extraordinary things, that a pamphlet should be produced by an individual, unconnected with any sect or party, and almost a stranger in the land, that should completely frighten a whole government, and that in the midst of its triumphant security."

Paine might have published his "principles" his life long without troubling many subjects of King George, had it not been for their combination with "practice" in France,—whither let us now follow him.

When he landed at Calais, the guard turned out and presented arms; a grand salute was fired; the officer in command embraced him and presented him with the national cockade; a good-looking citoyenne asked leave to pin it on his hat, expressing the hope of her compatriots that he would continue his exertions in favor of liberty. Enthusiastic acclamations followed,—a grand chorus of Vive Thomas Paine! The crowd escorted him to Dessein's hotel,3 in the Rue de l'Égalité, formerly Rue du Roi, and shouted under his windows. At the proper time he was conducted to the Town Hall. The municipality were assembled to bestow the accolade fraternelle upon their representative. M. le Maire made a speech, which Audibert, who still had Paine in charge, translated. Paine laid his hand on his heart, bowed, and assured the municipality that his life should be devoted to their service. In the evening, the club held a meeting in the Salle des Minimes. The hall was jammed. Paine was seated beside the President, under a bust of Mirabeau, surmounted by the flags of France, England, and the United States. More addresses, compliments, protestations, and frantic cries of Vive Thomas Paine! The séance was adjourned to the church, to give those who could not obtain admission into the Club Hall an opportunity to look at their famous representative. The next evening Paine went to the theatre. The state-box had been prepared for him. The house rose and vivaed as he entered.

When Calais had shouted itself hoarse, Paine travelled towards Paris. The towns he traversed on the road thither received him with similar honors. From the capital he addressed a letter of thanks to his fellow-citizens. Although he sat for Calais in the Convention, he had been chosen by three other departments. Priestley was a candidate for Paris, but was beaten by Marat, a doctor of another description. He was, however, duly elected in the department L'Orne, but never took his seat. Paine and Baron Clootz were the only foreigners in the Convention. Another stranger, of political celebrity out of doors, styled himself American as well as Paine,—Fournier l'Américain, a mulatto from the West Indies, whose complexion was not considered "incompatible with freedom" in France,—a violent and blood-thirsty fellow, who shot at Lafayette on the dix-sept Juillet, narrowly missing him,—led an attacking party against the Tuileries on the dix Août, and escaped the guillotine to be transported by Bonaparte.

In Paris, Paine was already a personage well known to all the leading men,—a great republican luminary, "foreign benefactor of the species," who had commenced the revolution in America, was making one in England, and was willing to help make one in France. His English works, translated by Lanthenas, a friend of Robespierre and co-editor with Brissot of the "Patriote Français," had earned for him the dignity of citoyen Français,—an honor which he shared with Mackintosh, Dr. Price, the Priestleys, father and son, and David Williams. He had furnished Lafayette with a good deal of his revolutionary rhetoric, had contributed to the Monthly Review of the Girondists and the "Chronique de Paris," and had written a series of articles in defence of representative government, which Condorcet had translated for him. Paine was a man of one idea in politics; a federal republic, on the American plan, was the only system of government he believed in, and the only one he wished to see established in France. Lafayette belonged to this school. So did Condorcet, Pétion, Buzot, and others of less note. Under Paine's direction they formed a republican club, which met at Condorcet's house. This federal theory cost them dear. In 1793, it was treason against the une et indivisible, and was punished accordingly.

After the flight to Varennes, Paine openly declared that the King was "a political superfluity." This was true enough. The people had lost all respect for the man and for the office. None so base as to call him King. He was only the pouvoir exécutif, or more commonly still, Monsieur Veto. Achille Duchâtelet, a young officer who had served in America, called upon Dumont to get him to translate a proclamation drawn up by Paine, urging the people to seize the opportunity and establish a republic. It was intended to be a "Common Sense" for France. Dumont refusing to have anything to do with it, some other translator was found. It appeared on the walls of the capital with Duchâtelet's name affixed. The placard was torn down by order of the Assembly and attracted little attention. The French were not quite ready for the republic, although gradually approaching it. They seemed to take a pleasure in playing awhile with royalty before exterminating it.

The Abbé Sièyes was a warm monarchist. He wrote in the "Moniteur," that he could prove, "on every hypothesis," that men were more free in a monarchy than in a republic. Paine gave notice in Brissot's paper, that he would demolish the Abbé utterly in fifty pages, and show the world that a constitutional monarchy was a nullity,—concluding with the usual flourish about "weeping for the miseries of humanity," "hell of despotism," etc., etc., the fashionable doxology of patriotic authors in that day. Sièyes announced his readiness to meet the great Paine in conflict. This passage of pens was interrupted by the publication of Part Second of the "Rights of Man." Before Paine returned to Paris, the mob had settled the question for the time, so far as the French nation were concerned.

Paine had also taken a leading part in some of the politico-theatrical entertainments then so frequent in the streets of Paris. At the festival of the Federation, in July, 1790, when Clootz led a "deputation" of the genre humain, consisting of an English editor and some colored persons in fancy dresses, Paine and Paul Jones headed the American branch of humanity and carried the stars and stripes. Not long after, Fame appears again marshalling a deputation of English and Americans, who waited upon the Jacobin Club to fraternize. Suitable preparations had been made by the club for this solemn occasion. The three national flags, united, were placed in the hall over the busts of Dr. Franklin and Dr. Price. Robespierre himself received the generous strangers; but most of the talking seems to have been done by a fervid citoyenne, who took la parole and kept it. "Let a cry of joy rush through all Europe and fly to America," said she. "But hark! Philadelphia and all its countries repeat, like us, Vive la Liberté!" To see a man of Paine's clear sense and simple tastes pleased by such flummery as this shows us how difficult it is not to be affected by the spirit of the generation we live with. How could he have supposed that the new heaven upon earth of his dreams would ever be constructed out of such pinchbeck materials?

It was now the year 1. of the Republic. The dix Août was over, the King a prisoner in the Temple. Lafayette, in his attempt to imitate his "master," Washington, had succeeded no better than the magician's apprentice, who knew how to raise the demon, but not how to manage him when he appeared. He had gone down before the revolution, and was now le traître Lafayette, a refugee in Austria. Dumouriez commanded on the north-eastern frontier in his place. France was still shuddering at the recollection of the prison-massacres of the Septembriseurs, and society, to use the phrase of a modern French revolutionist, was en procès de liquidation.

Paine got on very well, at first. The Convention was impressed with the necessity of looking up first principles, and Paine was emphatically the man of principles. A universal republic was the hope of the majority, with a convention sitting at the centre of the civilized world, watching untiringly over the rights of man and the peace of the human race. Meantime, they elected a committee to make a new constitution for France. Paine was, of course, selected. His colleagues were Sièyes, Condorcet, Gensonné, Vergniaud, Pétion, Brissot, Barère, and Danton. Of these nine, Paine and Sièyes alone survived the Reign of Terror. When, in due time, this constitution was ready to be submitted to the Convention, no one could be found to listen to the reading of the report. The revolution had outstripped the committee. Their labors proved as useless as the Treatise on Education composed by Mr. Shandy for the use of his son Tristram;—when it was finished, the child had outgrown every chapter.

Thenceforward, we catch only occasional glimpses of Paine. In the days of his glory, he lived in the fashionable Rue de Richelieu, holding levees twice a week, to receive a public eager to gaze upon so great a man. His name appears at the fête civique held by English and Irish republicans at White's Hotel. There he sat beside Santerre, the famous brewer, and proposed, as a sentiment, "The approaching National Convention of Great Britain and Ireland." At this dinner, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, then an officer in the British service, gave, "May the 'Ça ira,' the 'Carmagnole,' and the 'Marseillaise' be the music of every army, and soldier and citizen join in the chorus,"—a toast which cost him his commission, perhaps his life. We read, too, that Paine was struck in a café by some loyal, hot-headed English captain, who took that means of showing his dislike for the author of the "Rights of Man." The police sternly seized the foolish son of Albion. A blow inflicted upon the sacred person of a member of the Convention was clearly sacrilege, punishable, perhaps, with death. But Paine interfered, procured passports, and sent the penitent soldier safely out of the country.

Speaking no French, for he never succeeded in learning the language, Paine's part in the public sittings of the Convention must have been generally limited to eloquent silence or expressive dumbshow. But when the trial of the King came on, he took a bold and dangerous share in the proceedings, which destroyed what little popularity the ruin of his federal schemes had left him, and came near costing him his head. He was already so great a laggard behind the revolutionary march, that he did not suspect the determination of the Mountain to put the King to death. Louis was guilty, no doubt, Paine thought,—but not of any great crime. Banishment for life, or until the new government be consolidated,—say to the United States, where he will have the inestimable privilege of seeing the working of free institutions;—once thoroughly convinced of his royal errors, morally, as well as physically uncrowned, he might safely be allowed to return to France as plain Citizen Capet: that should be his sentence. But the extreme left of the Convention and the constituent rabble of the galleries wanted to break with the past, and to throw a king's head into the arena as wager of battle to the despots of Europe. The discovery of the iron safe in the palace offered, it was thought, sufficient show of evidence for the prosecution; if not, they were ready to dispense with any. The case was prejudged; the trial, a cruel and an empty form. There were two righteous men in that political Gomorrah,—Tronchet and the venerable Malesherbes. They offered their services to defend the unfortunate victim. Who can read Malesherbes's noble letter to the President of the Convention, without thinking the better of French nature forever after?

A fierce preliminary discussion arose the Convention on the constitutional question of the King's inviolability. Paine had no patience with the privileges of kingship and voted against inviolability. He requested that a speech he had prepared on the subject might be read to the House at once, as he wished to send off a copy to London for the English papers. This wretched composition was manifestly written for England. Paine had George III. in his mind, rather than Louis XVI. Here is a specimen of the style of it,—interesting, as showing the temper of the time, as well as of Member Thomas Paine:—"Louis, as an individual, is an object beneath the notice of the Republic. But he ought to be tried, because a conspiracy has been formed against the liberty of all nations by the crowned ruffians of Europe. Louis XVI. is believed to be the partner of that horde, and is the only man of them you have in your power. It is indispensable to discover who the gang is composed of, and this may be done by his trial. It may also bring to light the detestable conduct of Mr. Guelph, Elector of Hanover, and be doing justice to England to make them aware of it. It is the interest of France to be surrounded by republics, and that revolutions be universal. If Louis XVI. can serve to prove, by the flagitiousness of government in general, the necessity of revolutions, France ought not to let slip so precious an opportunity. Seeing no longer in Louis XVI. but a weakminded and narrow-spirited individual, ill-bred, like all his colleagues, given, as it is said, to frequent excesses of drunkenness, and whom the National Assembly raised again imprudently to a throne which was not made for him,—if we show him hereafter some pity, it shall not be the result of the burlesque idea of a pretended inviolability."

A secretary read this speech from the tribune,—Paine standing near him, silent, furnishing perhaps an occasional gesture to mark the emphasis. The Convention applauded warmly, and ordered it to be printed and circulated in the departments.

When the King was found guilty, and it came to the final vote, whether he should be imprisoned, banished, or beheaded, the Girondins, who had spoken warmly against the death-penalty, voted for it, overawed by the stormy abuse of the galleries. Paine, coarse and insolent, but not cowardly or cruel, did not hesitate to vote for banishment. He requested the member from the Pas de Calais to read from the tribune his appeal in favor of the King. Drunau attempted to do it, but was hooted down. Paine persisted,—presented his speech again the next day. Marat objected to its reception, because Paine was a Quaker, and opposed to capital punishment on principle; but the Convention at last consented to the reading. After alluding to the all-important assistance furnished by Louis XVI. to the insurgent American Colonies, Paine, as a citizen of both countries, proposed sending him to the United States. "To kill Louis," wrote Paine, "is not only inhuman, but a folly. It will increase the number of your enemies. France has but one ally,—the United States of America,—and the execution of the King would spread an universal affliction in that country. If I could speak your language like a Frenchman, I would descend a suppliant to your bar, and in the name of all my brothers in America present to you a petition and prayer to suspend the execution of Louis." The Mountain and the galleries roared with rage. Thuriot exclaimed,—"That is not the true language of Thomas Paine."

"I denounce the translator," shrieked venomous Marat; "these are not the opinions of Thomas Paine; it is a wicked and unfaithful translation."

Coulon affirmed, solemnly, that he had seen the original in Paine's hands, and that it was exact. The reader was finally allowed to resume. "You mean to send an ambassador to the United States. Let him announce to the Americans that the National Convention of France, from pure friendship to America, has consented to respite the sentence of Louis. Ah, Citizens, do not give the despot of England the pleasure of seeing sent to the scaffold the man who helped my beloved brethren of America to free themselves from his chains!"

Soon after the execution of the King, Paris fell into the hands of the lowest classes. Their leaders ruled with terrible energy. Chabot's dictum,—"Il n'y a pas de crimes en révolution," and Stablekeeper Drouet's exclamation,—"Soyons brigands pour le bonheur du peuple," contain the political principles which guided them. Marat thundered away in his paper against Brissotins, Girondins, federalism, and moderantism. The minority members, thus unpleasantly noticed, went armed; many of them dared not sleep at home. Soon came the arrest of the suspects. The 31st of May, cette insurrection toute morale, as Robespierre called it, followed next. The Convention was stormed by the mob and purged of Brissotins and Girondins. The Comité de Salut Public decreed forced loans and the levée en masse. Foreigners were expelled from the Convention and imprisoned throughout France. Mayor Bailly, Mme. Roland, Manuel, and their friends, passed under the axe. The same fate befell the Girondins, a party of phrase-makers who have enjoyed a posthumous sentimental reputation, but who, when living, had not the energy and active courage to back their fine speeches. The reductio ad horribile of all the fine arguments in favor of popular infallibility and virtue had come; neither was the reductio ad absurdum wanting. The old names of the days and months and years were changed. The statues of the Virgin were torn from the little niches in street-walls, and the busts of Marat and Lepelletier set up in their stead. The would-be God, soi-disant Dieu, was banished from France. Clootz and Chaumette, who called themselves Anacharsis and Anaxagoras, celebrated the worship of the Goddess of Reason. Bonfires of feudality; Goddesses of Liberty in plaster; trees of liberty planted in every square; altars de la patrie; huge rag-dolls representing Anarchy and Discord; Cleobis and Biton dragging their revered parents through the streets; bonnets rouges, banderolles, ça iras, carmagnoles, fraternisations, accolades; the properties, as well as the text of the plays, borrowed from Ancient Greece or Rome. What a bewildering retrospect! A period well summed up by Emerson:—"To-day, pasteboard and filigree; to-morrow, madness and murder." Tigre-singe, Voltaire's epigrammatic definition, describes his countrymen of the Reign of Terror in two words.

Neglected by all parties, and disgusted with all, Paine moved to a remote quarter of Paris, and took rooms in a house which had once belonged to Mme. de Pompadour. Brissot, Thomas Christie, Mary Wolstonecraft, and Joel Barlow were his principal associates. Two Englishmen, "friends of humanity," and an ex-officer of the garde-du-corps lodged in the same building. The neighborhood was not without its considerable persons. Sanson, most celebrated of headsmen, had his domicile ii the same section. He called upon Paine, complimented him in good English upon his "Rights of Man," which he had read, and offered his services in a polite manner.

When the Reign of Terror was fully established, the little party seldom left their walls, and amused themselves as best they could with conversation and games. The news of the confusion and alarm of Paris reached them in their retreat, as if they were miles away in some quiet country residence. Every evening the landlord went into the city and brought back with him the horrible story of the day. "As to myself," Paine wrote to Lady Smith, "I used to find some relief by walking in the garden and cursing with hearty good-will the authors of that terrible system that had turned the character of the revolution I had been proud to defend."

After some weeks, the two Englishmen contrived to escape to Switzerland, leaving their enthusiasm for humanity behind them. Two days later, a file of armed men came to arrest them. Before the month was out, the landlord was carried off in the night. Last of all came the turn of Paine. He was arrested in December, by order of Robespierre, "for the interest of America, as well as of France, as a dangerous enemy of liberty and equality." On his way to the Luxembourg, he stopped at Barlow's lodgings and left with him the First Part of the "Age of Reason," finished the day before. The Americans in Paris applied to the Convention for Paine's release, offering themselves as security for his good conduct during his stay in France. They rounded off their petition with a phrase of the prisoner's,—"Ah, Citizens! do not give the leagued despots of Europe the pleasure of seeing Thomas Paine in irons." This document was presented by a Major Jackson, a "volunteer character," who had come to Europe with a letter of introduction to Gouverneur Morris, then minister, from Mr. Jefferson. Instead of delivering his letter to Morris, Jackson lodged it with the Comité de Salut Public as a credential, and represented his country on the strength of it. The Convention, careless of the opinion of the "leagued despots," as well as of Major Jackson, replied, that Paine was an Englishman, and the demand for his release unauthorized by the United States. Paine wrote to Morris to request him to demand his discharge of the citizen who administered foreign affairs. Morris did so; but this official denied that Paine was an American. Morris inclosed this answer to Paine, who returned a shrewd argument in his own behalf, and begged Morris to lay the proofs of his citizenship before the minister. But Morris disliked Paine, and his own position in France was far from satisfactory. It is probable that he was not very zealous in the matter, and shortly after Paine's letter all communication with prisoners was forbidden.

The news of the outer world reached these unfortunates, penned up like sheep waiting for the butcher, only when the doors of the dungeon opened to admit a new fournée, or batch of victims, as the French pleasantly called them. They knew then that the revolution had made another stride forward, and had trodden these down as it moved on. Paine saw them all—Ronsin, Hébert, Momoro, Chaumette, Clootz, Gobel, the crazy and the vile, mingled together, the very men he had cursed in his garden at St. Denis—pass before him like the shadows of a magic-lantern, entering at one side and gliding out at the other,—to death. A few days later came Danton, Camille, Desmoulins, and the few who remained of the moderate party. Paine was standing near the wicket when they were brought in. Danton embraced him. "What you have done for the happiness and liberty of your country I have in vain tried to do for mine. I have been less fortunate, but not more culpable. I am sent to the scaffold." Turning to his friends.—"Eh, bien! mes amis, allons y gaiement." Happy Frenchmen! What a consolation it was to them to be thus always able to take an attitude and enact a character! Their fondness for dramatic display must have served them as a moral anaesthetic in those scenes of murder, and have deadened their sensibility to the horrors of their actual condition.

In July, the carnage had reached its height. No man could count upon life for twenty-four hours. The tall, the wise, the reverend heads had been taken off, and now the humbler ones were insecure upon their shoulders. Fouquier-Tinville had erected a guillotine in his court-room, to save time and transportation. Newsboys sold about the streets printed lists of those who were to suffer that day. "Voici ceux qui ont gagné à la loterie de la Sainte Guillotine!" they cried, with that reckless, mocking, blood-thirsty spirit which is found only in Frenchmen, or, perhaps, in their fellow-Celts. It seemed to Paine that Robespierre and the Committee were afraid to leave a man alive. He expected daily his own summons; but he was overlooked. There was nothing to be gained by killing him, except the mere pleasure of the thing.