'Common Sense' anniversary: The life and times of Thomas Paine (Part 5 of 7)

January 10, 5:12 PMPolitical Issues ExaminerJudah Freed

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Thomas Paine

French Treats

In revolutionary France, Thomas Paine earlier had joined with Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and select other Americans to be declared as French citizens by the Assembly. In September 1792, four French departments elected "Citizen Paine" to the Convention, where he sat for the Pas de Calais district.

Paine soon allied with the dominant Girondist party of educated, prosperous, moderate republicans who spoke English. Paine did not speak French, so his speeches were read by translators lacking his flair for words.

Rendered ineffective in the Assembly, Paine's temperament strained his relations. Among his close friends stood the Marquis de Condorcet along with Nicolas de Bonneville, a freemason joining Paine in the Craft. Paine wrote about freemasonry favoring democracy while separating church and state.

Draconian Jacobite radicals under Robespierre had seized power early in the French revolution. Moderate Girondists split off and asserted restraint. Girondists fell from power by trying to avoid the beheading of King Louis XVI.

At the climactic trial, Paine recommended imprisoning the king until war with England was over, then banishing him for life. Paine was forgiven as a humanitarian Quaker who, of course, was opposed to the death penalty.

After Louis' head fell into a basket, a mob under Jean Paul Marat on June 2, 1793, circled the French National Convention, demanding swift surrender of 29 Girondists. When Charlette Corday murdered Marat, more waves of executions followed. Outside Paris, Girondists joined the royalists in a revolt that was brutally crushed by the Jacobites.

Paine ceased attending the Assembly when the Girondists party fell. Retreating with friends to rural Faubourg St. Denis, he dwelled there in peace. But then the Assembly stripped away his French citizenship, which deprived him of membership in the Convention, which erased his legal immunity.

A French law allowed citizens of nations at war with France to be arrested. Since France was at war with England, outlawed Englishman Thomas Paine was arrested in December 1793 by the Jacobins behind the Reign of Terror. The man who inspired the American revolution that had inspired the France Revolution was imprisoned without trial in France for the crime of being British.

Scheduled for execution, Paine was saved by a fluke of fate (or divine intervention).

Paine fell ill in Luxembourg prison, according to apocryphal reports, and a doctor was visiting him in his cell when guards passed to mark with chalk the doors of those slated to die the next day on the busy guillotine. Since Paine's cell door was open, the harried guard placed the chalk mark on the inside panel of the door. With the door closed after the doctor's left, the execution mark was hidden from sight.

The next morning, other guards bypassed his cell when collecting that day's harvest of death, so Paine survived. Somehow, the mistake was overlooked (theories abound about how or why), and Paine's accuser, Robespierre, seemed content with letting Paine endure the pain of imprisonment.

Paine suspected he was denounced at the secret behest of the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, a Tory who'd voiced personal offense at Paine's "bohemian" ways. What's documented is that Paine applied for legal protection as an American citizen. The French foreign minister received a letter from Morris denying any and all responsibility for Paine since he had became a French citizen.

Morris wrote to Jefferson, then U.S. Secretary of State, that even if America acknowledged Paine as a citizen, he still was liable under French law for acts done in France. Paine was safer sitting quietly in jail, Morris argued, rather than risking the guillotine in a boisterous public trial.

Many enemies of the Revolution never went to trial, Paine among them. Locked in Luxembourg prison, he eventually persuaded his jailers to provide pen, ink and paper. He wrote there a portion of The Age of Reason. One can imagine that his mood was bitter as a "prisoner of conscience," and this feelings likely affected the tone of his writing.

The final downfall of Robespierre in November 1794 saved the Girondists from annihilation. Washington's recently appointed minister to France, James Monroe, at long last could claim Paine as an American citizen, demanding his freedom.

After nearly a year in a cold and infested prison, Paine at age 57 emerged weak from illness. He again was penniless. Monroe sheltered Paine while his health returned, but he would never recover his full vigor.

French citizenship was restored to Paine along with a seat in the Convention in July 1995. He rose in the French Assembly to declare his enduring faith in the Rights of Man.

Living thereafter in or near Paris with moderate republican friends, Paine dedicated his free energy to organizing a society he called the "Theophilanthropists," devoted to supplanting Christian faith with an orderly deist sense of the universe.

Writing remained Paine's primary source of livelihood. He published Dissertation on First Principles of Government in 1795, then Agrarian Justice in 1797. Between these two, he published his Letter to George Washington, blaming Morris for plotting his imprisonment. The harsh claim of conspiracy severely damaged Paine's public reputation in America.

Meanwhile, Paine completed and published his critique of religion, The Age of Reason, with part I in 1794 and part II in 1796. "I believe in one God, and no more," he begins, "and I hope for happiness beyond this life."

Please recognize that Paine was a deist, never an atheist, as many modern skeptics and freethinkers mistakenly claim.

The Age of Reason plainly offers Paine's metaphysical spiritual beliefs. God is the First Cause and Designer of the universe. God is knowable through the sciences and through mathematics, through human reason and natural intelligence.

Knowing God directly through the heart and transcendent spirit also interested Paine, but as a man of the mind, any certainty about God had to came through his use of reason.

Christians do not attempt to know God in a reasonable way, Paine wrote. The Bible is rife with glaring inconsistencies, subject to many differing interpretations, and therefore fallible. He compared the mythology of the Trinity with the paternity of Zeus, still a provocative analogy.

Having dispensed with Christianity, Paine spoke again about his deist God as the power and the wisdom anyone can witness directly in nature. He wrote that God is evident "in the immensity of the creation, ...in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible is governed."

The Age of Reason was welcomed in Europe as an intriguing philosophical treatise, but i the book's reception in American was far less friendly, much to Paine's sorrow.

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