In 1789, two years after Thomas Paine’s return to Europe with a prospectus for a 500-foot long single span bridge (like all his business schemes, it was a nonstarter), the King of France called the Estates-General into session for the first time in nearly 200 years to increase taxes. Despite their limited agenda, the members publicly demanded greater reforms. In July, a Parisian mob seized an ancient fortress turned minor prison. The fall of the Bastille, though unimportant in itself, revealed to the world the French monarchy’s inability to maintain public order.
Paine, like most democrats, rejoiced at the events in France. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament whom Paine knew well, did not. Intelligent, ambitious, a practical politician, Burke had been secretary to the Prime Minister and paymaster-general. Burke, who disdained ivory towers, elevated his pragmatism, which he called empiricism, to philosophy: “Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.” Burke saw society as a living organism, infinitely complex in its relations, representing an exquisite balance of social forces resulting from centuries of effort, not to be trifled with. Thus, the French Revolution, its leaders ignorantly disdaining tradition in favor of untried philosophical abstractions at any cost, horrified him.
On November 1, 1790, Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France. More than a pamphlet, Reflections was perhaps the first modern conservative polemic. The Irishman attacked the revolution as puerile agitation for mindless radical change:
No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.
Paine replied in his Rights of Man. He hit hard, even dismissing Burke’s career thus: “As he rose like a rocket, he fell like the stick.” He contrasted Burke’s compassion for the King and Queen of France with his apparent indifference to the impoverished and tax-burdened French people: “He pities the plumage, and forgets the dying bird”; Paine denounced aristocracy as “a kind of fungus growing out of the corruption of society.”
The book was good journalism, too: Paine’s research into British government finances paid off in exposures of uncontrolled government spending on no-show jobs and luxuries for the royal court. A fact-based attack on profitable government corruption is more dangerous than any invocation of abstract liberty. Paine was indicted for offenses against the dignity of the Crown, having suggested that George III who periodically went mad was barely competent to be a constable.
The French Republic had granted honorary citizenship to Paine and other American revolutionaries for their services to liberty. At the French elections in September 1792, four constituencies elected Paine to the National Convention. He had not known of his nomination, let alone his election, and did not speak French.
At a gathering later that month, William Blake, poet and visionary, drew Paine aside and told him not to return home. The literature suggests Blake, who often saw angels and demons, had foreseen Paine’s impending arrest. Paine took his advice and left for Dover, whence he sailed for France some twenty minutes before a dusty king’s messenger galloped up with the warrant. The convention seated him amidst wild applause.
It soon faded. King Louis XVI had been deposed and then indicted and tried for treason. The radicals sought death. Paine, who loathed violence, argued for imprisonment and exile. Translator in tow, Paine energetically lobbied his colleagues and even opposed the death penalty in a brief, carefully memorized speech in French. Despite the radicals’ strength, deputy after deputy rose, admitting they voted with Paine because they believed him incorruptible, disinterested, and humane. Paine lost by one vote. When he attempted to overturn the sentence, Paine, with prepared remarks in his translator’s hands, stood nearly alone to plead for the King’s life. He argued the republic should not stain its hands with blood and recalled that Louis had helped America shake off the “tyrannical yoke of Britain.” However, with Paine’s first words, the demagogue Jean-Paul Marat, self-proclaimed “Friend of the People,” rose and bellowed that Paine spoke as a Quaker, not as a revolutionary.
Paine was a political animal: one of those for whom politics alone is the breath of life. He could schmooze brilliantly, and even after opposing the King’s death he successfully lobbied the French government to release detained American sailors, ships, and cargoes. This irritated the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris. (Morris, a politician by occupation, was an amorist by avocation. Legend has it he had lost one leg in love’s cause: as the wife of an acquaintance entertained Morris on the second floor of her house, her husband prematurely returned. Morris climbed naked through the bedroom window, slipped, fell into the courtyard and broke his leg. Gangrene ensued, requiring amputation.)
Morris apparently viewed his appointment as a sinecure, providing an income sufficient to satisfy his needs, and did not overexert himself. Paine, finding Morris useless, asked him, “Do you not feel ashamed to take the money of the country and do nothing for it?” Morris would make him pay for the remark. Toward the end of 1793, as the revolution moved further left, Maximilien Robespierre’s new government imprisoned Paine as an oppositionist. Morris did nothing. He convinced President Washington that he had done everything possible for Paine. He even falsely advised Robespierre that Paine was not an American citizen.
While imprisoned, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, a secular analysis of the Bible. Paine was a deist. He acknowledged a divine creator, yet discarded organized religion and its theology in favor of a “natural morality” or “religion of nature,” a code of beliefs and conduct founded on the “repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition to good ones.” Paine found the notion of the Bible as the Word of God blasphemous: “When I see throughout the greatest part of this book scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonor my Creator by calling it by his name.” The Old Testament was filled with “obscene stories and voluptuous debaucheries.” The New Testament was internally inconsistent. Christianity was “a system…very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears.” St. Paul was “a manufacturer of quibbles.” The Book of Revelation required a revelation to explain it. Tales of miracles, instead of proving a system of religion true, merely showed it fabulous.
Happily for Paine, as Hesketh Pearson noted, “not all miracles were fabulous.” When a jailer marked Paine’s cell door for death, it had been momentarily open, flush against the wall. When closed, the mark was inside the cell. Thus, “the destroying angel passed by.” In August 1794, James Monroe became the American minister. He won Paine’s release and cared for him in his own home.
The Age of Reason, published shortly after his release, garnered its author widespread denunciation as atheist and blasphemer, from critics who obviously had not read the book. Paine returned to the United States after Thomas Jefferson became president. When he reached New York City in March 1803, his supporters hailed him with a formal dinner at the City Hotel. On moving to the New Rochelle farm granted him after the American Revolution, Paine found that his neighbors shunned and insulted him in public, local preachers denounced him from their pulpits, and the local paper vilified him. Paine leased the farm and largely remained in the city. He had begun drinking heavily during the French Revolution and now lived on bread and rum, often skipping the bread.
At the elections of 1806, Paine went to vote in New Rochelle, which remained his legal residence. The election inspectors held that as neither Gouverneur Morris nor President Washington had claimed him as an American during his imprisonment in France, the United States had determined he was not a citizen. The author of Common Sense was turned away from the polls. Worse, when he sued, his case was dismissed. He asked Jefferson to help him. Apparently, there was no response.
Thereafter Paine lived here, moving from 85 Church Street to 63 Partition Street (now Fulton Street) in 1807 and to 309 Bleecker in 1808. He wrote prolifically for two newspapers, The American Citizen and the Public Advertiser. In old age, his vanity, fueled by a sense of being “the neglected pioneer of a successful revolution,” made him nearly unbearable. He became uncouth: his body odor was “absolutely offensive and perfumed the entire apartment.”
Nearly crippled by gout, Paine drank even more to deaden the pain of his body and his loneliness. Strokes left him an invalid. He became incontinent, with bedsores infected by the urine he involuntarily passed in bed.
Religious fanatics broke into his rooms to seek his deathbed conversion. Finally, in May 1809 he begged Marguerite Bonneville, the wife of his French publisher, to care for him. She rented a house for Paine at 59 Grove Street, adjoining her own. There he died on June 8, 1809. He had asked to be buried among the Quakers: even they rejected him. Two days later, he was buried on his farm. Madame Bonneville and her son; Wilbert Hicks, an old friend; and two black men who had not known Paine but wanted to honor him for his opposition to slavery were the only persons at the graveside. Neither France nor the United States sent a representative.
In 1817, an English admirer of Paine’s, teh radical journalist William Cobbett, landed in New York. A a vigorous, blunt, self-educated John Bull of a man with an undeferential damn-your-eyes attitude toward authority, Cobbett had left England under threat of arrest. The Americans’ disdain of Paine amazed him. He dreamed of raising money among radicals in England to build there a mausoleum for Paine’s body. Cobbett persuaded Madame Bonneville to permit exhumation. When Cobbett returned to England in 1819, Paine’s body went with him.
The money was never raised. Paine’s remains were lost and never found.
New York Press, February 20, 2001