Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  In the roar that followed Duval’s statement, Paine could hardly hear Bancal’s voice, but saw the tears in his eyes and saw how proudly and calmly Duval stood among the tumult.

  When the vote came, it was for the death of Louis.

  The friends of Lafayette, men with connections in America, men who had a claim on him, came to Paine and told him:

  “You can do this—because you are Paine.”

  “Because when we fall there will be only confusion.”

  “Because when Louis dies, it means war with England.”

  “Because Louis came to America’s aid in the hour of her need.”

  Their plan—Condorcet’s, Roland’s, Brissot’s—was for Paine to arise on the Convention floor and make a plea for the king’s life. Tom Paine might carry the day; no one else could.

  For all their arguments, Paine saw that the king’s life meant nothing. The French revolution had split between the Girondins and the Jacobins, the right and the left, and in the middle was an aging staymaker whose name was glory.

  “I can’t speak French,” Paine said miserably.

  “Bancal will translate. The people will listen to Bancal—and they will listen to Paine.”

  “And to make it reasonable to myself—” Paine said bitterly.

  “Only remember what Louis did for America.” And knowing that they lied in their teeth as to their purposes, yet knowing there was truth in what they said—that in the hour of their need France’s king had come to the aid of America—Paine agreed.

  When Paine stood on the platform the next day, there was quiet in the house. Every eye was fixed on this man, whose name was synonymous with freedom and brotherhood; he, at least, was theirs, without subterfuge; he was the symbol of all they fought for; he was Paine.

  And then he spoke through Bancal, standing silent, but with a forlorn dignity that rose over Marat’s furious interruptions. Even when what he was saying became plain enough, the gallery did not hiss him; he was Tom Paine. He finished:

  “Ah, Citizens, give not the tyrant of England the triumph of seeing the man perish on the scaffold who has aided my much loved America to break her chains!”

  It made no difference; the vote was for death and on January 21, 1793, Louis of France went to the guillotine.

  Then the world was changed and the revolution fled past him. In a matter of days after the death of the king, almost every nation in Europe, including England, was at war with France. And while the enemy armies made preparations beyond the frontiers, within the city of Paris the Girondins and the Jacobins fought their own deadly struggle.

  Paine proposed that he go off to the frontiers with the troops. The military leaders smiled at him.

  “You are too old to be a soldier, monsieur,” they assured him, deliberately misunderstanding.

  And when he said valiantly, “An army fights with more than guns,” they raised their brows and smiled.

  Then, with others, he was appointed to formulate a message to the people of England.

  “Just a message?” he said. “And that will do what all my planning and work failed to do?”

  “It is what you are fitted for.”

  “Just that—”

  But he wrote as vibrantly as he had ever written, turning out the message that would never be seen by ninety-nine per cent of the British people. It helped him—his writing; it occupied him; but it answered none of the doubts that were plaguing him.

  “Leave France?” he asked himself. But then what? Then what reason to live? He had forgotten his trade of staymaking. He was a revolutionist; it was all he knew, all he was fitted for.

  No, he could not leave France, not yet, not while there was still hope for the revolution, not while the Girondins and the Jacobins might forget their hatred for each other long enough to permit France and the Republic to survive. But as time went on, the break increased rather than healed. A new situation had arisen, the hatred of the people for the middle class, fear of the people by the middle class.

  More and more muskets were distributed to the people of Paris. And keeping pace with Paine’s growing hatred of Marat and his party, there grew in him a mounting disgust for the Girondins who would destroy the revolution before they would give an inch.

  Those were dark days, and Tom Paine walked alone.

  Alone, he wrote to Marat and Danton, pleading. Danton ignored his letter; a pall of fear was beginning to hang over Paris, and Danton, who had looked askance now and then at the dictatorship of the mob, was beginning to feel gingerly at his own neck. Marat stormed to St. Just:

  “No man knows when to die! I am sick of Paine, sick to death of him. Does he think that a revolution is distilled from roses, like perfume?”

  “I have doubted that Paine thinks,” St. Just smiled.

  “Well, I am sick of him.”

  Alone, Paine prayed to God. A man does not pray easily when he is like Paine, when he is strong and his hands are broad, when he has a brain and a heart and contempt and hatred for those who made God’s name the disgrace of the centuries. A man leaves God alone and turns to men and tries to do what is right. But Paine was old and tired, and he prayed, self-consciously, “Give them understanding.”

  Alone he said to the Girondins, “Show your honesty, your love for France and mankind, and I will lead the people to you.”

  And the Girondins showed their honesty by as fine a piece of fraud as they had ever indulged in.

  There was a young, blue-eyed, dream-saturated Englishman, Johnson by name, who had followed Paine everywhere for weeks now, dreaming of becoming his Boswell. Johnson was not very stable; he saw himself as a knight-crusader; he saw himself also as a revolutionist, and the two did not go well together. He wrote bad poetry, and he fell in love with a French girl.

  His love-making was as bad as his poetry, and Paine had to listen patiently to both. The girl wasn’t so patient, and sometimes she laughed at Johnson, usually when he told her how he would die for her, or kill anyone who came between them.

  “You will not die for me, my little fool,” she said calmly. “And if there is anyone else, that’s my affair.”

  There was someone else, a Jacobin, and out of that Johnson built an entirely abnormal fear and hatred of the party of the left. When she told him, as kindly as she could, that she was through with him, he came to Paine and cursed Marat and his whole party as the source of every ill.

  Paine dismissed the matter from his mind, thinking nothing more would come of it, but Johnson, after playing with the thought of suicide for several days, finally made the attempt. He used a knife, not knowing the fortitude needed to end one’s life in so primitive a fashion, and as a result succeeded only in gashing himself.

  But before he took the plunge, he wrote a letter to Paine, blaming Marat.

  Alarmed until he learned how Johnson had fumbled the attempt, Paine showed the letter to Brissot, remarking, “Marat has done a good deal, but I’d hardly blame him for Johnson’s sticking himself.”

  “Yet if he dies—” Brissot mused.

  With that flimsy excuse, the Girondins dragged Marat before the revolutionary tribunal. It was their last brief flash of power—and exactly the opening Marat had been seeking. Before the tribunal, Marat tore the charges to pieces, stood in such dignity as he had never shown before, and calmly portrayed himself as the just anger of a just people.

  The Girondins had overstepped themselves—and so the end began. And Paine could only sigh tiredly, “The fools—oh, the poor, witless fools.”

  The end of the Girondins came with awful suddenness. One day Paine was telling Brissot, “In the end, it will not be the Jacobins who destroy Republican France, but you. For the sake of everything we’ve lived for, make your peace with them. Do you hate Marat more than I do? I tell you, the Republic is dying.” And the next day it was over.

  The Girondins were flailing about; their blows fell everywhere and accomplished nothing. They arrested Jacobins; they banned assemblies; they flung out accusa
tions. And then the people of Paris picked up their muskets and began to assemble. On a much vaster scale, it was Philadelphia all over again, but this time Paine was in limbo. This time, the people neither remembered Paine nor. turned to him; their wrath was against the Girondins, and if someone suggested that Paine was a mainspring of that party, they simply shrugged their shoulders. Thirty-two thousand of the volunteers stood over their muskets throughout the city, and all day long delegations stormed the Convention hall to scream for the arrest of the Girondins, who had betrayed the revolution. At last, the weary and frightened Convention adjourned for the day, and one by one, with shoulders bent over in despair, the Girondin deputies left the hall, the yelling mob hardly parting to make way for them. But when Paine left, there was a moment of silence.…

  There was no sleeping that night. They went to Bancal’s house, Duval, Condorcet, Brissot and Guadet, and they sat there until dawn turning over and over what had happened, what would happen to them, some even suggesting suicide.

  “And either way,” Paine said somberly, “the Republic is dead. Tomorrow the dictatorship of the mob, and after that anarchy—and after that, God only knows what.”

  The dawn of that day bore out their fears. The number of Parisians armed and assembled had increased almost to one hundred thousand; they made a dark, angry cordon around the hall of the Convention, and within, the deputies, not knowing precisely where the ax would fall, decreed as the people wished. The Girondin leaders were expelled from the Convention and placed under arrest. The French Republic was dead; the middle class had been overthrown by the hungry, angry poor of Paris, and the course of the revolution was turned into a strange and dangerous channel that had never been explored before.

  Yet they left Paine alone; Paine, who had been a Girondin—or at least a friend and associate of Girondins—was still Tom Paine who had bent into the mire where mankind lay through the centuries, and had proclaimed freedom. Even the Parisians, the small men of the shops and the factories and the looms and the benches, even they who hated the Girondins so, would not lift a finger against Paine.

  Silent and lonely he stalked the streets. They all knew him; his fierce hooked nose, his twisted eyes, his broad, sloping shoulders and his meaty, peasant hands were instantly recognizable; this was the godfather of revolution; this was the person who, across three thousand miles of water, somewhere in the American wilderness, had awakened sleeping mankind—and because they knew that, they were not cruel to him, they did not abuse him as they abused the Girondins, and now and then a kind word was spoken to him, as, “Good day, Citizen,” and, “It looks different, Citizen, wouldn’t you say?” or, “You’re with us, Citizen. We’ve disposed of the traitors, and now you are with us—”

  When was he not one of them? he asked himself. Their poor little bit of power had ripped out into anarchy, and the Republic was dead. His dreams were dead.

  He fought sleeplessness with a brandy bottle and he fought wakefulness. He made up his mind that when they came to arrest him, he would stand erect and say, “I am Citizen Paine,” and just look at them. But they didn’t come to arrest him. He heard how in England men had copper coins with Paine’s likeness on them fixed into the soles of their shoes, so they could vicariously stamp him into the mud. That, too, dissolved in a bottle. He drank himself into insensibility; for ten days, he had only enough control of himself to crawl down to the tavern for more brandy—after the waiter at White’s had told him:

  “Drink I’ll sell you, but I’ll not have the death of Paine on my conscience.”

  For a day, he was sober and haunted; he woke in the night, screaming, and when one of the Englishmen at the hotel, Jackson, told him, “For Christ’s sake, Paine, you are killing yourself,” he answered, “It’s time, isn’t it? Damn it, it’s time!”

  And then he was drunk again, day after day after day, vomiting, sick, seeing things that were not and things that were, unshaven, dirty, dragging himself about his room and mouthing:

  “Where is that damned bottle, that damned bottle?”

  That way, for almost thirty days—until anger came, anger so fierce and terrible that it sobered him while he vomited and trembled. There were two bottles of brandy left, and he smashed them against the floor. He strode back and forth across the room, pounding a clenched fist into his palm, and telling himself repeatedly in a calm, cold voice:

  “You fool, you damned, accursed fool, it’s only the beginning. You said seven years and even in seventy, it would still be only the beginning. You dirty, damned, drunken, besotted fool!”

  13

  REASON IN GOD AND MAN

  THE REVOLUTION goes on; a man does not make the revolution, not a thousand men, not an army and not a party; the revolution comes from the people as they reach toward God, and a little of God is in each person and each will not forget it. Thus it is the revolution when slaves shake their chains and the revolution when a strong man bends toward a weaker and says, “Here, comrade, is my arm.” The revolution goes on and nothing stops it; but because the people are seeking what is good, not what is wicked or powerful or cruel or rich or venal, but simply what is good—because of that the people flounder and feel along one dark road after another. The people are no more all-seeing than their rulers once were; it is in intention that they differ.

  Some of this, or all of it, Paine came to know, and he came to know that he was not the revolution, but only a man. There are no gods on earth, only men, and it had taken a long time for him to learn this.

  His face was drawn, his figure leaner, his broad shoulders sloped more than ever as he entered the hall of the Convention once again. They had made no move to arrest him. “Let him run away,” Marat said. “Let him be off to the devil!” But Paine did not run away, and now he was back, his lips tight as he strode through a thousand fixed eyes to his seat.

  There was a rustle and a murmur and the sound of many persons rising as Paine came back. Galleries and floor wanted to see him, the fool who walked back into the lion’s mouth. Paine found his place, stood a moment, looking from person to person, and then sat down.

  “Citizen Paine,” the speaker acknowledged.

  There was a ripple of applause, in spite of themselves. Paine wiped his eyes and stared at the floor.

  St. Just attacked him, St. Just at his best, shouting, “I accuse you!”

  Citizen Paine rose and came forward and asked, “Of what, sir—of what do you accuse me?”

  “Of treason to France!”

  “I committed no treason to France,” Paine said calmly.

  St. Just went on to accuse Paine of being in illegitimate correspondence with part of the royal family outside of the country’s borders, at which Paine shook his head and said, “You are speaking to Tom Paine, sir.”

  Even the galleries roared with applause at that. “Accuse me of many things,” Paine said. “Accuse me of being a republican, of being loyal to my friends, of loving an Englishman or a Frenchman as well as an American—but not of treason, sir, not of consorting with kings. I am not a young man; I have enough to look back upon, and I will not defend myself.”

  St. Just said no more.

  So Paine sat in the Convention, but said practically nothing. History was rushing on too fast, and he was left behind. He attended because he was a delegate and because he was practicing the only trade he knew, but there was nothing for him. And he was terribly alone, his friends in prison, others who might have been his friends avoiding him because he was suspect. A whole era was crowded into a week or a month. Marat died under Charlotte Corday’s dagger, and Robespierre took his place, a disarming man, so delicate and so French, but strong as iron and unbending as rock. A humanitarian, he called himself, telling Paine:

  “I am of the people because I feel all their wants, their hurts, their pains, their sufferings. You were of the people once, were you not, Citizen Paine?” That was his way, to sink a barb deepest where it hurt most.

  “I was a staymaker,” Paine said, “and a cob
bler and I swept a weaver’s shop and I grubbed in the dirt for tuppence a week. I don’t speak of being of the people—”

  And that was something that Robespierre would never forget.

  Still, the new ruler of France was a man of iron; he had to be. All around the nation enemy armies were closing in; provinces were in full revolt, and here and there the counterrevolution had gained full control of a local district.

  Reorganized, the Revolutionary Tribunal set to work, and there began that period known as The Terror. There was neither compromise nor mercy; either a man was loyal to the revolution or he was an enemy of the revolution, and if he was suspect he was more than likely to be considered an enemy. Day after day, crude carts trundled through the streets of Paris, their big wooden wheels groaning and squeaking, their bellies bulging with new victims for the guillotine. And day after day the big knife was wound up its scaffold and then released to fall upon another neck. From the king’s wife to a tavern keeper, to a simpering duke, to a midwife who had sheltered him. This was revolution in a way Paine had never dreamed of, not tall farmers who had always known that freedom was a part of their lives, but frightened little men who saw freedom for the first time in a thousand years, and were going to kill, kill, kill anything that stood in the way of its accomplishment. A dark cloud over Paris as the winter of 1793-1794 set in, a bloodstained cloud. Robespierre had to be a strong man.

  And as the heads rolled, there died those friends of Paine’s who had made up the party of the Plain, or the Girondins. Traitorous, or deceived, or weak, or without understanding, or frightened, or brave, or cowardly, or righteous in the only way they knew, they all died, Roland and his wife, Condorcet, Brissot, Petion, Lebrun, Vergniaud, Buzot—all of them, all under the knife that was the dark door at the end of a dark lane into which liberty had wandered. Long live the Republic—and the Republic died too. Paris was a city of death.