Today, as I write in my history,
A committee was appointed to revise and new model the constitution, consisting of … [nine including] Thomas Paine, Brissot, … and Condorcet.1666
France is no longer a monarchy. France is a republic. France needs and will have her first republican constitution!
Tuesday, September 25, 1792. Today, Tom Paine issues an Address to France:
I receive with affectionate gratitude the honor which the late National Assembly has conferred upon me by adopting me a citizen of France: and the additional honor of being elected by my fellow citizens a member of the National Convention …
It has been my fate to have borne a share in the commencement and complete establishment of one revolution (I mean the Revolution of America). The success and events of that revolution are encouraging to us …
The principles on which that Revolution began have extended themselves to Europe; and an overruling Providence is regenerating the old world by the principles of the new. The distance of America from all the other parts of the globe did not admit of her carrying those principles beyond her own situation. It is to the peculiar honor of France that she now raises the standard of liberty for all nations; and infighting her own battles, contends for the rights of all mankind …
[W]hen … the Constitution is made conformable to the Declaration of Rights; when the bagatelles of monarchy, royalty, regency, and hereditary succession, shall be exposed with all their absurdities, a new ray of light will be thrown over the world …1667
Monday, October 22, 1792. Today, in Paris, Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville’s journal, Le Patriote François, publishes Tom Paine’s “Essay for the Use of New Republicans in Their Opposition to Monarchy.” Tom Paine writes:
From one point of view, we should not perhaps censure kings for their savage cruelty, their brutality and their oppressions; it is not they who are in fault; it is hereditary succession; a swamp breeds serpents; hereditary succession breeds oppressors …
Let the Rights of Man be established, Equality enthroned, a sound Constitution drafted, with its powers clearly defined; let all privileges, distinctions of birth, and monopolies be annulled …
[T]he presence of a king entails the presence of an aristocracy and of taxation reaching thirty millions. This is doubtless why Franklin styled Royalism “a crime as bad as poisoning.”1668
John Adams:
I have the honor and consolation to be a republican on principle … I am not, however, an enthusiast who wishes to overturn empires and monarchies for the sake of introducing republican forms of government, and therefore, I am no king-killer, king-hater, or king-despiser …1669
My opinion of the French Revolution has never varied from the first assembly of the notables to this hour. I always dreaded it, and never had any faith in its success or utility … My friend Brissot has recorded a conversation with me at my house in Grosvenor Square [in London], which I esteem as a trophy. He says, and says truly, that I told him that the French nation were not capable of a free government, and that they had no right or cause to engage in a revolution.1670
Friday, November 2, 1792. Today, in Paris, Thomas Paine writes William Short, former private secretary to Thomas Jefferson:
I received your favor conveying a letter from Mr. Jefferson and the answers to Publicola for which I thank you. I had John Adams in my mind when I wrote the pamphlet [The Rights of Man] and it has hit as I expected.1671
Saturday, December 15, 1792. Today, the French National Convention proclaims that France will end aristocracy and feudalism in any country the French army occupies.1672
Tuesday, December 18, 1792. Today, in London’s Guildhall, the British Crown tries Tom Paine in absentia for his “seditious” writings against the monarchy.1673 From a trial account:
The Attorney General read the contents of a third letter, which he received from THE SECOND PERSON in America (Mr. [John] Adams). “Having the honour of his acquaintance,” the Attorney General said, “I wrote to him relative to the prosecution and in answer I was informed that it is the wish of Thomas Paine to convene the people of Great Britain … to adopt a constitution similar to that of France and to establish a government proceeding directly from the sovereignty of the people …”1674
Partly on the basis of U.S. Vice President John Adams’ testimony, Britain convicts Tom Paine of seditious libel, permanently exiles him, orders his Rights of Man suppressed for all time, and threatens to imprison any British bookseller who sells Rights of Man.1675
Monday, January 21, 1793. Today, to the cries of Vive la nation! and by the swift descent of the guillotine’s blade, the King of France pays with his life for the independence he gave America.1676 Had the French king not entered America’s war against the British monarch, he would not have bankrupted his kingdom, he would not have had to call the Third Estate to Paris, and he would not have inspired so many Frenchmen (more than forty thousand came to America!) with the idea of democratic revolution. Had Louis XVI not chosen to help America, the British monarch would still rule America, and the French monarch would still rule France. Perhaps it was emotion, not reason, that put Louis XVI on the path to his own destruction. Perhaps, under the spell of a balding American in the garb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the king and his people succumbed to the highest ideals of a changing age. John Adams:
[F]our of the finest writers that Great Britain produced, Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Hume, and Gibbon … and three of the most eloquent writers that ever lived in France … Voltaire, Rousseau, and Raynal, seem to have made … strenuous exertions to render mankind in Europe discontented with their situation in life and with the state of society, both in religion and government. Princes and courtiers as well as citizens and countrymen, clergy as well as laity, became infected. The King of Prussia, the Empress Catherine, were open and undisguised. The Emperor Joseph the Second was suspected, and even the excellent King of France grew impatient and uneasy under the fatiguing ceremonies of the Catholic Church. All these and many more were professed admirers of Mr. Franklin. He was considered as a citizen of the world, a friend to all men and an enemy to none …
When the association of Encyclopedists [Enlightenment philosophers] was formed, Mr. Franklin was considered as a friend and zealous promoter of that great enterprise which engaged all their praises. When the society of economists was commencing, he became one of them, and was solemnly ordained a knight of the order by the laying on the hands of Dr. Quesnay, the father and founder of that sect … Throughout his life he courted and was courted by the printers, editors, and correspondents of reviews, magazines, journals, and pamphleteers and those little busy meddling scribblers that are always buzzing about the press in America, England, France, and Holland. These, together with some of the clerks in the Count of Vergennes’s office of interpreters (bureau des interprètes) filled all the gazettes of Europe with incessant praises of Monsieur Franklin. If a collection could be made of all the Gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the eighteenth century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon “le grand Franklin” would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived …
“Eripuit cœlo fulmen;
mox sceptra tyrannis. ”
By the first line, the rulers of Great Britain and their arbitrary oppressions of the Colonies were alone understood. By the second was intimated that Mr. Franklin was soon to destroy or at least to dethrone all kings and abolish all monarchical governments. This, it cannot be disguised, flattered at that time the ruling passion of all Europe …
Hence the popularity of all the insurrections against the ordinary authority of government during the last century … When, where, and in what manner all this will end, God only knows. To this cause Mr. Franklin owed much of his popularity. He was considered to be in his heart no friend to kings, nobles or prelates. He was thought a profound legislator, and a friend of democracy. He was thought to be the magician who had excited the ignorant Americans to resistance. His mysterious wan
d had separated the Colonies from Great Britain. He had framed and established all the American constitutions of government, especially all the best of them, i.e., the most democratical. His plans and his example were to abolish monarchy, aristocracy and hierarchy throughout the world. Such opinions as these were entertained by the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, M. Turgot, M. Condorcet, and a thousand other men of learning and eminence in France, England, Holland, and all the rest of Europe …
Such was the real character, and so much more formidable was the artificial character, of Dr. Franklin when he entered into partnership with the Count de Vergennes, the most powerful minister of State in Europe, to destroy the character and power of [John Adams,] a poor man almost without a name, unknown in the European world, born and educated in the American wilderness, out of which he had never set foot til 1778 …1677
Friday, February 1, 1793. Today, the War of the French Revolution between Britain and France begins. Britain will attempt, through another war, this time with France, to end the democratic revolution that began in America almost twenty years ago. The British monarch will fight to end democracy and restore monarchy in France and will lead Europe’s other monarchies against Europe’s only democracy and against America’s only ally.
Friday, February 15, 1793. Today, as France faces a war crisis that will, for a time, radicalize French politics, a nine-man drafting committee, chaired by the Marquis de Condorcet and composed of Condorcet, Tom Paine, Brissot de Warville, and other admirers of Benjamin Franklin, submits The French Constitution of 1793 to the entire French National Convention.1678
Saturday, March 2, 1793. Today, from New York, John Adams writes Abigail:
Smith says my Books [Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States] are upon the Table of every Member of the Committee for framing a Constitution of Government for France except Tom Paine …1679
This may be true, but the committee’s chairman, Condorcet, has agreed with Tom Paine to model the constitution of the French Republic after Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.1680 John Adams:
The political and literary world are much indebted for the invention of the new word IDEOLOGY … It was taught in the school of folly; but alas! Franklin, Turgot, Rochefoucauld, and Condorcet, under Tom Paine, were the great masters of that academy.1681
Monday, April 22, 1793. Today, despite America’s treaty of alliance with France (promising to defend the French West Indies, etc.), the onetime Fabius who is President of the United States issues a Proclamation of Neutrality (drafted by U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Jay) which declines to support France’s war for democracy against the British monarch. As I write in my history
[T]he disposition that dictated it and the latent principle upon which it was predicated were in direct opposition to the obligations of treaties and contrary to the common principles of liberality which entitle men to a return for good offices conferred in critical circumstances.1682
Thomas Jefferson, who opposes the proclamation, respects the French alliance, but will not endure the heat of political wrangling,1683 will soon offer his resignation as Washington’s Secretary of State.
Wednesday, April 24, 1793. Today, in the largest typeface the Philadelphia Aurora has used to date, Benjamin Franklin Bache publishes the French Constitution of 1793. His grandfather would be very pleased. Excerpts from the French Constitution of 1793, as translated in the Aurora:
Primary Assemblies.
In the primary assemblies, every man aged 21 years has a right to vote, provided that his name is inscribed on the civic table and that he shall have resided one year in France.
The primary assemblies shall be so distributed in each department [state] that none shall consist of less than 400 [representatives], or more than 900, members …
Administrative Bodies.
There shall be in each department an administrative council of 18 members … to correspond with the executive government …
The administrators are to be elected in the private assemblies, and the half renewed every two years.
Executive Council.
I. The executive council of the Republic shall be composed of seven general agents or ministers …
III. Each of the ministers shall alternatively preside in the executive council, and the president shall be changed every fifteen days. To this council it belongs to execute all the laws and all the decrees passed by the legislative body …
The ministers are to be chosen in the primary assemblies …
The ministers are to be chosen for two years. The half shall be renewed every year … The executive council are accountable to … the legislative body.
Legislative Body.
The [national] legislative body is to consist of one chamber, and to be renewed annually by elections …
The number of deputies … is to be newly fixed every ten years according to the increase or decrease in population …1684
Federalists may claim their Fabius as the “Father of His Country” and applaud the Duke of Braintree for America’s British-style constitution, but France honors America’s true “Papa”1685 and adopts his vision of democracy at the founding of the French Republic. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 is alive today in France.1686 So, too, is Franklinian democracy.
Armed cavalry on Philadelphia’s High-street during America’s Reign of Terror.1687
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
I do not “consider hereditary Monarchy or Aristocracy as Rebellion against Nature.” On the contrary, I esteem them both as Institutions of admirable wisdom and exemplary Virtue … and I am clear that America must resort to them as an asylum during discord, Seditions and Civil War … Our country is not ripe for it in many respects … but our ship must ultimately land on that shore or be cast away.
JOHN ADAMS,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797-18011688
[T]he energy of [William Duane’s Aurora], when our cause was laboring and all but lost under the overwhelming weight of its powerful adversaries, its unquestionable effect in the revolution [it] produced in the public mind … arrested the rapid march of our government towards monarchy …
THOMAS JEFFERSON,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1801-18091689
Dr. Franklin’s behavior had been so excessively complaisant to the French ministry … I had been frequently obliged to differ from him and sometimes to withstand him to his face; so that I knew he had conceived an irreconcilable hatred of me and that he had propagated and would continue to propagate prejudices, if nothing worse, against me in America from one end of it to the other. Look into Bache’s Aurora and Duane’s Aurora for twenty years and see whether my expectations have not been verified.
JOHN ADAMS,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1797-18011690
[B]y a singular fortune, your Great Grandfather [Benjamin Franklin] has been for more than thirty years of my life the constant idol of my affections as a politician—he has been my hero—and it is a felicity to me that I am so nearly connected with his posterity …
WILLIAM DUANE. EDITOR,
AURORA GENERAL ADVERTISER, 1798-1822 (IN LETTER TO BENJAMIN BACHE’S FIRSTBORN SON)1691
I have always regarded Duane, and still regard him, as a sincere friend of liberty, and as ready to make every sacrifice to its cause but that of his passions.
JAMES MADISON,
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1809-18171692
PROLOGUE TO BOOK THREE
We return to Philadelphia in 1798 … President Adams has abrogated Ben Franklin’s Franco-American Alliance of 1778. He has leagued America with her foremost enemy, the British monarch, against her only ally, the democratic Republic of France. He has made the French Revolution and Franklinian democracy our nation’s enemies. He has armed the country, taxed the people, dispatched the navy, and brought back Fabius to fight a war—though undeclared—with the French Republic. He has ended America’s freedoms of speech and of the press.
Adams pre
dicted, “America must resort to [hereditary monarchy or aristocracy] as an asylum during discord, Seditions and Civil War.” Could this be the time? Could John Adams see himself as an American monarch whose family occupies important government posts, whose son will succeed to the presidency, who will wage war with or without the people’s assent, who will use a mercenary standing army (officered by political loyalists) to suppress his opposition, who will support a religious establishment to honor his prayer and fast days, preach his political sermons, and define his enemies as infidels, who will imprison his critics or exile them without trial, who will control the press, devalue the Constitution, and define democracy as a threat to his rule?
Will America be fighting another revolution against another monarch? Virginia is reportedly arming against the federal government. Republican militias face government partisans on the streets of the capital. The message of the mob replaces the message of the Constitution. Would-be citizens leave America by the boatload. Immigrants to America are no longer welcome.
John Adams fears the ghost of Franklin at the Philadelphia Aurora He’s tried to silence that ghost with a gag bill. He’s indicted and arrested Young Lightening-Rodfor sedition. He’s encouraged and rewarded attacks upon that editor.
Ben Franklin is dead. Young Lightening-Rod is dead. Thomas Jefferson has fled. Is the Aurora dead? The rest of us must answer that question.
We resume this history in mid-October. I, William Duane, want to collect some old debts, revive the paper, and involve a wealthy Philadelphia Republican and Aurora contributor, Tench Coxe …
CHAPTER ELEVEN
American Aurora Page 70
