Citizen Tom Paine

by Howard Fast

  Danton said to him, “The majority of the people are with us, with the Jacobins—I tell you that, Paine; the left has the majority.”

  “I have no quarrel with the majority,” Paine answered him. “I live for the majority of the world—and when France is free, that will be another nation for the brotherhood.”

  As he sat in the Convention, he told himself, “I must remember that Freedom is on trial.” It was good, at first, to see the galleries filled with the people of Paris; he hungered to talk, dreamed of soon speaking French well enough to speak directly to them, to the people.

  Yet when the first decision came, he shied away from the majority. They were with Danton, who proposed complete reform of France’s medieval, torturous judicial system, and Paine could see in that only unending complications. “Constitutional reform, not judicial reform,” he kept harping. “A free legislature can make just laws—”

  Danton smiled and agreed, but nevertheless the motion was pushed through under the cheering of the galleries. Paine could not see that it mattered too much—complications, of course, but the thing was done—and the next day he was horrified when Buzot, a Girondin deputy, trembling with passion and fear, demanded an armed guard against the citizens of Paris—“The mob,” as he called it. Thus Paine was inaugurated into the strange, complicated, terribly ominous situation of revolutionary France, so bright and hopeful in ways, so deadly and nightmarish in others. He argued with his friends:

  “But the people, they’re the basis of everything. Law and order, reason, of course, I want that—who wants it more than I do? But you must depend on the people, they’re everything, they’re the ones who take the guns in their hands and fight, they’re the ones who work and produce. If you don’t trust the people—”

  “Well enough for you,” they cut him short. “You know the American farmer, but this scum of Paris!”

  “Scum of Paris,” he thought. “That’s all it is to them.”

  For a moment, he considered being on his own; after all, he was Paine—he was the voice of revolution and he called no man his leader, and what did language matter? A truth was a truth, and he knew—or forced himself to know—in his own soul that this Parisian “scum” were no different than the small, frightened people he had worked with and fought for elsewhere in the world. If he appealed to them, they would listen. Wasn’t he coming to know the true heart and core of revolution?—the strength was in the people, the fury in them; but for the direction of it, there must be a plan, an order, and a final goal. That was what all the impatient rebellions of small people had lacked until now, and to formulate such a goal was his purpose.

  Thus he wrote and published an Address to the People of France. France, he said, was not fighting for France alone, but for the coming Republic of the World, for mankind. France must be unified; France must be bold, yet calm and courageous. The world waits for France.…

  Did the people hear him? When, he sat in the Convention again, he realized that even if they did, the deputies were completely immersed in their own personal struggles. Who was Paine? He could not even talk French. He sat helpless while the shrill arguments raged about his ears, the Girondins calling for a government in which all France participated, the Mountain reaffirming the strength and stability of the Parisian proletariat, the hot-headed deputies coming to blows again and again, the galleries screaming, hissing, booing, spitting, drowning out the voices of those they disliked, the whole impression being one of disorder, for all the vigor and strength. When someone was good enough to sit by him and translate, and when Paine saw a place where he might say something that mattered, throw a little oil on the waters and point them back to the fact that the freedom of France was at stake, and when he rose, he was usually ignored—or, if noticed, found the language a hopeless barrier. If he prepared something and had it rendered into French, the argument and debate had passed so far on that what he said was meaningless.

  Again and again, his instincts told him where he belonged, with the Jacobins, for all their violence and extremism; but he could not bear the way Danton and St. Just and Robespierre smiled at his ordered theories of revolution, his systemized description of step-by-step procedure, always hearking back to the struggle in America. They implied that Paine was a figurehead, an ideal, but not a person to listen to, to trust. Perhaps he was getting old.

  He asked himself, “Am I afraid?”

  He dreamed of having his old American comrades around him once more, and then he returned to Madame Roland’s salon, where at least they respected him; even if they, in their bright talk of a middle-class government of all France, foreshadowed their own doom.

  Hope came again when the Convention named him to the committee of nine who were to frame a new constitution for the Republic of France. Along with him, there were Condorcet, Danton, Sieyès, Barère, Vergniaud, Petion, Brissot, and Gensonné. But except for Sieyès and Danton, they were rightists, Girondins. Danton could accept a place on the committee and remain with the left; but when Paine accepted, he cast his lot once and for all with the Girondins.

  For the first time, he said to himself, “I don’t know.”

  But there were times when his doubts left him. Paris was not a place in which to doubt constantly; for Paine, it was a city of vigor, strength, and beauty; he did not see only the dirt of the people, the patched clothes, the way they hissed and booed in the galleries, their lack of manners and breeding; he knew that you did not put away a thousand years overnight. He saw their strength, their lust after a life just revealed to them, and when the republican armies swept the invaders back to the frontiers, he let himself be carried away by the general wave of rejoicing. The British expatriates, the rebels, radicals, poets and philosophers who had been driven into France by the Tory government, planned a great party at White’s Hotel, their headquarters. Paine was one of the guests of honor, and it was a good feeling to go there and mingle with old friends who spoke his own tongue, Frost, Edward Fitzgerald, Carry Clewellen, the Welshman, Allison—

  “By God, it’s Common Sense!” they roared as he entered,

  He had let himself go shabby, but out of his eighteen francs a day, he had saved enough for a new coat; no wigs in France now, his own hair drawn back and tied, and the old sparkle in his twisted eyes as Fitzgerald asked him, “Thomas, will we be crossing the Channel the other way soon?”

  “Who can tell?”

  Fitzgerald had had something to drink, and his brogue was broader than ever, his light blue eyes dancing as he enumerated, “America, England, France—by God and little Jesus, Thomas, tell me you will be in Ireland next! Her green hills run with blood—I tell you, Thomas, land there and when you step off the ship a hundred thousand good men will be waiting to march with you!”

  The military band blared and they stood to the Marseillaise bareheaded, and when they picked up Yankee Doodle, as tribute to Paine, he threw back his big head and roared:

  “Father and I went down to camp, along with Captain Goodin,

  And there we saw the men and boys as thick as hasty puddin’!”

  The punch was good, the rum better, the French brandy hot as fire in his throat. Paine got drunk, Fitzgerald got drunk, Frost too, and when Petion came to join them, they fell on his neck and kissed both his cheeks until he drew himself up to his five feet four inches and exclaimed:

  “Gentlemen, for the dignity of the Republic!”

  They drank a toast to the Republic, of France, of America—of the whole world, Paine perched on a chair and crying:

  “Listen to me, my friends, my good comrades, I am drunk—drunk but inspired. I said once, not so long ago, give me seven years and we will usher in the brotherhood of man! My friends, I say five years and the glorious armies of France together with the glorious armies of the United States of America will carry the flag of freedom to every nation and every people on the face of this earth! Already we have seen the Prussian dogs flee like the swine they are; we see fat, half-witted George of England cowering on his
throne, your own Louis abdicating to the people! Comrades, who shall say what miracles cannot be? Join me, I drink a toast to my good friend, my old comrade, that best of men and truest of friends, George Washington of Virginia!”

  They joined him, but Paine was already so drunk that half the brandy ran down his chin. As the band again picked up Yankee Doodle, he strutted across the room, swaying from side to side—yet strangely enough not ridiculous, not provoking laughter even from those drunk, but rather pitiful admiration for a man at once so exalted and so forlorn.

  He was afraid of himself, and he said to himself, “Tom Paine who never feared man or beast on God’s green earth is afraid.”

  He was afraid because his body was becoming old and unwilling and tired, because his own dream of world brotherhood was becoming more precious and more real than actuality. Forcing himself to walk through the narrow, cobbled Paris streets, to go into the shops and into the workrooms, he could nevertheless not establish a kinship with the citizenry. He would say to them, “Thomas Paine,” and they would smile delightedly, pour wine, cut sausage, and set out bread for him. A great gesture, because they were so close to starvation, and he had to eat a little, while they rattled their Parisian French at him, so quickly that he caught no more than a word out of ten.

  They were good people, simple people, swelled with their own power because the power of little people was a new thing in the world, but a good, strong, sound people—and seeing that, recognizing it without reservation, he still could not put his trust in them—as once he had put his whole trust, life, and dreams into the hands of the ragged continental militiamen. The difference, the change was in himself; he feared the anarchy of the people, and preferred the order of the middle class; he knew that, and he could do nothing about it. He wanted order; he had the sense of oldness that hurries time; he wanted a quick, orderly fabric of republicanism to which one country after another might be added.

  He had never been a man troubled by God or greatly given to prayer; his approach to religion was emotional, a fervent belief in an undefined deity, so composed of love for man and for all things living that he had never troubled himself with the nature of that deity. His business was with this world, and moving in a circle of atheists and agnostics, here as well as in America, he could afford to smile when hot words were spilled on the subject of religion; his belief was not subject to ritual, nor was it subject to argument.

  But now he prayed, excusing himself with the knowledge that he was growing old. Death loomed up, and he didn’t want to die. He had only begun, and it was harder, a thousand times harder than he had ever thought it could be.

  Canais, the young disciple of Marat, came to Paine’s lodgings and said, in very good English:

  “Would it be presumptuous for me to talk about things that are none of my business, Mr. Paine?”

  Paine liked the boy; he poured some brandy and nodded for him to go ahead.

  “I’ve read every line you’ve written,” Canais said.

  “Yes—”

  “And I would die tomorrow, content, if I could have written or done even a little part of what you did.”

  Paine fumbled his thanks; the boy’s eyes were fixed full and clearly on him.

  “So you see that I respect you, even as I love America—would you say that we are ushering in the citizen’s century, Mr. Paine? I think so; I think that France can never repay her debt to America, and I hope that there will be a debt the other way. And I also say, Mr. Paine, that the world will never be able to repay its debt to Thomas Paine.”

  “And that is all?” Paine smiled.

  “Not all. What happens to a man—?” The boy hesitated, disturbed by the thoughts that were crowding his mind. “What has happened to Tom Paine—if I anger you, stop me, throw me out and tell me that this is no business of mine.”

  “Go ahead,” Paine said, miserably conscious of youth, vibrant, hot youth gone from himself forever, a boy telling Tom Paine what Tom Paine knew so well, yet feared to admit to himself.

  “What has happened to you? In Philadelphia, you were with the people, in America—and who but the people made up your militia, who but the people starved and died at Valley Forge, ripped a dream of empire to pieces at Bunker Hill and taught little men how to fight on the green fields between Concord and Lexington? Have you forgotten? Were there bankers behind the stone walls at Concord? Did the rich merchants die at Monmouth Courthouse? Did your fine manufacturers and ship owners march up from Philadelphia to save Washington after he crossed the Delaware, or were they plain people, peasants and workers and clerks and small shopkeepers?”

  “I remember,” Paine said harshly. “Get on with what you have to say.”

  “Then are we so different? Is it that we’re French? Is it because your militia drove back the German swine half-naked, and ours drove them back wearing blue smocks and wooden sabots, that they are different? Is your Boston massacre to be admired and our storming of the Bastille to be despised? For the sake of everything, Mr. Paine—come with us, come to the people and they will welcome you with open arms, make the world or else there will be no world to make for another hundred years!”

  His fists clenched, his broad, powerful body stooped over, Paine stared at the boy moodily.

  “It’s no use, is it?” the boy said after a moment. “You are committed to your friends, the Girondins, to the bankers and merchants and all the apostles of the half-way, the liberalism that fears the people.”

  “I am past an age where I can enjoy anarchy,” Paine told him. “We are fighting an organized enemy—and the people are not an organization; they’re a mob. And a mob does not make democracy; a mob looks for someone to lead it, and if someone is clever enough, it can be led into the devil’s mouth.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “That’s all,” Paine nodded.

  Well, it was done, and he knew where he stood. He was getting old; he would go on fighting; somehow, things did not matter any more—and he almost regretted that he had not remained in England, as Jordan had. Jordan had been martyred, tried, punished, jailed while the man whose work he published ran away.

  Paine was a sadder, older man when he stood in the Convention again. The question up before the house Was whether the king should go to the guillotine, or be imprisoned until the end of the war—and then banished from France forever.

  For Paine, the situation was complex and many-sided; and he could not agree with the simple reasoning of the Paris masses—that the king was a traitor, and therefore the king must die. Even if he could grant that the king was a traitor—and kings in specific and aristocracy in general had no greater or more bitter enemy these past eighteen years than Tom Paine—even if he could grant the accusation, he did not see that death must be the penalty. He knew that something inside of him had hardened and slowed, that the old fire was gone; he who would have seen every Tory hanged by the neck now grasped for the straw of reason. The king had not betrayed what he lived by. Once he had said, “We, Louis, are France,” and that statement he hadn’t betrayed.

  Marat said, “He must be cut out like a foul growth!”

  And Paine asked for justice, imprisonment now, a trial afterwards. He pointed out that George Washington, who was reverenced so deeply in America, would not forget the debt the colonies owed to France’s king.

  “And without America,” Paine said wearily, “how far can we go? If men look for a brotherhood, will they be satisfied with blood?”

  Thirty-six hours the question was debated in the hall of the Convention. Not in all the history of France had there been such high, tense, terrible drama as this, for not merely the king’s life hinged on the final vote, but all the future course of the revolution. From the first it was apparent that the Girondins could not retreat, that they would have to fight, upon this issue, for control of the revolution. Christiani, a somewhat obscure member of the party, a mild man, gentle as a woman, said ruefully to Paine:

  “It is hard to die for something one
hardly believes in—but it is harder to throw away the last scruple. A wretch like Louis, who is better off dead, holds the destiny of man about his fat neck; and it makes one want to laugh at this life.”

  “You are not on trial,” Paine protested.

  “Ah, but we are—all of us.”

  And a letter to Paine, delivered in the Convention hall, unsigned, said:

  “Citizen, for all that you once held dear, go with the people of France.”

  Like a lonely, lost man, he listened to the rocking currents of the debate. One does not understand; one sits, elbows on knees, hands cradling chin; one is alone and all that one has are memories. To Irene Roberdeau one says, Where freedom is not, there is my country. Arm in arm, one walks with Peale and Matlack—good comrades; then there was youth and fire and hope, and never the intrusion of doubt. One remembers and dreams, and then, waking out of the dream one comes back to the hall of the Convention in revolutionary Paris.

  And hearing his name in all the melodious, frantically quick chattering of a foreign tongue, he seized old Bancal who was sitting beside him and asked:

  “What are they saying?”

  Duval had just spoken. Bancal translated, “That Thomas Paine is a man beyond suspicion will not be doubted. By the example of this man, one of the people, a long and a deadly enemy of kings and aristocracy, a defender of republican liberty—by his example, I vote for imprisonment during the war and exile after the peace.”