Six primary documents from the thirty-three years after the Revolution ended. The seditious libel conviction. The Luxembourg Prison. The letter that burned Washington's friendship. The return to America. The six mourners.
In 1790, Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, a conservative critique of the French Revolution that defended hereditary monarchy and the established order. Paine answered it directly. Rights of Man appeared on March 13, 1791, in London. It defended the French Revolution, argued that governments derive their authority from the people, and went considerably further than Burke's critics had gone before: it proposed a welfare state, progressive taxation, and old-age pensions funded by the government.
It sold nearly a million copies. The British government moved against it immediately.
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.
It is not among the least of the evils of the present existing governments in all parts of Europe that man, considered as man, is thrown back to a vast distance from his Maker, and the artificial chasm filled up by a succession of barriers, or sort of turnpike gates, through which he has to pass. I will quote Mr. Burke's catalogue of barriers that he has set up between man and his Maker. Putting himself in the character of a herald, he says: We fear God — we look with awe to kings — with affection to parliaments — with duty to magistrates — with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Mr. Burke has forgotten to put in “chivalry.”
The British government indicted Paine for seditious libel in May 1792, for writing and publishing Part II of Rights of Man. A writ for his arrest was issued. In September 1792, Paine fled to France, he had been elected to the French National Convention as a representative from Pas-de-Calais, despite being a foreigner who could not speak French. His speeches had to be translated and read for him on the floor.
On December 18, 1792, Paine was tried in absentia in London. He was found guilty before his defense attorney had finished speaking. He was convicted of seditious libel, declared an outlaw in Britain, and Rights of Man was ordered permanently suppressed. He never returned to England.
Paine's response to the indictment, written before he fled, was published and circulated. In it he stated his defense directly:
If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy, and every species of hereditary government — to lessen the oppression of taxes — to propose plans for the education of helpless infancy, and the comfortable support of the aged and distressed — to endeavour to conciliate nations to each other — to extirpate the horrid practice of war — to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce — and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank — if these things be libellous, let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb.
In France, Paine had aligned himself with the Girondist faction, the comparatively moderate republicans. When the Jacobins under Robespierre took power, the Girondists were purged. Paine had also voted against the execution of King Louis XVI, arguing that execution would alienate American sympathy and that exile was more just. Anyone who had voted against the execution was now an enemy.
On December 28, 1793, at the height of the Reign of Terror, Paine was arrested and imprisoned in the Luxembourg Prison in Paris. He was seriously ill. He was in prison for more than ten months, awaiting execution. The method of marking cells for the next day's executions involved chalking a mark on the door. The mark on Paine's cell door was placed on the inside when the door was open, when the door was closed for the night, the mark faced into the cell and was not visible from the corridor. His cell was passed over. The fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794 ended the Terror. Paine was released on November 4, 1794.
He wrote about the imprisonment afterward. The account is in his collected works.
I was one of the nine members that composed the first Committee of Constitution. Six of them have been destroyed. Sieyes and myself escaped, and, as far as my knowledge extends, we are the only two survivors of that Committee... I was imprisoned in the Luxembourg eleven months... The illness I suffered in that dungeon, the consequences of which still continue, was occasioned by the damp and unwholesome air of a cell, I was put into at night as a dark dungeon, which had been used as a store room for some time before.
Paine handed the manuscript of Part I of The Age of Reason to a friend the night before his arrest, fearing it would be confiscated. It was published in 1794. It argued for deism, a rational belief in God based on reason and nature, without revealed religion or scripture, and against the Bible as divine revelation. In Europe, where Enlightenment freethinking was common, it was unremarkable. In America, where evangelical Christianity was strong, it was scandalous.
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest I should be suspected of believing in more than I profess, I will, before I close, give my reasons for not believing in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
While Paine was imprisoned in Luxembourg awaiting execution, he believed, with some justification, that Washington's administration had done nothing to secure his release. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister to France, disliked Paine personally and took no action. Washington was aware of the situation. Paine wrote to Washington from prison; the letters appear to have received no response.
After his release, Paine published an open letter to Washington in 1796, one of the most bitter documents in founding-era history. In it he accused Washington of ingratitude, political treachery, and deliberate abandonment. The friendship was over. The letter is in the collected works.
As to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide, whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
Thomas Jefferson invited Paine to return to America in 1802. Paine accepted and arrived in Baltimore in October of that year. The reception was hostile. The Age of Reason had preceded him. Newspapers attacked him. Old friends kept their distance. He settled in New York and New Rochelle, where he had been granted a farm by the state of New York in recognition of his revolutionary service. He spent his final years in increasing poverty, illness, and isolation. He applied to vote in New Rochelle and was refused on the grounds that he was not an American citizen, because a French decree during his time in the National Convention had declared him a French citizen.
Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809, at a house on Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York. He was seventy-two years old. Six people attended his funeral. He was buried at New Rochelle. In 1819, the English radical journalist William Cobbett dug up his bones and brought them to England, intending to build a monument. The monument was never built. The bones were lost.
Where liberty is, there is my country.
The primary record of Paine's final years is in his letters, the contemporary New York press, and the accounts of the few people who visited him. The New York Historical Society holds materials from this period. His complete works are at Project Gutenberg.