Citizen Tom Paine (29 page)

Paine went as quickly as he could. He had just heard of the arrest of the leaders of four of the cells; he was ready for anything, but he could not smile when the tall printer showed him an order commanding him, Jordan, to appear at the Court of King's Bench. The charge was treason to the Crown, as of the publication of a criminal book called
Rights of Man
.

“I'll answer it,” Paine said.

“You will not,” Jordan told him firmly. “If they hang you, that's the end of everything; if they hang me, it's much ado about nothing—you see, Paine, you've been here and there and everywhere, knocking about, and as you say, the world is your village. But I'm an Englishman, that's all, pure and simple, and I have a crazy liking for this little island and the people on it. I see them going like horses chained to carts, and I want to cut the traces. That's why I published your book—and that's why I am going to die for it, plain and simple, if I have to. You're the revolution, I'm a printer; that's all, Paine.”

Paine pleaded, but he had met a man more stubborn than himself. He went to his Whig liberal friends to plead, but the few doors not locked to him opened to reveal bland, ironical faces that told him:

“But really, Paine, you never imagined we'd countenance revolution. Really, we are British, you know—” And advice, “Get out of England before you're hanged.”

Romney sent him a message, “They're going to hang you, Paine, sure as God.”

Blake wrote him, “Paine, for god's sake, flee.”

He issued a manifesto to the cells that remained, and only a dead silence greeted him. “This is the time to act,” he wrote, and there was only a dead silence.

The next move of the government was a royal proclamation which forbade all unauthorized meetings and all seditious writings. Anyone knowing of such and not reporting them would be open to prosecution.

But the book was selling, madly, wildly, by the thousands. In the small time left, Jordan kept the presses going day and night; the written word, once launched, could not be reclaimed, not by all the power of the crown. And Paine wrote constantly, letters, proclamations, appeals—if the cells had failed him, he would go to the people. And the people read his appeals, whispered among themselves, and did nothing. They were not the armed farmers of Massachusetts, but poor, frightened peasants and shopkeepers.

Thus it was over. Blake, in an hour of pleading, convinced him that final orders had gone through; Frost came with news that a warrant had been issued. And a messenger from France pleaded:

“See this, Paine. France needs you. In England everything is done, and when you are dead, the hopes of the English people will be dead, too dead to ever be raised, I tell you, Paine. In France, it is beginning, and when the name of the Republic of France sounds through Europe, the people of England will find their strength. But don't stay here to be hanged.”

“Running away,” he told himself. “When I could stay and die. But I'm an old man. In seventy-six, I was young, and there were other young men with guns in their hands—and I could talk to them. And where are they now?”

And he told himself, “I'll come back!” He swore to himself, “I'll come back—only seven years at the most, and there'll be brotherhood among men who have never known anything but hate and fear. The dead never come back, but I'll return.…”

All that he turned over and over in his mind, standing on the Channel boat and watching the white cliffs of Dover fade, on a fall morning in September, 1792.

12

THE REPUBLIC OF FRANCE

I
T WAS
always the beginning. The cold, fresh wind blowing across the Channel was a tonic, the blue sky, the gulls, the sway of deck under his feet, and the breathless exhilaration that comes to someone who has narrowly escaped death. His mood changed and the black despair lifted, and his failure in England took its place in the natural order of things; for thousands of years of recorded history, it had been the other way, and a brotherhood of man does not come in hours nor in days. He would return to England with a United States of Europe at his back, and then the people would rise triumphantly at his call. How long? Five years, ten years; he was only fifty-five. Always until now, it had been training, training, and more training; he was Paine, the champion of man.

He said to Frost, “Do I look old?”

“You never looked better,” Frost answered, somewhat surprised, now that he had thought of it.

“Tired?”

“Hardly—”

“What are you afraid of, Frost?”

“A man doesn't miss being hanged by the neck by inches, and smile at it.”

“Don't be a fool! Your life is nothing, just a little makeshift that you play with for a while, a machine that you put to use. And if something cracks it, then it's cracked, that's all.”

“I'm sorry I can't see things that way,” Frost said bitterly. “That was my home,” nodding over his shoulder at England. “Now it's gone, now I don't come back.”

Taking the young man by the shoulder, Paine waved an arm at Europe and said, “That's bigger—that's all the world. I have nothing, not a shilling from my book”—what there was, he had left with Jordan—“not a penny in my pockets, just a rag in my valise and the clothes on my back. And I'm fifty-five and I'm not afraid.”

As they made the coast of France, one of those quick, dark Channel storms blew up, and it was raining when they docked. But notwithstanding the weather, almost the whole of Calais turned out to welcome Paine, a file of soldiers, fife and drum squealing first the
Marseillaise
and then
Yankee Doodle
, apparently under the impression that it was the revolutionary anthem of America. The citizens cheered and whistled and waved their arms at the astounded Paine, who had expected nothing like this.

“Vive Paine!”

The soldiers marched back and forth and back and forth, and Captain Dumont, half Paine's size, embraced him time after time. Then there was the mayor to give his embrace, and then four councilmen, then two lieutenants of the national guard. They informed Paine, first in French and then in very bad English, that he was deputy to the National Assembly—and from Calais, the honor, to them, of course, the overwhelming honor.

“I am most honored,” Paine murmured in English. French, which he could hardly understand, flew about his ears. He could not speak now, and his eyes were wet; they wept with him, wept and cheered and wept again.

“If you accept,” they said. “Naturally, only if you accept. The pay, eighteen francs a day, it is nothing, for you less than nothing. But to have Calais represented by Paine—”

He nodded, and they bore him away to a banquet they had prepared.

There was dead quiet at first as Paine walked in to the Assembly to take his seat. All eyes turned on him as news of who he was sped about, there was a soft murmur, hats were removed and heads bent in a completely French gesture of honor, even of worship, and then soaring acclaim as the voices rose. This was Paine and this was Paris and this was the revolution—and he had come home.

He sat down and wept, and all over the hall they wept with him. He arose, and they drowned his voice in another blast of sound—and then all order vanished as they rushed to embrace him.

That was one thing; he was Paine, the stepchild of revolution; not of the parlor variety, but a man who had given his propaganda to revolutionary soldiers at first hand, marched with them, fought with them, engineered a workers' revolt in Philadelphia, and guarded like a madman those liberties America fought for. That was one thing; Paine, who would make the world over, was another.

Paine who would make a world over could not speak French—yes, a few words, ask for a cup of coffee, ask for a piece of bread, a night's lodging, but no French at all to handle swift political talk, the rushing, frenzied French of Paris; and is the language of freedom universal?

In the days that followed he was to be reminded again and again of what Lafayette had said to him, not so long ago:

“Friend Paine, I think that you and I both were born too soon—and that we will have to pay for it.”

But a man is not born too soon, Paine had smiled. The world waits for men and dreamers, so how can a man be born too soon?

Yet he thought often of what Lafayette had said. Paine's handbook of revolution was made in America, among long, drawling farmers who were slow to speech, slow to action, but not turned once they were on their way. You declared a liberty and you fought for it. Men died and men suffered, but the world became a better world—or so you hoped. Your comrades were Washington and Jefferson, and Peale and Anthony Wayne and Nathanael Greene and Timothy Mat-lack, and even the workers rising in a city were not a mob. And then you conceived an idea, a dream of a whole world a republic, and you tried to make a revolution in England—and you fled for your life but were welcomed in France, where a revolution was being made. It was still the beginning.

But was it? The Legislative Assembly dissolved, he sat in the National Convention. His friends were called the Girondins, liberals headed by Condorcet and Madame Roland; he was with them, naturally, they were his old friends, they had listened to his ideas, his orderly presentation of the revolution in America. Yet their stock was falling lower and lower as the Jacobins, called the party of the Mountain, gained a firmer hold on the poor of Paris, crying for their dictatorship of the city over the provinces. For Paine, it was confusion where there should have been order—ominous confusion. There had to be a representative Congress, regardless of the impotence or corruption of that Congress. He didn't understand the endless ramifications; freedom was freedom, and once you had gained power, it was a simple thing to arrive at. And here was France being invaded by foreign armies, being threatened by traitors within and traitors without, being threatened by starvation, fighting herself, party of the Plain, the Mountain, Girondins, the left and the right and the center. And why? why? he kept asking. They all had only one enemy—power, privilege, aristocracy. That must be crushed, and there must be only a party of freedom.

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.