When he landed at Calais, the guard turned out and presented arms; a grand salute was fired; the officer in command embraced him and presented him with the national cockade; a good-looking citoyenne asked leave to pin it on his hat, expressing the hope of her compatriots that he would continue his exertions in favor of liberty. Enthusiastic acclamations followed,—a grand chorus of Vive Thomas Paine! The crowd escorted him to Dessein's hotel,[1] in the Rue de l'Égalité, formerly Rue du Roi, and shouted under his windows. At the proper time he was conducted to the Town Hall. The municipality were assembled to bestow the accolade fraternelle upon their representative. M. le Maire made a speech, which Audibert, who still had Paine in charge, translated. Paine laid his hand on his heart, bowed, and assured the municipality that his life should be devoted to their service. In the evening, the club held a meeting in the Salle des Minimes. The hall was jammed. Paine was seated beside the President, under a bust of Mirabeau, surmounted by the flags of France, England, and the United States. More addresses, compliments, protestations, and frantic cries of Vive Thomas Paine! The séance was adjourned to the church, to give those who could not obtain admission into the Club Hall an opportunity to look at their famous representative. The next evening Paine went to the theatre. The state-box had been prepared for him. The house rose and vivaed as he entered.
[Footnote 1: See Sterne's Sentimental Journey.]
When Calais had shouted itself hoarse, Paine travelled towards Paris. The towns he traversed on the road thither received him with similar honors. From the capital he addressed a letter of thanks to his fellow-citizens. Although he sat for Calais in the Convention, he had been chosen by three other departments. Priestley was a candidate for Paris, but was beaten by Marat, a doctor of another description. He was, however, duly elected in the department L'Orne, but never took his seat. Paine and Baron Clootz were the only foreigners in the Convention. Another stranger, of political celebrity out of doors, styled himself American as well as Paine,—Fournier l'Américain, a mulatto from the West Indies, whose complexion was not considered "incompatible with freedom" in France,—a violent and blood-thirsty fellow, who shot at Lafayette on the dix-sept Juillet, narrowly missing him,—led an attacking party against the Tuileries on the dix Août, and escaped the guillotine to be transported by Bonaparte.
In Paris, Paine was already a personage well known to all the leading men,—a great republican luminary, "foreign benefactor of the species," who had commenced the revolution in America, was making one in England, and was willing to help make one in France. His English works, translated by Lanthenas, a friend of Robespierre and co-editor with Brissot of the "Patriote Français," had earned for him the dignity of citoyen Français,—an honor which he shared with Mackintosh, Dr. Price, the Priestleys, father and son, and David Williams. He had furnished Lafayette with a good deal of his revolutionary rhetoric, had contributed to the Monthly Review of the Girondists and the "Chronique de Paris," and had written a series of articles in defence of representative government, which Condorcet had translated for him. Paine was a man of one idea in politics; a federal republic, on the American plan, was the only system of government he believed in, and the only one he wished to see established in France. Lafayette belonged to this school. So did Condorcet, Pétion, Buzot, and others of less note. Under Paine's direction they formed a republican club, which met at Condorcet's house. This federal theory cost them dear. In 1793, it was treason against the une et indivisible, and was punished accordingly.
After the flight to Varennes, Paine openly declared that the King was "a political superfluity." This was true enough. The people had lost all respect for the man and for the office. None so base as to call him King. He was only the pouvoir exécutif, or more commonly still, Monsieur Veto. Achille Duchâtelet, a young officer who had served in America, called upon Dumont to get him to translate a proclamation drawn up by Paine, urging the people to seize the opportunity and establish a republic. It was intended to be a "Common Sense" for France. Dumont refusing to have anything to do with it, some other translator was found. It appeared on the walls of the capital with Duchâtelet's name affixed. The placard was torn down by order of the Assembly and attracted little attention. The French were not quite ready for the republic, although gradually approaching it. They seemed to take a pleasure in playing awhile with royalty before exterminating it.
The Abbé Sièyes was a warm monarchist. He wrote in the "Moniteur," that he could prove, "on every hypothesis," that men were more free in a monarchy than in a republic. Paine gave notice in Brissot's paper, that he would demolish the Abbé utterly in fifty pages, and show the world that a constitutional monarchy was a nullity,—concluding with the usual flourish about "weeping for the miseries of humanity," "hell of despotism," etc., etc., the fashionable doxology of patriotic authors in that day. Sièyes announced his readiness to meet the great Paine in conflict. This passage of pens was interrupted by the publication of Part Second of the "Rights of Man." Before Paine returned to Paris, the mob had settled the question for the time, so far as the French nation were concerned.
Paine had also taken a leading part in some of the politico-theatrical entertainments then so frequent in the streets of Paris. At the festival of the Federation, in July, 1790, when Clootz led a "deputation" of the genre humain, consisting of an English editor and some colored persons in fancy dresses, Paine and Paul Jones headed the American branch of humanity and carried the stars and stripes. Not long after, Fame appears again marshalling a deputation of English and Americans, who waited upon the Jacobin Club to fraternize. Suitable preparations had been made by the club for this solemn occasion. The three national flags, united, were placed in the hall over the busts of Dr. Franklin and Dr. Price. Robespierre himself received the generous strangers; but most of the talking seems to have been done by a fervid citoyenne, who took la parole and kept it. "Let a cry of joy rush through all Europe and fly to America," said she. "But hark! Philadelphia and all its countries repeat, like us, Vive la Liberté!" To see a man of Paine's clear sense and simple tastes pleased by such flummery as this shows us how difficult it is not to be affected by the spirit of the generation we live with. How could he have supposed that the new heaven upon earth of his dreams would ever be constructed out of such pinchbeck materials?
It was now the year 1. of the Republic. The dix Août was over, the King a prisoner in the Temple. Lafayette, in his attempt to imitate his "master," Washington, had succeeded no better than the magician's apprentice, who knew how to raise the demon, but not how to manage him when he appeared. He had gone down before the revolution, and was now le traître Lafayette, a refugee in Austria. Dumouriez commanded on the north-eastern frontier in his place. France was still shuddering at the recollection of the prison-massacres of the Septembriseurs, and society, to use the phrase of a modern French revolutionist, was en procès de liquidation.
Paine got on very well, at first. The Convention was impressed with the necessity of looking up first principles, and Paine was emphatically the man of principles. A universal republic was the hope of the majority, with a convention sitting at the centre of the civilized world, watching untiringly over the rights of man and the peace of the human race. Meantime, they elected a committee to make a new constitution for France. Paine was, of course, selected. His colleagues were Sièyes, Condorcet, Gensonné, Vergniaud, Pétion, Brissot, Barère, and Danton. Of these nine, Paine and Sièyes alone survived the Reign of Terror. When, in due time, this constitution was ready to be submitted to the Convention, no one could be found to listen to the reading of the report. The revolution had outstripped the committee. Their labors proved as useless as the Treatise on Education composed by Mr. Shandy for the use of his son Tristram;—when it was finished, the child had outgrown every chapter.
Thenceforward, we catch only occasional glimpses of Paine. In the days of his glory, he lived in the fashionable Rue de Richelieu, holding levees twice a week, to receive a public eager to gaze upon so great a man. His name appears at the fête civique held by English and Irish republicans at White's Hotel. There he sat beside Santerre, the famous brewer, and proposed, as a sentiment, "The approaching National Convention of Great Britain and Ireland." At this dinner, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, then an officer in the British service, gave, "May the 'Ça ira,' the 'Carmagnole,' and the 'Marseillaise' be the music of every army, and soldier and citizen join in the chorus,"—a toast which cost him his commission, perhaps his life. We read, too, that Paine was struck in a café by some loyal, hot-headed English captain, who took that means of showing his dislike for the author of the "Rights of Man." The police sternly seized the foolish son of Albion. A blow inflicted upon the sacred person of a member of the Convention was clearly sacrilege, punishable, perhaps, with death. But Paine interfered, procured passports, and sent the penitent soldier safely out of the country.