Citizen Tom Paine (33 page)

“It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and, from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intend it to be the last offering I shall make to my fellow citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.

“The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of the priesthood and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.

“As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.

“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 it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe and my reasons for not believing them.

“I do not believe 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.

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

That way, there was a beginning; he put down what he believed, what he did not believe, and then he labored, day after day, in the old, deserted farmhouse. He was not fashioning a creed; men had done that already, as much by acts as by words. Christ on a cross had fashioned it and so had a rustic boy dying on a village green in New England. So had a thousand and a hundred thousand others. It remained only for him to formulate it and put it in place as the last work in his encyclopedia of revolution.

During those quiet days when he worked on
The Age of Reason
, he did not go into old Paris very often. Once to seek for a Bible written in English; Bibles there were in plenty, but all in French, and for the life of him he could not lay hands on a King James version. That made it harder for him, having to work on out of his memory, seeking back to all the times in his childhood when he had read certain passages over and over, quoting as he worked, sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly. The Bible was necessary, for in writing down a faith that could be accepted by a reasonable man, a gentle man, a good man, he had to tear apart, boldly and ruthlessly, the whole fabric of superstition that had been woven through the ages.

Often he was tempted to send to England for the work he needed, but the passage of even a piece of mail was long and uncertain, and Paine was driven by a deadly sense of urgency. No one, living in or about Paris as the year of 1793 drew to a close, could forget the pall of The Terror. It had lost meaning and reason, and struck about as wildly as a maddened beast. First it had been the
right
, but now Jacobins of the extreme left joined the procession to the guillotine. What Paine had feared most was coming about, the dictatorship of violence gone amuck.

On one of his trips into Paris, Paine looked up an old acquaintance of his, Joel Barlow, whom he had helped once when Barlow was in legal difficulties with a French court.

“Whatever happens,” Paine said, “I don't care too much, but I've been working on a manuscript that will soon be finished and that means a great deal to me. If they come for me, can I entrust the manuscript to you?”

“Gladly,” Barlow nodded, and then begged Paine to leave for America.

“In good time,” Paine nodded. “When my work in France is over.”

He had finished his book; his credo was down on paper, and he felt a complete and wonderful sense of relief, the feeling of a man washed clean and rested. He had struck a blow at atheism, and he had—or so he believed—given the people of France and of the world a rational creed to sustain them through the years of revolution that he saw ahead. He had proclaimed God in all that man saw, in the perfect symmetry of a leaf, in a rosy sunset, in a million stars cast like a hood in the night, in the earth, in the sea, in all creation. He told them not to look for cheap, tawdry miracles, when they themselves and the world they lived in were the greatest of all miracles.

He told them to believe in God because they and the world they inhabited were the strongest proof of God. God's work was creation; His bible and proof were creation. It was a blazing, living, signed document, and it required neither superstitions nor horror tales to support it. It was Tom Paine to France, saying, “If you choose atheism now, I, at least, have done my part.”

On one of his short trips to Paris, he had gone to the Convention hall and told the doorkeeper in very bad French, “Deputy Thomas Paine, representing Calais,” and the doorkeeper stared as if he had seen a ghost. And others stared; all over the hall brows raised and necks craned as they turned to look at him.

There was only one of the old radical group of foreign expatriates left in the hall, Anacharsis Clootz, the Prussian, one of the extreme left, a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a socialist before there was socialism, a little mad, a great deal brilliant, unafraid, vehemently outspoken, much like Paine and very much unlike him. Until now, they had worked together occasionally, but not easily; Paine was a republican, an advocate of democracy; Clootz was the advocate of a social conception, the theory of which hardly existed. He waved at Paine now, and afterwards, leaving the hall, got close to him and called:

“Hello there, my old friend, where have you been?”

“Writing.”

“They all write before they go to the Madam Guillotine. And what nonsense this time?”

“Gods and men.”

Clootz was a militant atheist; he held his stomach now, roaring with laughter and calling after Paine, “We will discuss that, no?”

They were to discuss it soon enough.

His time had about run out; he had desired a reprieve, not out of any great desire to go on living a life that for all practical purposes was over, but because, as so often before, he had something which he felt he must put down on paper. But now that it was done, he went to meet his fate almost eagerly. They would not have to seek him; he was no recluse, and he had never fled from a judgment. Already, he had been too long alone in the big farmhouse; that was not for Paine; for Paine was the feel of his fellow men, their nearness, their voices and their smiles and their good intimacies. So he packed together the few things he had, the finished manuscript, some other papers, a book or two and some shirts and underclothes—not a great deal, but he had never been one for worldly possessions. If a man makes the world his castle, he does not seek to furnish it.

He returned to Paris and White's Hotel, to raised brows and breath softly drawn in. “Still here, Paine?”

“Still here.”

And such whispered comments as, “Well, there's no fool like an old fool.”

And behind his back, slick, a finger across a throat—“If he wants to, that's his own affair.”

He ordered a brandy, he proposed a toast, “To the Republic of France, forever, gentlemen!” And no one knew whether to laugh or to deride.

On Christmas Day, a motion was put forward in the hall to exclude all foreigners from seats in the Convention. There were only two foreigners left, Paine and Clootz, and it was at them that the move was directed. Paine had seen this coming; he knew it when he returned to the city, when he made the toast to the Republic, when he finally went to bed to sleep what might be his last night as a free man. He was not afraid; he wanted it to come quickly; no longer a deputy of France, he wanted the surge of the revolution to overtake him, to devour him if it must.

And in the early dawn, it came.

Thus—there were two agents of the Committee of General Security pounding on the door of his room and unrolling their imposing warrant when he came in his nightshirt to let them in.

“For Citizen Paine! And you, monsieur, are Citizen Paine?”

“I am,” he smiled. “Come in, gentlemen.”

The two agents were followed by one corporal and four privates. The corporal took his place at the foot of Paine's bed, after saluting, the privates on either side.

“Permit me to dress,” Paine said. The corporal graciously nodded and the two agents set about searching the room. Paine poured them each a brandy, and the privates stared intently at nothing at all. “Excellent brandy,” the agents admitted, and went on with their searching.

When he was dressed, Paine asked, “I would like to know—the charge—”

“Monsieur Merson,” one of the agents introduced himself, a small tribute to the brandy, and read from the warrant, “Conspiring against the Republic.”

“Conspiring against the Republic,” Paine repeated, softly and tiredly. “Citizen Paine is under arrest for conspiracy. He sits alone in an empty farmhouse and broods about God, and thereby the Republic is endangered. I wonder whether the shortest thing in the world is not the memory of men.” He had spoken in English; when the agents raised their brows, he shook his head. “Nothing, nothing—I have some papers at the Britain House, may we go there and get them?” pouring another brandy for each.

“Not entirely in order,” Merson shrugged. “But when one arrests a citizen one admires, so reluctantly, one may make an exception.”

At the Britain House, Barlow was waiting, and Paine gave him the manuscript of
The Age of Reason
.

“I wish to God you had left France,” Barlow said.

“And I may, sooner than I expected,” Paine answered ruefully. “Barlow, this thing I wrote may be trash, but to me it's very dear—in the loose talk of an old man, the finish of a life. If I go to the guillotine, try to have it published. I have some friends in America; the printers in Philadelphia would do me another turn, for the sake of old times. There's Jefferson and Washington—I think they remember me. If you have to, play on their feelings, tell them, recall to them an old soldier in the times that tried men's souls.”

“Don't be a damn fool,” Barlow muttered.

M. Merson said, “Please, citizen, I have been good enough to allow you pass on your book and gullible enough to come here and meet your friend. But now we must go.”

“Where are you taking him?” Barlow demanded.

“To the Luxembourg, for the time.”

On their way to the prison, they stopped off long enough to arrest Anacharsis Clootz, and then, with soldiers on either side, the two ex-deputies were marched through the streets. Clootz was bubbling with suppressed mirth; there was something diabolical in the way he regarded this last march. “So we go, friend Paine,” he chuckled, “you at one end of the long bar of revolution, I on the other, and in the end it makes no difference to the good Lady Guillotine. She will go chop, once, twice, and then it will be a finish to Paine and Clootz—and to what else, old friend? Who can tell?”

“But why? They accuse me of being a traitor to the Republic, a charge I don't have to answer. The name of Paine is answer enough. But of what do they accuse you?”

Clootz let go with a furious burst of laughter. “You are an old man, Paine, so even the remarkably simple becomes greatly involved. You are a republican, and I am, to coin a phrase for our times, a proletarian. You believe in the democratic method through representation, and I believe in the same method through the will of the masses. You say, let the people rule; I say the same thing; we are after the same thing, only in different ways. I believe that your way is hopeless, part of the past; but otherwise we are the same, and the dictatorship, which this Republic of France is fast becoming, does not want us. Therefore, chop, chop—let the good Lady Guillotine take care of everything.”

They continued toward the prison, and for a while Clootz was silent, his bushy brows puckered intently, and to Paine it seemed that the German had finally realized his destination and his fate. But suddenly Clootz swung on him and roared,

“What is this nonsense you write, Paine, about the creation being the Bible of God?”

“A simple fact which I believe.”

“Which you believe!” Clootz snorted, stopping the march and turning on Paine, arms akimbo. “You repudiate organized religion and substitute mystical rationalization! My friend, Paine, you shock me. With you I spend some of my last precious hours. On every hand people in the streets turn to stare at us and whisper to each other, There are Paine and Clootz on their way to the guillotine. These good soldiers, these two agents of what calls itself the Republic of France, will go home to their soup and their wives with the news that they marched the last march with the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century. And you rationalize about the creation being the Bible of God. What creation?”

“Of course, it happened!” Paine snapped. “Atheism, the great creed of chance! Like a game of cards, everything just fell together until it fitted nicely!”

“And why not? Where is reason, but in our minds? Where is godliness, but in the people? Where is mercy, but in the masses? A thing becomes reasonable because we make it reasonable, and we are not reaching toward God, but toward goodness, a formulation of the people, a concept of small, suffering men—”