The Old Jacobins Nearly Killed Thomas Paine; The New Jacobins (mistaken) Patron Saint

consulted him and placed him on the committee of surveyance.” The Girondins comprised, for the most part, the wisest and the best of France’s legislators. Had they remained in power the excesses of the revolution would, to a great extent, have been avoided. But in an evil hour the Jacobins gained the ascendancy and while they ruled madness reigned supreme. The Girondins were slaughtered or expelled. In one night twenty-two of them —every one a noted statesman or orator—the very flower of French manhood, “the eloquent, the young, the beautiful, the brave,” as Riouffe, their fellow prisoner, lovingly describes them, were taken before a Jacobin tribunal and condemned to death. Carlyle thus graphically and pathetically tells us how they died:

“All Paris is out; such a crowd as no man had seen. The death-carts, Valaze’s cold corpse [he had committed suicide] stretched among the yet living twenty-one, roll along. Bareheaded, hands bound, in their shirt sleeves, coat flung loosely round the neck; so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the shouts of Vive la Republique, some of them keep answering with countershouts of Vive la Republique. Others, as Brissot, sit sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike up, with appropriate variations, the hymn of the Marseilles. Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet living chant there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson’s axe is rapid; one head per minute, or a little less. The chorus is wearing weak; the chorus is worn out; farewell, forevermore, ye Girondins. Te-‘Deum Fauchet has become silent; Valaze’s dead head is lopped; the sickle of the guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away.”

“How Paine loved those men—Brissot, Condorcet, Lasource, Duchatel, Vergniaud, Gensonne! Never was man more devoted to his intellectual comrades. Even across a century one may realize what it meant to him, that march of his best friends to the scaffold.”—Dr.Conway.

Eight days after the execution of the Girondins another of Paine’s friends, Madame Roland, the “Inspiring Soul” of the Girondins — one of the greatest, one of the fairest, one of the bravest, and one of the noblest women that ever came to brighten our planet—died on the same scaffold. Beautiful in life, Madame Roland rose to sublimity in death. Standing on the scaffold, robed in white, she seemed like a lovely bride before the altar. She asked for pen and paper to record “the strange thoughts that were rising in her” as she gazed into the eyes of death. This request denied, she turned toward the statue of liberty and, with tearful eyes, exclaimed, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Then, seeing the one who was to have preceded her to the guillotine trembling with fear, she begged and obtained permission to take his place—to die first—that she might soften the terrors of death by showing him “how easy it is to die.” This is her picture—painted by Carlyle: “Noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle; and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman’s bosom! Like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things;—long memorable.”

“What with the arrestations and flights Paine found himself, in June, almost alone. In the convention he was sometimes the’ solitary figure left on the plain, where but now sat the brilliant statesmen of France. They, his beloved friends, have started in procession towards the guillotine, for even flight must end there; daily others are pressed into their ranks; his own summons, he feels, is only a question of a few weeks or days.” — Dr. Conway.

Madame Roland died in November; Paine was imprisoned in December.

Dictionary Of Religious Knowledge: “Here [trial of Louis XVI] his honorable moderation won the enmity of Robespierre, who marked him for a victim.”

Schaaf’s Religious Encyclopedia: “He had the courage to vote against the execution of Louis XVI., and thus incurred the anger of Robespierre, who threw him into prison.”

Chambers’ Encyclopedia Of English LiteraTure: “He offended the Robespierre faction, and in 1794 [December 28, 1793], possibly by the procurement of the American minister, Gouverneur Morris—who disliked the French revolution and the alliance between the new republics—he was imprisoned.”

Col. Thomas W. Higginson: “They urged him (he was in personal danger) to go back to America, the country he had served so long. ‘Go there,’ they said; ‘it is your country.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘for the time, this is my country.’ … So said Thomas Paine, and the doors of the Bastile closed around him.”Rev. John W. Chadwick: “A prisoner deserted by the young Republic at whose birth he had assisted so efficiently, his life in jeopardy for the humanity of his opinions.”

Morning Advertiser (England, Feb. 8, 1794): “His arrest was a species of triumph to all the tyrants on earth. His papers had been examined, and far from finding any dangerous propositions the committee had traced only the characters of that burning zeal for liberty—of that eloquence of nature and philosophy—and of those principles of public morality which-had through life procured him the hatred of despots and the love of his fellow citizens.”

“His arrest and imprisonment, without charges preferred or even the pretense of crime, were acts of perfidy without a parallel except in the history of the French revolution.”—Hon. E. B. Washburne.

Major W. Jackson (and other Americans in Paris): “As a countryman of ours, as a man above all so dear to the Americans; who like ourselves are earnest friends of liberty, we ask you in the name of that goddess cherished by the only two republics of the world, to give back Thomas Paine to his brethren.”

Achille Audibert: “A friend of mankind is groaning in chains—Thomas Paine. . . . But for Robespierre’s villainy the friend of man would now be free.”

At the beginning of the revolution Robespierre was recognized as one of the most moderate and humane of men. In the National Assembly he advocated the abolition of the death penalty. Describing his advent to leadership, Paine’s biographer says: “Mirabeau was on his deathbed, and Paine witnessed that historic procession, four miles long, which bore the orator to his shrine. . . . With others he strained his eyes to see the coming man; with others he sees formidable Danton glaring at Lafayette; and presently sees advancing softly between them the sentimental, philanthropic—Robespierre.”

M. Danton: “What thou hast done for the happiness and liberty of thy country I have in vain attempted to do for mine. They are sending us to the scaffold.”

“It was a strange scene; these two constitution makers, Paine and Danton, and for the last time in the prison of the Luxembourg, both equally destined for the scaffold.”—Hon. E. B. Washburne.

Danton was taken to the guillotine; Paine, by mistake, was left.

The manner of Paine’s escape, as related by Carlyle, was as follows: “The tumbrils move on. But in this set of tumbrils there are two other things notable: one notable person; and one want of a notable person. The notable person is Lieutenant-General Loiserelles, a nobleman by birth and by nature; laying down his life for his son. In the prison of Saint-Lazare, the night before last, hurrying to the grate to hear the death-list read, he caught the name of his son. The son was asleep at the moment. T am Loiserelles,’ cried the old man. . . . The want of the notable person, again, is that of Deputy Paine! Paine has set in the Luxembourg since January; and seemed forgotten; but Fouquier had pricked him at last. The turnkey, list in hand, is marking with chalk the outer doors of to-morrow’s fournee. Paine’s outer door happened to be open, turned back on the wall; the turnkey marked it on the side next him, and hurried on; another turnkey came and shut it; no chalkmark now visible, the fournee went without Paine. Paine’s life lay not there.”

In a letter to Washington, Paine thus narrates the inhuman slaughter of his fellow-prisoners, from whose fate he so narrowly escaped: “The state of things in the prisons [for over four months] was a continued scene of horror. No man could count upon life for twenty-four hours. To such a pitch of rage and suspicion were Robespierre and his committee arrived, that it seemed as if they feared to leave a man to live. Scarcely a night passed in which ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more were not taken out of the prison, carried before a pretended tribunal in the morning, and guillotined be