SHORTLY BEFORE FLEEING ENGLAND, Paine had learned that a provision in France’s new constitution allowed foreigners to gain French citizenship. In Paine’s case, the provision was meaningful because it also allowed him to be elected in absentia to represent the département of Pas-de-Calais in a national constitutional convention. The new body was convened in September 1792, amid the growth of antimonarchical anger and an expanding French war against Austria and its continental allies. For a man who had spent most of his adult life decrying the constitutional inadequacies of monarchical government, the opportunity to do what he did very little of in the United States—to help fashion a republic’s fundamental governing principles—would seem a godsend. But as Paine soon discovered, constitution making in revolutionary France involved a series of problems he had thought little about.
The most momentous of these was the question of what was to become of Louis XVI and the rest of his Bourbon lineage. In the aftermath of the King’s flight, and with growing evidence that the royal family had covertly encouraged a loyalist counterrevolution, even moderates were flocking to the republican side. In Paris, the thronging crowds had long since abandoned hope of a constitutional monarchy. The sans-culottes, a diverse collection of Parisian artisans, mechanics, shopkeepers, and petty merchants, named for their choice of attire—the long trousers of the artisan rather than the short culottes, or knee breeches, of the social elite—had prepared the way for the First Republic. In early August 1792, they joined forces with national guard units to drive the King and his family from the Tuileries Palace, an action that effectively deposed the monarch but also resulted in the brutal massacre of several hundred Royal Swiss guards.
When the National Convention of 750 elected deputies assembled the next month, on September 20, just a few days after Paine’s arrival in Paris, among its very first acts was to affirm the abolition of the French monarchy. One year later, the revolutionaries instituted a new calendar that established September 22, 1792, as the first day of the first year of the new French republic. To the horror of Burke and other conservatives, constitutional reform in France involved much more than the creation of a republic. It also involved starting history anew.
Within days of the new republic’s birth, the Convention’s deputies began pushing for the destruction of remaining vestiges of monarchical authority, among them the judiciary, established under the previous constitution, which had been endorsed by the King. Georges-Jacques Danton, a now famous young leader of the radical Parisian Jacobin club, led the Convention’s assault against the judiciary, arguing that the only way to establish its fundamental loyalty to the new republic was through the creation of a new corps of elected judges.
In his first speech before the Convention, Paine countered that elected judges could never be impartial. In a sign of things to come, he was ignored. By late November, a debate in the Convention over whether to try the King for conspiracy, treason, and a long list of other crimes came to a sudden end. A sheaf of incriminating papers discovered in the vacant Tuileries Palace left no doubt about Louis XVI’s guilt. The Convention would now have to decide whether or not the King—whom Paine had begun referring to by his family name, Louis Capet—would suffer the same fate as any other traitor to the state: execution. Paine and other deputies urged caution, fearing that execution would strengthen counterrevolutionary forces at home and abroad. It could also alienate French allies, particularly the new United States, a country that very likely owed its existence to Louis Capet. Meanwhile, the restive crowds of Paris were calling for royal blood.
As Louis’s trial began in December, Paine pleaded with his fellow deputies to spare the former monarch’s life, noting that the increasingly influential leader of the radical Jacobin Club of Paris, Maximilien Robespierre himself, had favored the abolition of capital punishment. Paine proposed, instead, that Capet be imprisoned until he could be banished to the United States. There, “far removed from the miseries and crimes of loyalty, he may learn, from the constant aspect of public prosperity, that the true system of government consists not in kings but in fair, equal and honorable representation.” Paine was, once again, unable to sway the Convention. After Louis Capet’s treason conviction, in January 1793, the Convention voted, by a slim margin, for the death penalty. The decision filled Paine “with genuine sorrow” and he urged the Convention to postpone the execution. Paine did not speak French, so he had his speeches translated and read aloud by another deputy. As his translator attempted to share Paine’s views with the Convention, the radical physician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat shouted him down, proclaiming Paine a Quaker, opposed on religious grounds to capital punishment. But shouts of “free speech” briefly prevailed, and Paine’s position was made plain. His objections were not religious. They were constitutional. The punishment of the King, he explained, was not the duty of a body convened to create a new constitution. The King had been dethroned; his guilt established. Let the business of constituting a new government go forward and let that new government administer justice, in accord with the law.
Paine also pointed to the international consequences of regicide. “France’s sole ally is the United States,” he reminded his colleagues. “Now, it is an unfortunate circumstance that the individual whose fate we are at present determining has always been regarded by the people of the United States as a friend to their own revolution. Should you come, then, to the resolution of putting Louis to death, you will excite the heartfelt sorrow of your ally.” Again, Marat silenced Paine’s translator: “I denounce the translator. Such opinions are not Thomas Paine’s. The translation is incorrect.” In what was perhaps the most dramatic moment of his political life, Paine ascended the tribune from which his translator spoke to proclaim that, no, indeed the translation was correct. These were his words. The translator then continued, “I beg that you delay the execution. Do not, I beseech you, bestow upon the English tyrant the satisfaction of learning that the man who helped America, the land of my love, to burst her fetters, has died on the scaffold.”1
Paine’s pleas, of course, came to naught. The Revolution, it seemed, would fulfill the prophecy of its greatest critic. With the King’s execution, on January 21, Burke lamented, “the Catastrophe of the tragedy of France has been completed.” But there was no solace in vindication for Burke. “I looked for something of that kind as inevitable,” he explained to a friend, “yet, when the fatal, and final Event itself arrived, I was as much leveled, and thrown to the Ground in the consternation, as if it were a thing I had never dreamt of.”2
In an ill-advised moment of candor some months after Louis’s execution, Paine wrote Danton, “I now despair of seeing the great object of European liberty accomplished, and my despair arises not from the combined foreign powers, not from the intrigues of aristocracy and priestcraft, but from the tumultuous misconduct with which the internal affairs of the present revolution are conducted.”3
BY THE FALL of 1793, the systematic denunciations and judicial murders known as the Terror were in full force. Paine himself had been repeatedly denounced but survived the previous summer and much of the fall by working in the service of the ruling Jacobin faction. He had devoted himself to a series of schemes, including one to import desperately needed flour from the United States and another to acquire saltpeter from British vessels returning from India. On Christmas Eve, after months spent watching one friend after another led off to their deaths, Paine was arrested and taken to the Luxembourg prison. The fifty-six-year-old Paine would spend the next ten months there, narrowly escaping death from both illness and the executioner.
When his health permitted, Paine campaigned for release. He challenged French officials on the grounds that he was a U.S. citizen, imprisoned with neither cause nor due process. He begged friends to take up his cause, but his pleas achieved little. American and British friends in Paris feared the wrath of a Jacobin regime rooting out alleged foreign agents. For the United States government, action on Paine’s behalf risked angering the Jacobins and undermining relations with Great Britain. Making matters yet more difficult, the American minister in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, had no sympathy for Paine’s plight.
Morris, whom Paine had known in Philadelphia, had been an early proponent of Paine’s bridge. But when the two met in London in the spring of 1792, as Morris made his way to Paris, their differences over the Revolution erupted into bitter argument. Much like Burke, Morris had long since concluded that revolutionary France was headed toward disaster. As he confided to his diary in the fall of 1790, “this unhappy country, bewildered in the pursuit of metaphysical whimsies, presents to one’s moral view a mighty ruin. . . . One thing only seems to be tolerably ascertained, that the . . . Revolution has failed.” Paine would later describe Morris’s posting to France as “the most unfortunate and injudicious appointment that could be made.” His reason was that Morris’s views “gave every reason to suspect that he was secretly a British Emissary.”4
BY THE SPRING of 1794, the Washington administration had begun to see Morris as a liability. With Britain and France at war, and with the United States seeking improved trade relations with Britain, it walked an ever-finer line of neutrality. Rather than risk needlessly angering its oldest European ally, it recalled Morris, replacing him that August with Senator James Monroe of Virginia. Monroe could hardly have been more unlike Morris. A protégé of Jefferson, Monroe was sympathetic to the French republican cause. He opposed rapprochement with Britain and favored strengthening ties between the modern world’s new republics. Not long after arriving in Paris, in willful denial of the bloody Terror, Monroe stood before the National Convention to declare his fealty to the Revolution. He celebrated French military achievement and attacked the forces of counterrevolution, especially those surging forth from the British Isles. This performance earned him the happy approval of his French hosts but infuriated his president, whose British envoy, John Jay, was covertly working toward a new Anglo-American trade agreement. For Paine, however, Monroe was a savior.
The new ambassador admired Paine and was determined to gain his release. This was, he assured Paine, the duty of any representative of the American people.
The crime of ingratitude has not yet stained, and I trust never will stain, our national character. You are considered by [the Americans], as not only having rendered important services in our own revolution, but as being, on a more extensive scale, the friend of human rights, and a distinguished and able advocate in favour of public liberty. To the welfare of Thomas Paine the Americans are not, nor can they be, indifferent. . . . To liberate you, will be an object of my endeavours, and as soon as possible.5
Paine urged Monroe to challenge French authorities on the definition of republican citizenship. Instead of a status determined by the state itself, it had to be seen as a matter of voluntary and fraternal allegiance. In refusing to accept Paine’s claims that he was an American citizen, the French violated these principles. Monroe adopted a more pragmatic path. Fearing that such arguments could be misinterpreted as counterrevolutionary, he argued Paine’s case as a simple matter of criminal justice. If in fact Paine had committed a crime, the time had come for him to stand before his accusers. If there had been no crime, the regime was obliged to release him.
The strategy succeeded. On November 6, 1794, Paine was finally allowed to leave Luxembourg prison. Months in a cold, dark, and dank room had taken their toll on him, but he was now, once again, a free man.
After Paine recovered from a painful abscess and a life-threatening case of typhus, his circumstances improved. While convalescing in Monroe’s Paris home, he was able to reclaim his seat in the National Convention, along with the back pay due after his wrongful imprisonment. He also returned to the political stage with new vigor, urging the new Thermidorian government, which had ruthlessly purged the revolutionary government of Robespierre’s Jacobins and their sympathizers, to resist another slide into terror. He would begin writing again, publishing a brief tract, Dissertations sur les Premiers Principes de Gouvernement, defending the democratic principles he had so successfully outlined in Rights of Man. But Paine’s first concern was finding a way back to his American home, a goal that had eluded him before his imprisonment and would continue to do so for the next seven years.
AFTER SIGNING A TRADE treaty with Great Britain in late November 1794, the Washington administration abandoned any pretense of neutrality in the Revolutionary Wars. In response, French privateers and naval ships began attacking American vessels, and by 1798 the United States and France were engaged in the “Quasi-War,” an undeclared naval struggle that would last until 1800.
Trapped in a foreign country, Paine spent his days contemplating the course of revolution and receiving visitors in a rented Left Bank room at 4 rue du Théâtre Français. One of those visitors, the Irish reformer Wolfe Tone, recalled Paine as “conscientiously an honest man,” but he also remembered a conversation with Paine about their mutual friend, Edmund Burke: “I mentioned to him that I had known Burke in England, and spoke of the shattered state of his mind, in consequence of the death of his only son Richard. Paine immediately said that it was the ‘Rights of Man’ which had broken his heart.” In the privacy of his diary, Tone responded with disgust: “Paine has no children!”6
IN THE FALL of 1798, English newspapers had begun carrying stories about Paine’s return to architecture. “Thomas Paine,” they reported, “tired or disgusted with politics has been employed these two years in the construction of an iron bridge.” By 1802, that work had led to two new bridge models. Henry Redhead Yorke, an Englishman who visited Paine in Paris that year, recalled that the American “seems to have a contemptuous opinion not only of books, but of their authors; for in shewing me one day the beautiful models of two bridges he had devised, he observed that Dr. Franklin once told him that ‘books are written to please, houses built for great men, churches for priests, but no bridge [is built] for the people.’” Once again, Paine was building bridges for the people. Paine’s new bridge models, Yorke remembered, “exhibit an extraordinary degree not only of skill, but of taste, in mechanics; and wrought with extreme delicacy, entirely by [Paine’s] own hands.” So fine were the models, Yorke recalled, someone offered to purchase them for the vast sum of three thousand pounds.7
As long as Paine remained in France, the models would be little more than curiosities. Whatever access he had had to the French architectural establishment had long since been lost. The aged Perronet died shortly after Paine was imprisoned and the French scientific and architectural world had been reshaped by revolution. In sweeping away the royal schools and guilds that governed knowledge in prerevolutionary France, the revolutionaries also swept away the fluid, cacophonous world of invention and philosophy that had been so welcoming of Paine. The world of Franklin had given way to the world of Napoleon, the revolutionary general who would begin ruling France in November 1799. And what Napoleon stood for was bureaucracy, regulation, and state power. In place of the court favorites and aristocratic institutions of the old regime came a new regime of professionalism, meritocracy, and order.
A new École Polytechnique would prepare the French republic’s engineers. Admissions to the École would be determined by new nationwide exams. Students would begin their training with rigorous studies in mathematics and geometry, and only the most able graduates would move on to the École des Ponts et Chaussées. There, they would encounter a quasi-military culture, with ranks, uniforms and even the signature ritual of the honor-driven, martial world: the duel. There was no room in this new professional order for the self-taught bridge builder.
PAINE’S architectural prospects outside of France were little better. He still had many admirers in America and Britain, but that admiration had grown quiet, in part because of Paine’s apparent support of the French Revolution, even after its turn to terror. Worse for Paine though was a terrible political miscalculation: he had wrongly concluded that President Washington was directly responsible for his long imprisonment. Although Morris was probably more to blame than anybody else, Paine published an open letter attacking Washington and his administration. Parts of the letter appeared in American newspapers in the fall of 1796. Paine condemned the perfidy of the U.S. government and attacked the President himself as a cowardly hypocrite. Consider the fact, Paine urged his readers, that the man who so publicly celebrated the deep and abiding Franco-American alliance was all the while seeking trade deals with Britain. “In what a fraudulent light must Mr. Washington’s character appear in the world,” Paine exclaimed, “when his declarations and his conduct are compared together!”8
Washington’s reputation was nowhere near as peerless as it had been when he had taken office in 1789. Nonetheless, Paine paid dearly for his attack. In a typical condemnation, one Massachusetts newspaper proclaimed it the “most extraordinary composition of abuse, petulance, falsehood and boyish vanity that ever came from Grub Street or a garret.” Even this attack on the character of America’s most esteemed public figure, however, paled in its consequences next to Paine’s pamphlet The Age of Reason. Several years in the making, The Age of Reason was first published in English in early 1794, not long after Paine’s imprisonment.9
The tract was among the fiercest attacks on organized Christianity ever written. One could not read the Bible, Paine wrote, with its “obscene stories,” its “voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness,” without concluding that it “would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.” Much like the old monarchical governments Paine had so long decried, so the defenders of this Biblical history, often acting at the behest of those very governments, served themselves before they served their followers. This was contrary to the ideals of Paine’s Jesus. “Out of the matters contained in” the Bible, “the Church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”10
Although The Age of Reason, at least as Paine understood it, was ultimately a defense of true religion, Paine’s enemies saw it as an atheist manifesto. At a time when even moderates feared associations with radical Jacobinism and its ruthless anticlericalism, such fringe religious views became particularly hard to forgive. Henceforth, there were few references to Paine not prefaced with the word “infidel.” Architecture, even for the democratic Paine, had always been dependent on the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. Now, few social elites on either side of the Atlantic would associate with him. Those British architects who admired him as architect and pamphleteer would begin to conceal their views. Thomas Telford, the great Scottish-born bridge builder, sometimes referred to as the Colossus of Roads, was typical.
BY THE MID-1790S, CONGESTION on the Thames threatened London’s mercantile supremacy. The massive West India Docks and the London Docks downstream had not yet been built and London Bridge prevented oceangoing vessels from traveling upriver to the city’s growing mercantile heart. Among the proposed solutions was a new London Bridge that would allow high-masted ships to pass easily to the quays and warehouses of the City. In 1799, Parliament established a committee to review proposals for addressing Thames congestion. The most majestic of these, and an essential addition to the catalog of the world’s most remarkable unbuilt structures, was a 600-foot iron-arch bridge proposed by Telford and James Douglass, another Scottish architect.
Telford had long been an admirer of Paine’s Rights of Man. The book, which appeared when Telford was thirty-three, had persuaded him that “nothing short of some signal revolution can prevent [Great Britain] from sinking into bankruptcy, slavery, and insignificancy.” Telford, it would seem, had been the supreme Painite: a believer in revolutionary reform and a builder of bridges. But when he solicited expert endorsements for his proposed London bridge, he came to see just how incompatible Painite radicalism and architecture had become. Among the experts Telford consulted were the Walkers of Rotherham, one of whom replied that the
idea of an arch of 600 feet is a bold stretch—Tom Paine’s opinion was, that a Bridge upon his System might be thrown over the Atlantic, if centres for erecting it could be fixed. We have however liv’d to see his System of Bridges, as well as of Politics, exploded.
Telford responded to the Walkers accordingly. He disclaimed any knowledge of Paine or his bridge, adding a jovial stab at the “political Quixote.” Still, he had to acknowledge that whatever Paine’s political failings, the old revolutionary was right to assume that the future of bridge building lay in iron, a substance that would permit “the span of arches” to be “extended considerably farther than by the present practice.”11
In early 1791, when Telford read Rights of Man, the work was a sensation in Britain. In Sheffield, Manchester, and London, artisans, mechanics, and radical intellectuals had joined together in committees of correspondence and constitutional reform associations to discuss Paine’s ideas. Those discussions gave rise to hundreds of less well-known pamphlets, calling for constitutional reform at home and celebrating the achievements of revolutionaries abroad. Within two years, the government’s crackdown would dampen Painite enthusiasm, but a declaration of war by France, the Jacobin terror, and Paine’s attack on Christianity did far more to quiet Paine’s British disciples. By 1800, the year the Parliamentary committee evaluated Telford’s Thames River bridge, no serious promoter of public works dared acknowledge a debt to Paine.
PAINE CONTINUED to believe that invention would ultimately triumph over politics and personal attack. Whatever the world thought of him, it recognized the universal genius of his invention. Such, in any event, was the reasoning behind his determination to return to America and resume his bridge building. Paine’s prospects for returning brightened when his friend and ally, Thomas Jefferson, was elected to the presidency in 1800. With the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, which momentarily ended hostilities between revolutionary France and its enemies in Europe, Paine could finally make safe passage to his home nation. On September 1, 1802, the sixty-five-year-old Paine boarded a ship at Le Havre and set sail for the United States.
The temporary end of the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe also made possible another Atlantic crossing, one Paine knew nothing of, but one he had made possible. Sometime in 1801, a ship set sail from Hull, England, bearing an 87-ton iron-arch bridge. The structure had been fabricated at the Walker brothers’ Rotherham works and was to be erected across the Rio Cobre near Spanish Town, Jamaica, the colony’s capital city. The bridge would link Spanish Town to Jamaica’s new commercial capital, Kingston. Erected in 1802, it remains in place to this day, making it the oldest substantial example of iron architecture in the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish Town structure also stands as a monument to one of Paine’s least recognized innovations. As he had noted in his 1788 British patent application, iron construction turned architecture into an exportable commodity. Iron members cast in Britain could be sent anywhere in the world.
In 1819, British authorities erected a naval hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica, also with a prefabricated iron structure sent from England. Jamaican builders had turned to iron because the Caribbean island had been deforested. In the United States, the situation was entirely different. The abundance of old-growth forests made the country no place for a builder of iron bridges.12