Apostles of Revolution by John Ferling

Author:John Ferling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER 9

“I RELINQUISH HOPE”

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN FRANCE AND AMERICA

When Thomas Paine fled England four months before the execution of Louis XVI, he thought that not only would he find a sanctuary in France, but also that he could play an important role in the Revolution. Instead, as 1793 unfolded, Paine found himself faced with dangers as great, or greater, than those he would have faced in England.

Paine had opposed Louis’s execution, but he supported going to war against England. Following the news of both events, Spain and Holland recalled their ambassadors, and France—aglow with a host of recent military victories in the Austrian Netherlands and Rhineland—declared war on them as well. Paine radiated optimism despite France’s growing number of enemies. Although the “tyrants of the earth are leagued” against a France that stands “single-handed and alone,” he said in mid-February, the Revolutionary nation was “unshaken, unsubdued, unsubdueable, and undaunted,” and only poor generalship could cause its defeat.1

This would have been a good time for Paine to take his leave of France and sail for America. In fact, before taking flight from England he had said that he would quit France if the king was executed. Paine stayed on, however, thinking he could still play a substantive role in the Convention, especially as during the previous autumn the Girondin-dominated assembly had chosen him and eight others to draft France’s first republican constitution. Paine had made progress in reading French, if not in speaking it, and he made some contributions to the document produced by the committee and submitted in April 1793.2 But nothing came of the committee’s work. By the time spring settled over Paris, another faction controlled the Convention.

Paine was never a hard-and-fast member of any bloc, though he usually voted with the Girondins, or Brissotins as they were sometimes called. The faction was dominated by Jacques Brissot de Warville, who had left his law practice in 1789 to become the editor of a democratic and abolitionist newspaper, Patriote Français. Paine and Brissot were friends and one-time collaborators. As Brissot was fluent in English, the two could also readily converse, and both were writers and republicans who abhorred slavery and dreamed somewhat the same dream for a post–ancien régime France. Both also harbored deep feelings for America. Brissot had visited America in 1788, a year after Paine sailed for France and while Jefferson was still living in Paris. Brissot had made the journey in hopes of learning why the American Revolution had succeeded and to “study the effects of liberty on the development of man, society, and government.”

After landing in Boston, he traveled through several states, along the way meeting seemingly every important American. His thumbnail sketches of those he called on are intriguing, sometimes quite accurate, sometimes not. Madison had “the thoughtful look of a wise statesman” and evinced the “meditative air of a profound politician”; Hamilton had “a resolute, frank, soldierly appearance” as well as “the determined appearance of a republican”; John Adams (whom he encountered during

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