Robespierre’s “Paine”

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Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine was born 29th of January 1737, at Metford, in the county of Norfolk, England. He was trained to the business of a stay maker, and afterwards obtained a situation in the Customs and the management of a tobacco manufactory; but he fell into debt and was dismissed in 1774. He then came to America and took the side of the colonies against England. In 1776 he published “Common Sense,” which is a strong appeal for the freedom of the colonies. He was appointed by Congress secretary of the committee on Foreign affairs and visited France in 1787 where he made the acquaintance of Buffon, Malesherves and other leading men.

In 1791 he went to England and published his “Rights of Man,” which is a reply to Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution.” On his return to France he was elected in 1792 a deputy to the National Convention and acted with the Girondist party. He opposed the execution of Louis XVI and wanted that unhappy monarch exiled to America. This proposition gave offense to Robespierre, who caused Paine to be put in prison where he was detained fourteen months.

During his imprisonment he wrote his famous work “The Age of Reason.” He argues in favor of Deism but against Christianity. He was released from prison at the intercession of the United States Government, and restored to his seat in the Convention. Napoleon said that it was his intention when he conquered England to make Paine introduce a popular form of government there.

In 1802 Paine returned to the United States and devoted the remainder of his days to the study of finance. He died on the 8th of June, 1809.

The News (Frederick, Maryland) Jan 28, 1886

Robespierre’s Passion – Literary Vanity

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ROBESPIERRE’S ORATORICAL POWERS.

His first and only passion was literary vanity. There never was the chief of a party, sect, or government who, when a crisis had arrived, was so incurably a rhetorician, and a rhetorician of the flattest, muddiest, and dullest kind. On the eve of the 9th Thermidor, when it was a question of conquest or annihilation, he brought to the tribune a prepared speech, which had been written over and over again. It had been polished and repolished; it was tawdry with false ornaments, glazed with academical varnish, heavily draped with the symmetrical antitheses, long-drawn out periods, exclamations, apostrophes, and all those other regulation trappings belonging to the business.

In one of the most celebrated and important of his reports I have counted 24 different figures of speech, imitations of Rousseau and other old writers of antiquity, some of them marvels of prolixity, addressed to the dead, to Brutus, to the young Bars, others to absent persons, to priests, to aristocrats, to the unhappy, to French women, others having for topics abstractions, as Liberty or Friendship. With a conviction which nothing could shake, and with supreme self-conceit, he believed himself to be an orator, because on all occasions he worked the old apparatus, and jerked it with the same old wires. Never is there to be found one single spontaneous accent in all this labored eloquence.

Here are all the worn-out receipts of an art long ago on the decline, references to Greek and Latin, Socrates and his hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, and a jumble of classical metaphors, as “the torch of discord,” “the ship of state,” and a mixing up of words with false attempts at style, exactly like those a shallow rhetorician would use when addressing the benches of his college. Occasionally Robespierre puts on an air of immense bravery, as befits a man who struts when on parade, but then again he pipes a feeble tune on a flute, because at that time it was supposed that he was overflowing with sweetness. — Tain’s Psychologie des Chefs Jacobins, in Revue des Deux Mondes.

The New York Times (New York, New York) Oct 5, 1884