According to a newspaper account:

On Wednesday last, the Effigy of that Infamous Incendiary, Tom Paine, was exhibited in this town, seated in a chair, and borne on four men’s shoulders; – in one hand he held the ‘Rights of Man’ and under the other arm he bore a pair of stays; upon his head a mock resemblance of the Cap of Liberty, and a halter round his neck.

On a banner carried before him, was written,

‘Behold a Traitor! Who, for the base purposes of Envy, Interest and Ambition, Would have deluged this Happy Country in Blood!’6

All they had was Paine’s effigy, for, sensing the justice he would receive in an England enflamed by Pitt, Burke and Reeves, Paine had fled to France two months earlier. The trial nevertheless took place in December. Paine was found guilty in absentia of seditious libel, and outlawed from ever returning to Britain.

Remaining in France for the next ten years, Paine now entered the historical stage as French revolutionary. He was chosen delegate to the National Convention by a constituency that included Calais and Oise, and threw himself into the chaotic politics of the revolution in the critical year of internecine fighting between Girondin and Jacobin. Once again Paine was no mere bystander. In October 1792 he was appointed to the Committee of Nine to frame the new French Constitution. But all was not easy for Paine in the suspicious atmosphere of Paris. He became entangled in the labyrinth of revolutionary personalities and politics. His associations with the moderate Girondin would anger the more radical Jacobins when they came to power. Most particularly he alienated Robespierre and Marat by pleading in the Convention that Louis XVI’s life be spared. No one was criminal enough, he argued, for the barbarity of the death penalty. In addition, he pleaded, whatever were Louis Capet’s manifest faults he had after all ‘aided my much-loved America to break its chains’. The English-speaking Paine became further suspect when war broke out in 1793 between France and England. In October his allies the Girondins were tried and condemned. In December foreigners in the Convention were denounced. Paine was arrested and imprisoned.

For ten months of his imprisonment Paine busied himself working on The Age of Reason, a penetrating attack on theistic Christianity and defence of a natural deistic religion free from supernatural trappings. In it he examined the Bible and regaled his readers with its contradictions, its false chronology and its tales of barbarism, slaughter and inhumanity. This was not, he argued, the work of God who presided over the natural universe. In an age of reason, he insisted, men and women would replace such superstition with science and nature. In place of a mysterious and brutal God, they would have God the first cause, the Supreme Being. While he wrote on religion, Paine also worked on his release from prison through the good offices of the new American minister, James Monroe. After some confusion about his status as American or British, Paine was released in the autumn of 1794.

One of Paine’s first works after his release from prison was a stinging attack on George Washington, whom he held responsible for the length of his imprisonment. In fact, the much more likely culprit was Paine’s old conservative nemesis Gouverneur Morris, who was the American minister to France before Monroe. It was he, not Washington, who apparently saw no reason to speed Paine’s release. Nevertheless, Paine lashed out at Washington in rage-filled pages that denounced the President’s military skills as well as his Federalist politics. Once again, Paine voiced his deepest feelings in print.

The Jacobins had fallen in the meantime, and Robespierre himself had been guillotined. Paine was re-elected to the Assembly in December 1794 and sat through the following year, but he had contracted a malignant fever in prison and for the most part could summon energy enough only to write. His last years in Paris, therefore, were less pohtical than polemical. He produced a second part of The Age of Reason, a pohtical essay, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, and a major piece of social and economic criticism, Agrarian Justice.

In 1802 Paine returned to America for the final and tragic chapter in his career. The America he found was very different from the Philadelphia he had known in 1774 or even in 1783.