The most documented year of Paine’s life is the year he should not have survived.
He was arrested on December 28, 1793 at the White’s Hotel in the Passage des Petits-Peres, where he had been staying since the Convention had voted to expel its foreign-born deputies. He was held briefly, taken to the Hotel des Monnaies on the Seine for a final negotiation with the American minister Gouverneur Morris (who shrugged), and then committed to the Luxembourg Prison, the converted palace that had been the principal Bourbon residence in Paris until the year before. He was sixty-two. He had a fever. He carried with him the manuscript of The Age of Reason, which he handed to Joel Barlow on the way to the prison.
The Luxembourg held about a thousand prisoners by January 1794. The daily winnowing for the guillotine was conducted by chalk. Each evening a sheriff’s clerk would walk the corridors marking the doors of the men to be taken at dawn. The mark was a small cross. The chalk was easily smeared.
On the night of July 23, 1794, the chalk mark went on the wrong side of Paine’s door. Conway tells the story this way: Paine had been moved into a three-man cell that was unusually warm in the July heat, and the prisoners had left the door open during the day for ventilation. When the clerk came through with chalk, he marked the door’s outer face. When the door was closed for the night, the cross was on the inside. The squad came by at dawn for the cell, saw a clean exterior, and moved on.
Six days later, on July 28, Robespierre fell. Five days after that, on August 7, James Monroe arrived in Paris as Morris’s replacement. By November 4, after three months of negotiations during which Paine wrote three of the longest pieces of his career (The Memorial to Monroe, The Appeal to the Convention, and Part Two of The Age of Reason), Monroe got him out.
The historiographical case for the chalk-mark story is contested. Conway, who interviewed survivors as late as 1880 for his 1892 biography, treats it as authenticated. John Keane (1995) is more skeptical: the version of the story Paine himself tells in the Memorial to Monroe, written within days of his release, is more cautious; he says the prisoners were warned and the door was kept closed during a second pass. Hawke (1974) splits the difference: the chalk-mark mechanism is real, the specific incident is plausible, the dates are uncertain. The evidence we have is Paine’s own testimony and the testimony of two cellmates who survived.
What is not contested is what Paine wrote in those eleven months. The Luxembourg cell is where he composed Part One of The Age of Reason in its complete form, finished a draft of the Memorial to Monroe, kept up an extensive correspondence with Lady Smith and others outside the prison, and began to organize his case for the new Convention. He emerged from the Luxembourg in November 1794 having written, by his own count, about forty thousand words while imprisoned. He emerged so weakened by infection in his side, possibly from typhus, that he could not stand without help. He moved into Monroe’s house at the Folie de la Bouexiere and stayed eighteen months while Monroe’s wife Elizabeth nursed him through the recovery.
The lesson the year leaves is not the lesson the legend wants. The legend wants providence: a hairs-breadth escape from the guillotine, the chalk on the wrong side of the door, the great writer saved for the great work. The actual record is grimmer. Paine survived because Robespierre fell. He survived because Monroe replaced Morris. He survived because Marguerite Bonneville’s husband sent him bread. He survived because his cellmates were the kind of cellmates who, when warned, closed the door.
He did not survive because of fortune. He survived because the men around him, in the spaces between the sweeps, did the small things that needed doing. The chalk-mark story is true the way most prison stories are true: there were ten chalk-mark incidents, and one of them mattered.
The Luxembourg writings are at /works/the-memorial-to-monroe/, /works/appeal-to-the-convention/, and /works/the-age-of-reason/. Read them in that order if you want a window into the year Paine almost died. The Memorial is a fortress of evidence; the Appeal is a politician’s careful brief; the Age of Reason is the book a man writes when he expects to be dead within a week and wants to set down what he believes about God.