Biography | Thomas Paine — The Prison Palace Where Revolution Turned Against Him

On 28 December 1793, guards arrested Thomas Paine in Paris and carried him to the prison operating inside the Luxembourg Palace. Only a year earlier, France had welcomed the English-born author of *Common Sense* and *Rights of Man* as a citizen and elected him to the National Convention. That revolutionary standing became a liability as power shifted toward the Montagnards, who treated Paine's association with the Girondins and his foreign birth as grounds for suspicion. Paine later recalled that the Convention had moved to exclude foreigners and that an arrest order reached him at about three in the morning. He had finished the first part of *The Age of Reason* only hours before the guards arrived and placed the manuscript with his friend Joel Barlow while being taken toward prison. The episode did not begin as a writer quietly composing a book in a cell; it began with a completed manuscript separated from its author for safekeeping. Inside the Luxembourg, Paine joined a population held in a former royal residence that the French Senate's history identifies as the revolutionary “Maison nationale de sûreté,” or National Prison. He remained there through the fall of Robespierre, suffered a grave fever, and learned how quickly a revolution founded on rights could suspend them when political identity became dangerous. Modern retellings sometimes credit Paine's survival to a chalk mark placed on the wrong side of a cell door, but the surviving evidence does not establish that famous story securely enough to present it here as fact. In November 1794, Paine was released after intervention by James Monroe, the newly arrived American minister, and recovered at Monroe's residence before returning to public life and later writing. His imprisonment made the Luxembourg Palace a junction between two parts of his legacy: the democratic arguments that had helped revolutions speak and the religious critique that made him controversial among many former admirers. The palace subsequently became a legislative building and is now the seat of the French Senate, giving the site an afterlife in representative government that sharply contrasts with its use during the Terror. This pin marks the documented palace building that housed the prison, not Paine's unidentified room or an invented point within its walls. The photograph shows the palace's present south façade, whose nineteenth-century garden wing postdates Paine's confinement and is used here as an honest view of the surviving public site rather than a reenactment. Photo: DXR, “Palais du Luxembourg, South View 140116 1,” photographed 16 January 2014, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.