Thomas Paine on Wikipedia

There’s some interesting material on the Wikipedia page for Thomas Paine.

Following the outbreak of the French revolution, Paine traveled to France to take part in the fun, but found himself on the outs with the faction in power and was sentenced to death:

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine’s cell, but Paine’s door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. “The Angel of Death” had passed over Paine. He kept his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

This section is amusing:

Loyalists vigorously attacked Common Sense; one attack, titled Plain Truth (1776), by Marylander James Chalmers, said Paine was a political quack and warned that without monarchy, the government would “degenerate into democracy.” Even some American revolutionaries objected to Common Sense; late in life John Adams called it a “crapulous mass.”

Oh snap.

Paine certainly seems to have made himself a lot of enemies. I guess that’s what happens when you write stuff like this:

“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun.”

Which leads to this last interesting tidbit:

Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, reports that Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine’s deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln’s political career.