After Thomas Paine wrote ‘Common Sense’ he chose to make it open to all publishers to publish without needing to pay Paine for it. This helped make it a bestseller.  After the American Revolution he was celebrated in France at the start of the French Revolution and Paine moved there and was made a French legislator. After he chose to argue against killing the King he lost a lot of support and was stripped of his position and imprisoned in France for 10 months during the Terror. He was scheduled to be guillotined but somehow managed to avoid it by what appears to be a bureaucratic mix up. He was eventually freed and moved back to the United States. Britain considered him to be guilty of sedition for his views about the rights of man and arguing for the English people to get rid of the crown. He had to avoid sailing back to the United States from France for a while so that he would not be picked up by a British warship. Benjamin Franklin was one of his biggest supporters when he first moved to the American Colonies but he had made many enemies across the political spectrum over the years and died an unpopular figure in the United States.

(Book – Thomas Paine – Craig Nelson)