The Rights of Man and the French Revolution: Tom Paine's "Rights of Man."

The reading this week is Tom Paine's Rights of Man. It is also available in many printed editions. In Common Sense, Paine called for America to separate from England, and to replace the English form of government with a republic. Although the British government fought to prevent the Americans attaining independence, many important individuals in Britain opposed the war, and sympathized with America. They included Edmund Burke (1729-97), an Irishman who became a politician, philosopher, pamphleteer, and member of parliament in Britain. Burke defended the Americans, but he took a very different line towards the revolutionaries in France after 1789, regarding them as dangerous fanatics, whose activities were largely unjustified and who threatened to bring chaos and disorder not just to France but to Europe as a whole. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was an extremely influential attack on the French Revolution and on the radical principles which he thought underlay it. The book is one of the key foundational texts of modern conservatism. He argued that we should be very cautious about making sudden and revolutionary political changes, and that we ought to have the highest respect for customs, traditions, and hereditary rights.

After publishing Common Sense, Tom Paine embarked on a career as an American politician and political writer. In 1781 he went to France on a diplomatic mission, and he returned there in 1787 - this time with the idea of interesting the French in an iron bridge he had designed. In the same year he traveled to England, where he met and befriended Burke. In 1789, the French Revolution began: on July 14 a crowd in Paris stormed the Bastille; and in August the revolutionary National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights on Man and Citizen. Paine went to France in November, and wrote to Burke about what was going on there. But when Burke denounced the Revolution in his Reflections, Paine (who had returned to England) defended it, and vigorously attacked Burke's views, in Rights of Man. The first part was published in London in 1791, and quickly sold tens of thousands of copies. The second part appeared in 1792. In England, the government began legal proceedings against Paine for seditious libel. In France, he was elected to the National Convention and granted French citizenship in 1792. He became a French politician, and lobbied for the abolition of monarchy but opposed the execution of Louis XVI. During the Terror (1793-4), he was imprisoned. In 1798 he tried to persuade Napoleon Bonaparte to invade England. Paine's political and especially his religious views - in 1794-5 he published The Age of Reason which supported Deism and questioned the authority of the bible - alienated a number of Americans, but in 1801 Jefferson invited him to return to America and he did so the following year. There, Federalists attacked him as an atheist and drunkard. He died in New York in 1809.

In Rights of Man Paine is much more explicit than in Common Sense about the kind of government he would like to see instituted - a republic organized on rational and efficient lines, acknowledging the natural equality of individuals, and protecting their rights. Does Paine succeed in reconciling individual rights with the public good? Does he refute Burke's ideas about tradition? How does his thinking compare with the ideas of the Levellers and of Locke? How much of a radical, or liberal was he?

   Fashion for ease:
   or, a good constitution sacrificed for a fantastic form