By R.W. Morrell
Thomas Paine Contre L’imposture Des Prêtres. Nathalie Caron. Illustrated. 543pp. Paperback. Paris, L’harmattan, 1999. 260e
Although Thomas Paine appears to have been thoroughly steeped in christian belief as a child, the fact of his parents sectarian differences may have been one of the factors instrumental in his later adoption of deism, while his experiences in the American colonists struggle for political independence, which brought him directly into contact with religious sceptics such as Franklin and Jefferson, who were also passionately interested in science, which by then had started to challenge orthodox christian beliefs, must also be considered another major influence on his thinking in matters of religion. Deism was, in fact, in the English speaking countries a belief which many leading figures subscribed to privately, political and social considerations making them rather circumspect when it came to being publicly identified as deists. In many respects Paine was to act in a similar manner, but when faced with what may have appeared to him to be his imminent death he went public about his beliefs in his essay, The Age of Reason, apparently being under the impression that this would be his last published work, a sort of personal testimony and a warning about the religious situation in France which he saw as one of dangerous confusion. In asserting his belief in a god and attacking atheism, Paine was being critical of many of his French contemporaries, but if he thought his essay would make the same impact on French religious and philosophical thinking as his political ideas, he made a serious error of judgement. If anything, and the author of this book illustrates this fact with considerable clarity, France reacted to The Age of Reason, Part One, and later Part Two, with what could be described as polite indifference.
One of the major reasons for French indifference to Paine’s essay was the fact that his emphasis on the bible was lost on the French was simply because the dominant religious sect, the established sect in the country prior to the revolution, was the Roman Catholic sect, a religious organisation in which the bible played nothing like the role it did in Protestant religious thinking, in England and amongst English speaking citizens of the new United States, an infallible book had replaced an infallible sect. The uproar created by The Age of Reason was enormous, and while Paine had his defenders, for the most part even his political allies sought to distance themselves from him. The various sects lost no time in making Paine symbolic of the devil, if not the devil himself incarnate. Yet strange to say, his religious ideas were not really revolutionary, if anything they were highly moralistic in tone, though he also sought to make them compatible with the many scientific discoveries which were starting to call many major christian tenets into question, however, the debates on these were only being hinted at.
This important book takes a close look at Paine’s deism set within the context of his historical period. The author examines deistical concepts both in religious terms and in its political implications and impact. In doing this she follows Paine’s life and work, examines the reaction to his deistical ideas and rounds off the whole with a reference to Thomas Paine Day in the United States. She has clearly absorbed much of the literature published both in Britain and the United States, where the main focal point of the debate is found, but she also examines the political implications in France. Her book is both thoughtful and challenging and will, I suspect, become a key study of Paine’s deism in both a personal and wider context. It is a work which I would unhesitatingly say should be translated into English and thus made available to a wider general readership.
The author provides extensive appendices listing separately British and American replies to The Age of Reason, but there is no similar list of French replies, which is itself illustrative of the indifference to the essay there. One of the replies listed in the American section is Simpson’s, Plea jiff Religion, though the author seems to have doubts about it’s place of publication being in Vermont. She is right to entertain such a doubt as the edition in question was published in Macclesfield, Yorkshire, being one of several editions published in both Yorkshire and Lancashire. Whether there was an American edition I do not know, not having come across one, but it is possible.