In April 1797, as Napoleon Bonaparte continued his meteoric rise, Thomas Paine made his way to 4 Rue du Théatre Français. With his knock on the door, life changed for Nicolas and Marguerite Bonneville and their very young children. Paine had grown close to the couple during the early days of the French Revolution. Now, stateless and homeless in the wake of the Committee of Public Safety’s Terror, an 11-month incarceration that almost killed him, and his long recuperation at the home of American Minister to France, James Monroe, Paine had been invited to take refuge at the Bonneville home. Madame Bonneville expected the great man to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed for six years.

Surrounded by the Bonneville’s circle of writers and intellectuals—headstrong, passionate, and yet still optimistic even in the wake of so much death—Paine new companions rekindled his revolutionary spirit. The Bonnevilles were great admirers of Paine. They even named their fourthborn son, Thomas Paine Bonneville, in the great man’s honor the year after Paine arrived at their home, and asked him to serve as godfather. As Paine’s fortnight turned into months and then years, his presence as a doting, albeit eccentric, “grandfather” became the norm, while the family’s hospitality towards him—between 1797 and 1802—became the foundation of an abiding friendship.

In 1802, Nicolas Bonneville was arrested by Napoleon and his printing presses were seized just as Paine was finally preparing to return to the United States. Paine saw a way to pay the struggling Bonnevilles back for their generosity, so Madame Bonneville and three of her four boys—12-year old Louis, 5-year-old Benjamin and 4-year-old Thomas, sailed to America shortly after Paine’s return, planning to stay until Nicolas could get back onto a solid financial footing. Instead, for the next seven years in New York, this “odd couple” became a part of Paine’s sometimes eccentric orbit. Little Nicolas was too frail to travel and remained in France, while Louis, the oldest, was unhappy in New York, so arrangements were made for him to return to France and to the care of a family friend until he could be reunited with his father.

By 1808, prone to a growing litany of frailties, Paine was not the easiest person to be around. The small town of New Rochelle, 22 miles from New York, was no panacea for a happy life. There was an ill-executed attempt on Paine’s life by a disgruntled workman, and the town had infuriatingly refused to let him vote in an election, alleging that he was not an American citizen. As a result, the Paine-Bonneville “family” began spending more time in what is now Greenwich Village. Paine began facing physical struggles. A bad fall and episodes of transient ischemia made it difficult for him to hold a pen. But he was still busy trying to make the world a better place.

As Paine shuttled between a series of rooming houses, Madame Bonneville became his occasional secretary: “I …went regularly to see him twice a week; but, he said to me one day: “I am here alone, for all these people are nothing to me, day after day, week after week, month after month, and you don’t come to see me.” An aging, ailing man, who thrived on arguments in the service of great ideas, now roiled against the infirmities of old age and his confinement in lonely, shabby rooms. At the same time, the futures of the Bonneville boys weighed heavily upon Madame Bonneville. It was the central bond between Paine and her.

On June 8, 1809, Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

Whatever scholars may make of Paine’s feelings about Madame Bonneville, and hers about him, there can be no disputing her position as the principal beneficiary in Paine’s will. His bequest included “shares, movables, and money… for her own sole and separate use, and at her disposal, notwithstanding her coverture.” Small amounts were dispensed to old friends, including Nicolas, but the most significant chunk, including 100 acres in New Rochelle, went to Madame Bonneville: “…in trust for her children …their education and maintenance, until they come to the age of twenty-one years, in order that she may bring them well up, give them good and useful learning, and instruct them in their duty to God.”

Madame Bonneville wrote, “Paine, doubtless, considered me and my children as strangers in America. His affection for us was…great and sincere.” His generous bequest to the boys in his will proves that.

In March of 1810, Marguerite Bonneville, with Paine’s dear friend Walter Morton by her side, took a stage coach to Albany, and, associated with Paine’s estate, posted a bond of $14,000—an amount that would today be the equivalent in purchasing power of about $359,973. Paine had indeed provided for his “boys”. Thomas Paine—physically diminished but with his mind still clear—died peacefully. With the reading of Paine’s will, the responsibilities for his burial and the execution of his estate lay on Madame Bonneville’s shoulders.

What of Paine’s “Dear Boys”?

Benjamin Bonneville

Paine loved the youngest Bonneville boys. After his death, Madame Bonneville, with a boost from Lafayette, petitioned Thomas Jefferson for a place for Benjamin at West Point. He rose to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army as well as gaining fame as an explorer of the American northwest. The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Pontiac Bonneville are named for him.

Thomas Paine Bonneville

Thomas Paine Bonneville did not fare as well. On January 1, 1812, now dropping the “Paine,” the adolescent Thomas became a midshipman in the U.S. Navy. He was awarded a sword of valor for his service during a fierce battle, but Thomas was a discipline problem. Heroism and discipline did not go hand in hand. Thomas resigned from the Navy in 1816. In November 1820, he enlisted as an Army private for a five-year tour, took a 2-month leave for illness, left on March 26, 1821, and vanished from history’s gaze.

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By Joy Masoff

ABSTRACT: The intellectual and political sides of Paine have had their time in the spotlight. More scholarly attention needs to focus on Paine, the person, his connections, and his networks. Few publications have examined Paine’s intimate inner circles, and almost nothing has been written about Paine as a devoted confidante, much less as a family man. Underexamined in the entire Paine corpus is the story of Paine’s role as a surrogate father and grandfather during the long denouement of the Revolution in France and the years he spent living with Nicolas and Marguerite Brazier Bonneville and their four young boys. Paine’s deep relationship with the Bonnevilles lasted for more than 15 years. This essay studies Paine’s time with the Bonnevilles in Paris during the six years he lived with them, from 1797 to 1802, as Napoleon Bonaparte began his ascent to power and U.S.-France relationships floundered.

The impressive Théâtre-Français, affectionately called La Maison de Molière in honor of the French literary icon, is the world’s oldest established national theatre. In the late 1790s, the homes surrounding it were relatively new, and the residents relatively prosperous. The Left Bank was beginning to acquire its reputation as a bohemian and artistic mecca. The street directly north of the theater square was called the Rue de Theatre Français, and it was here that Nicolas Bonneville’s Imprimerie de l’Cercle Social occupied part of the ground floor at No. 4: here that Thomas Paine’s knock on the door, one April day, changed the trajectory of his life. 

This new period in Paine’s life was transformative. In addition to fretting about the state of the world, he assumed a new role: godfather, surrogate grandfather, and family man. His absorption into family life adds a nuanced dimensionality to our knowledge of Paine. The Bonneville family was unique among Paine’s circles because their roles in his life were unique. Family became a part of Paine’s persona through their shared experiences of the revolution as ongoing unrest unfolded across Europe: through years of disruption and uprooting, and even the simple struggles of daily household existence. Several historians have dubbed Paine a “loner,” and missed this important connection. Paine’s inner circles were broader than mere political or pontifical associations, and far more than simply springboards for epistolary exchanges or impassioned editorializing. Friends and family changed Paine’s future.

WHO WERE THE BONNEVILLES? 

Paine first met Nicolas Bonneville in the early, heady days of the French Revolution, after he faced sedition charges in England and arrived to take his seat as the delegate from Calais at the 1792 National Convention. Paine had already formed several firm friendships with friends of the Bonnevilles who were members of the Girondins—especially the Condorcets, the Brissots, and the Rolands.¹ With these contacts came entry into several new networks, including L’Cercle Social, the benignly-named, initially-secretive organization that played an aggressive role in the Revolution as it unfolded. Paine’s induction into the Cercle, helmed by Nicolas Bonneville and the Catholic cleric, Claude Fauchet, firmly inserted him into the heart of French revolutionary activism. 

Bonneville (1760-1828) was a writer, utopianist, activist, publisher, and editor of four newspapers, each aimed at a different demographic. He was part of a rarified coterie of political, philosophical, and theosophical thinkers of the time, and some historians regard him as a founder of the “modern revolutionary tradition.”² His wife, Marguerite Brazier (1767-1846) was a proto-feminist and Cercle Social activist. The Bonnevilles were in the thick of Girondin politics until the rise of the Committee of Public Safety, which unleashed the Terror and led to the executions of many Girondist leaders. Paine was incarcerated, allegedly for being British, and almost died, abandoned by the U.S. Minister to France at the time, Gouverneur Morris.³ After Paine’s release from his imprisonment and long recovery, he came to live with the Bonnevilles, not sure how long he would remain. His years with the family humanized Paine, revealing a different dimension of a complicated man. The constant exchange of ideas between Bonneville and Paine— two utopianists separated by age and temperament— offers glimpses of the intergenerational inspirations that flowed in both directions and steadied Paine through this period of his life. These connections enabled the political Paine, the spiritual Paine, the scientific Paine, and the social Paine to flower in new ways. Imbued with a sense of safety that came from the warmth of his new living arrangements, Paine could focus on the many ideas crowding his thoughts.

Meeting Paine as a family man, in conjunction with his search for relevancy in the wake of the failure of France’s 1793 Constitutional Convention and his difficult imprisonment, discloses a scantily examined chapter in his life. Paine’s stay with the Bonnevilles lasted for six years, from 1797 to 1802, when Paine was finally able to return to the United States after Jefferson was elected president. Paine wrote several forceful pamphlets, and he certainly remained engaged in furthering of his cause for universal republicanism. Paine wrote tirelessly, constantly, and frequently defensively, particularly as Age of Reason continued to create blowback. Significantly, Paine was deeply invested in the triangulated political machinations of the United States, Britain, and France, as well as Bonaparte’s continued thrust into, and annexation of, regions across much of Europe. Paine’s output was largely reactive, rather than accretive. He was not building on radical new ideas, as he had with Agrarian Justice, but instead attempting to dismantle existing ones that conflicted with his own. 

AS THE CENTURY ENDED 

Despite the Enlightenment mantra that we are all created equal, societies are not, and their responses are unpredictable. Causality, complexity, and contingency all played roles in the events leading up to the Western Hemisphere’s revolutions and in the crumbling of their possibilities in France in the years that followed the Terror. The last five years of the eighteenth century saw tremendous turmoil in both the Atlantic world and the halls of governance in America. The Genêt Affair and the Jay Treaty had worsened Franco-American relations, and several events in the United States impacted Paine’s world: John Adams’s ascension to the U.S. Presidency; 1797’s XYZ Affair; and a declaration of what became known as the Quasi-War with France.⁴ It was during this period in America that Federalist hegemony in opposition to Democratic-Republican agrarianism exploded—both in the halls of Congress and across the Atlantic world— as slave revolts in the Caribbean, Napoleon’s incursions deeper across Europe, and diplomatic failures pushed the Western Hemisphere deeper into unrest. 

A NEW HOME, A NEW NETWORK

The Bonneville-Paine connection was forged at the beginning of the Revolution, during the many socio-political gatherings of the post-Bastille, pre-Terror years. In addition to sharing common notions of freedom and an unflaggingly optimistic belief in a better future, Nicolas Bonneville’s fluency in English allowed Paine to speak “in a more familiar and friendly manner than to any other persons of the society.”⁵ On the April day that Marguerite Brazier Bonneville welcomed Paine into her home, she expected him to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed on and off for six years. Many years later, in collaboration with Paine acolyte William Cobbett, Madame Bonneville recalled the statesman’s arrival and the many years spent under her roof.⁶ Her memoirs offer a fascinating picture of Paine’s time between James Monroe’s departure from Paris in 1797 and Paine’s final farewell to France in 1802. 

It fell upon Madame Bonneville—with a newborn in her arms when Paine arrived—to look after her new houseguest. Two other boys scampered around the house: Louis, aged seven, and little Nicolas, just three-and-a-half. 8 Paine loved the children, especially the new baby, named Benjamin in honor of Ben Franklin. He nicknamed the infant “Bebia,” an endearment that stuck through late childhood. A little over a year after Paine’s arrival, a fourth boy, Thomas Paine Bonneville, added to the bustle of an already hectic household and became Paine’s godson. But who was Madame Bonneville? 

Love and marriage did not necessarily go together in pre-revolutionary France, or, for that matter, in much of Western Europe. Marriage often dragged the heavy baggage of laws of inheritance, dowries, dotage, and paternity behind it. For families with any wealth, it involved elaborate financial documents with multiple pages of fiscal foreplay—more business arrangements than bonds of love: a mariage de convenance. Worse still, it could involve conjugal cruelty and forced unions. Within the Catholic Church, there was no escaping an unhappy, or worse, a brutal marriage. In Suzanne Desan’s The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, the author quotes the Comte d’Antraigue’s 1789 description of Old Regime marriage, not as a sacrament, but as “a sacrifice, a sacrilege.”⁹ 

During the revolutionary period, vigorous debates were held on how best to reform the conjugal system. Within the context of these discussions that we can best understand the union Marguerite Brazier entered into with Nicolas Bonneville and the life they began to create together. As a result, with the Enlightenment came newfound matrimonial freedom and a new framework that, to this day, informs the marital laws of many Western nations. 

When Lyonnaise-born Marguerite Brazier— the now-orphaned daughter of an activist maître pâtissier—met Nicolas Bonneville, he had not yet found his true calling. He was alternately hyperfocused or unfocused, with a kind of intellectual attention deficit disorder that kept him veering from one passion to another. Was he a philosophe? A poet? A political theologian? A journalist, politician, linguist, historian? No matter the label, he assuredly believed that he had earned the right to call himself a full-fledged member of the Republic of Letters—as well as a citizen of Paris, which had anointed itself as the cultural capital of the world. 

Meeting Marguerite sparked something new in Nicolas. If he were to be a husband, then the notion of matrimony demanded some of his scattershot attention. In 1792, he finally gathered all his thoughts on marriage—both personal and civic—and published Le Nouveau Code Conjugal.¹⁰ His ability to speak definitively on the subject owed much to his union with Marguerite. As a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, he would not have written this were his marriage a sham. The slender volume is at times frustratingly arcane, particularly in its theoretical discussions of a return to the monarchy. Should any new king only be permitted to marry a Frenchwoman?

In Le Nouveau Code Conjugal, traditional church vows were replaced with a more free-spirited pledge. “I declare, as a free man and good citizen, that I take _________as my friend and my wife.” The woman would reply “ as a free woman and good citizen, I take_________as my friend and my husband.” Friends and lovers: By combining ideals of citizenship with love and friendship, the Bonnevilles saw the culmination of a utopian ideal.

At the time, both believed that a civil union was an act of patriotism and Nicolas argued that religious marriages could only take place if the couple were first bound in a civil marriage—an oddly prescient idea that is the norm in America, where the statement “by the powers vested in me by the State of ________takes place at the end of most wedding ceremonies no matter how religious. But as radical as this ideology was, the union of Marguerite and Nicolas, proved as enduring as any marriage bound by ecclesiastical promises. As Paine settled into his rooms, he read reports of a new monarchist revival brewing, as Royalists emerged from their hiding places, eager to take advantage of the nation’s continued economic struggles to foment a new rebellion and a return to monarchical rule. This troubled Paine, so he sharpened his quill and began writing for Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé.

Living with the Bonnevilles offered a healing atmosphere for Paine: the warm and boisterous embrace of family was something he had never experienced before. Bonneville quickly became the son Paine had never had, and Marguerite Brazier, his surrogate daughter-in-law. Every morning, Paine would sleep late, devour the local newspapers, and then seek out his genial host, journals in hand, to “chat upon the topiks [sic] of the day.”¹¹ He wrote editorials for Le Bien Informé, and often found himself in the company of two of Bonneville’s great friends, Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Jean-Charles Nodier both book lovers and brilliant creative writers. 

Mercier was a prolific playwright and one of the earliest writers of science fiction. He, like Paine, had served at the Convention, aligned with the Girondins, and also ended up in prison during the Terror, while Nodier, almost 40 years younger than Paine, represented a new generation of thought.¹² He was a writer of contes fantastiques—tales of vampires and of the romantic monsters that were a hallmark of Gothic literature.¹³ Nonetheless, both Mercier and Nodier were political creatures. They spent a great deal of time with the Bonnevilles, exposing Paine to writers who were part of a burgeoning “romantic” movement in the arts that was sweeping across Europe. 

Romanticism brought a way of seeing a new and rapidly changing world. Feeling was more important than thought, and introspection more important than exposition.¹⁴ The Romantics argued that human behavior was governed by passion, not reason, and we are left to wonder what Paine thought about this.

Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé, was a work of serious journalism and was widely read in Paris. It covered politics, society, and literary events along with stock market and weather reports. In addition, Bonneville’s post-Terror printing establishment, Imprimerie de Cercle Social, offered a second journal: Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer, which was Bonneville’s philosophical playpen for his own idealistic visions, many of which read like mystical fever dreams. Bonneville also translated and published several of Paine’s political tracts, including Compacte Maritime—one of Paine’s last polemical pamphlets. 14 Paine’s association with Bonneville’s imprimerie and specifically Le Bien Informé gave him a platform, a voice, a degree of relevance, and, perhaps misguidedly, a sense of power—a bully pulpit from which he could preach about his ongoing obsession with the end of the British monarchy. Four significant areas occupied Paine as he ricocheted from politics to ombudsmanship to religion to science, and back again, often in the same day.

THE ATLANTICIST PAINE

I have been introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He’s being vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part, I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings where his humor is clumsy enough.¹⁵

—Theodore Wolfe Tone

Theobold Wolfe Tone was an Irish revolutionary and a Paine admirer. Together with James Napper Tandy, in 1791, the two Irishmen founded the Society of United Irishmen, with the organization’s goal of “the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen.”¹⁶ Paine was an ardent advocate of Irish independence and worked actively for their cause throughout the entirety of his years in France, beginning in the early days of France’s revolution. He wrote several articles in Le Bien Informé lauding the United Irishmen and their leaders, and frequently socialized with both Tone and Tandy, who had come to Paris to rouse French support for their cause.¹⁷ 

Le Bien Informé frequently reported on Paine’s interactions with both men, as well as his associations with Scots agitator Thomas Muir.¹⁸ Paine believed that a corrupt British government was the greatest threat to peace at the time. It became an obsession for Paine, to the point where Great Britain, not Bonaparte’s increasing power grabs, were foremost on his mind. Irish independence was simply part and parcel of Paine’s grander view, and, to his thinking, the logical next steps after France’s victories in Belgium and the creation of a French alliance with the Dutch in 1795.¹⁹ This allowed Paine to foment a fever-dream of his own: an invasion of Great Britain.²⁰ 

Both Paine and Bonneville had a shared flaw: what historian Thomas Walker called their relentlessly “exhilarating optimism.”²¹ Paine’s democratizing international liberalism dominated his activities at this point, yet it is a study in contradictions. He had a deep disdain for war-prone authoritarianism, yet conversely, a belief that military interventions were an acceptable price to pay for progress.²² But in Paine’s envisioned military, the incursions were won by small liberating armies—rather than large-scale invasions—and directed toward nations and states eagerly expressing a desire to transition from a monarchy to a republic. 

Paine began authoring a series of articles for Le Bien Informé, urging an invasion of England.²³ Returning to mathematical analysis as a weapon, he calculated everything from the military force needed to successfully effect an invasion to the cost of building a thousand gunboats. One month later, Paine penned a letter to the Directoire’s Council of Five Hundred, followed by a piece that appeared in Le Bien Informé the next day. In it, Paine championed an intervention entirely funded by contributions from fellow French Republicans. Paine proudly put his money where his mouth was, writing, “My economy permits me to make a small patriotic donation. I send a hundred livres, and with it all the wishes of my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of any service I can render to promote it.”²⁴

Throughout this push for invasion, Paine maintained polite relations with Bonaparte, who visited the Rue de Théâtre Français and even dined with the Bonnevilles. Who better to bring down Great Britain’s monarchy than the French general who was wreaking such havoc on Europe? Their initial meetings were cordial, and Paine, a sponge for praise, told his friend Joel Barlow that Bonaparte confessed to sleeping with a copy of Rights of Man by his bed. Many years later, Madame Bonneville remarked that Paine “was not satisfied without admirers of his success,” and at that point, Bonaparte indeed was. That admiration did not last. By 1802, according to a friend of Paine’s, whenever Paine and Bonaparte found themselves together at political gatherings, they would not speak. They simply glared at one another.²⁵ 

Paine had been obsessively devising a British invasion plan, and shared it in a long and detailed letter to James Monroe written in 1797. He praised the efficiency of small, swift gunboats—“a vessel that can elude ships of war, for its object is not to fight but to elude and disembark”—to be deployed across the North Sea under the proper wind conditions to sneak down the British coast to launch an attack.²⁶ Reading the minute details of Paine’s plan, the imaginary envisioning of an almost Viking-like offensive, and the swift crumbling of British monarchist resistance, seems nearly as dreamlike as Bonneville’s romanticist ramblings in Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer. An abortive attempt to liberate Ireland in August 1798, ended in disappointment one month later after a very short-lived Irish Republic.²⁷ Curiously enough, although specifically warning against authoritarianism in government and condemning the restoration of special privileges based on wealth or caste, Paine at first felt little alarm at the rise to power of Napoleon. For Paine, the greatest of all enemies to the French people, internal or external, was the corrupt and autocratic British government. With his eye on Great Britain, he may have overlooked the potential threat posed by Napoleon to France, so focused was he on the problem of delivering a military defeat to his sworn foe. 

THE SOCIAL PAINE 

The house at No. 4 became Paine’s sanctuary, offering him a metaphorical “throne:”a place to hold court with some of the most influential scientists, politicians, warriors, and philosophers of the age. One role that Paine loved playing was ombudsman: the man with “connections.” He was always busily introducing a needy individual to the right person who could offer help. There was an “innocent Englishwoman trapped in France with a five-year-old child, longing to get home, who Paine assisted.”²⁸ Paine connected Bonneville with a banker he knew to help prepare an loan application for Madame Bonneville to become the proprietress of a lottery office.²⁹ In a remarkable two-column bilingual letter written by Paine and Bonneville, on shared pieces of paper, the men submitted a two-language petition to free Charles Este—the son-in-law of Paine’s close friend Robert Smith—who had been imprisoned.³⁰

Paine even wrote to General Brune—a close friend of Bonneville’s and a key leader with part of Napoleon’s multi-placed strike forces—to say “I congratulate you, my dear and brave general, on your happy and glorious success in Holland,“ and then, still obsessed with the trampling of the British fleet, suggested that the Batavians would need to raise a new navy.³¹ “I have a friend, an American, who has been bred up to sea from his infancy, and is very desirous of serving under Admiral Dewinter. He is in the prime of life, brave, and a complete seaman.”³² Paine also maintained his lifeline to Fulwar Skipwith throughout his years with the Bonnevilles, facilitating help for the inventor Robert Fulton and many others. 

Madame Bonneville, busy with proofreading and child-rearing, was assigned the role of “concierge” and charged with either allowing the visitors who flocked to her door to see Paine, or offering up “polite prevarications” as she put it, when she told them he was not in.³³ 

Paine’s visitors included Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of the American Revolution, and Henry Redhead Yorke, a young British friend of Paine’s, who survived Madame Bonneville’s intense scrutiny the first time he came to visit. Yorke was an illegitimate Creole born to a British slave-owning plantation overseer in Barbuda and a free black Antiguan mother. At age six, his father brought him to England to be educated, bestowed a private income upon him, and saw to it that the lad went on to Cambridge, where he studied law. His Caribbean roots and mixed parentage placed Yorke in a position of liminality, and throughout his life, he never quite knew where his feet might best be planted.³⁵

Sociable evenings capped off Paine’s days. He frequently visited with the Barlows and their houseguest, Robert Fulton, or dined with the Smiths. Other nights, Paine would walk over to an Irish coffeehouse on Condé Street. There, a drink in hand, he would hobnob with expatriate Irish, English, and Americans to take the pulse of politics in the U.S. and England.³⁶ Constant exposure to people of many nationalities and all ages kept the cosmopolitan Paine energized and engaged even though he had no official role. 

THE SPIRITUAL PAINE 

The blowback from Christian church adherents to Age of Reason, Part the Second, was vitriolic. Nonetheless, Paine stayed the course, tirelessly defending his beliefs to whoever took him to task about them. Having gained his higher education in the company of learned people in his post-privateering London days, he found himself craving the company of likeminded deists, so Paine joined a relatively new society that began welcoming members in January of 1797. It was a lovely 20-minute walk from the Bonneville’s, past the glorious Saint Chapelle, and across the Seine to gatherings of the Society of the Theophilanthropists. Their dogma was simple: “les Theophilantropes croient a l’existence de Dieu, et a l’immortalite de l’ame,” which translates to “The Theophilanthropists believe in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.”³⁷ Rather than being an apostate, as he was constantly accused, the opposite was true. Paine’s faith was pure and deeply felt, as evidenced in a part of the speech he gave to the group.

The Universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man’s hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe, the true Bible, — the inimitable work of God. 38

—Thomas Paine

The dismantling of the Christian Church by the Committee of Public Safety had left holes in the hearts of many French citizens. Throughout 1797, Paine wrote a series of letters defending his thoughts while challenging his critics to examine their own claims of personal godliness. In a pamphlet entitled Worship and Church Bells, Paine wrote to Camille Jordan, a royalist member of the Council of Five Hundred, and reminded him, “It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.”³⁹ 

Paine’s hackles were continually raised by the clinging rigidity of some of his colleagues to existing religious traditions. It is sometimes hard to tell which he was more determined to achieve: the spread of democracy or the global embrace of a new religion of humility and humanity. 

In Prosecution of the Age of Reason, a pamphlet that Paine published in Paris in September of 1797, he confronted Thomas Erskine, a lawyer who had once defended Paine in absentia at his trial for publishing Rights of Man, and who now, five years later, had taken a Burkean path, and chose to prosecute Thomas Williams, Paine’s British publisher of Age of Reason, Part the Second.⁴⁰ Williams was found guilty and sentenced to a three-year prison term. “Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity,” wrote Paine.⁴¹

Bonneville and Paine shared another powerful spiritual bond. Both were intrigued by Freemasonry, but only as an abstraction. Despite allegations of initiation, no records of a single lodge in England, France, or the United States bear either Paine or Bonneville’s name, but both had seriously investigated the practice.⁴² In 1788, before Paine and Bonneville became close, Bonneville had written Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie.⁴³ In it, Bonneville dealt with a conspiracy theory that alleged that the Jesuits infiltrated Masonic lodges and had done the same thing to the medieval Templars. 

The famed historian of the Revolution, Albert Mathiez, described the original gatherings of the Cercle Social as an offshoot of Masonic ideology, writing, “Bonneville, the smoky and bold spirit, [was] the Grand Chief.”⁴⁴ Paine continued to march to his own spiritual drum and began amassing notes for his own study of Freemasonry.⁴⁵

At the same time, Bonneville grew increasingly obsessed by the Bavarian Illuminati, who championed universal brotherhood and the pursuit of global peace through benevolent spirituality. Compassionate globalism was Bonneville’s guiding vision, which he expressed with a romantic’s passion-tinged pen. Paine shared his sentiments but wrote more clinically and scientifically. In L’Esprit des Religions, Bonneville had also championed the creation of a “united universal association” to settle global imbroglios, which he called “the supreme court of nations.”⁴⁶ Paine had adopted that idea and included it in Agrarian Justice—both men envisioning what would one day become the United Nations. The two men, living under the same roof, working together at Le Bien Informé, socializing at a favorite café on the Rue de Marais, discussing literature and philosophy with other forward thinkers, and sharing in the antics of the Bonneville’s little boys, filled a deep ache in Paine’s soul.⁴⁷

THE SCIENTIFIC PAINE 

Politics, religion, and Paine’s occasional ombudsmanship were not enough. As he balanced a full plate of intellectual and social challenges, there was one cherished place of escape for him. When he left America for France in 1787, he created and carried models of his iron bridge. Now, almost 10 years later, living with the Bonnevilles, he had the time to focus on more than party politics and insurrections. Paine resumed his obsession with his arched iron bridge and transformed Bonneville’s study into what he began to call his “work-shop.”⁴⁹ Adding to the din of crying babies, the thrum of the presses on the first floor, and the shrieks of rambunctious children running through the hallways, came the hammering of mallet against metal late into the night. Paine had returned once more to the world of physics and the parameters of engineering: the certainty that came with the laws of nature. 

One of the reasons Paine slept late most mornings was that he stayed up late into the night. Madame Bonneville recalled, “He employed part of his time, while at our house, in bringing this model to high perfection…This was most pleasant amusement for him.”⁵⁰ The blows of a sledgehammer were now added to the soundtrack of the Bonneville home, but the good-natured Bonnevilles accepted the eccentricities of their guest. 

Paine especially welcomed the company of fellow scientists. A frequent visitor to Paine’s workshop was Robert Fulton, one of the masterminds of the steamboat. As a 12-year-old growing up in Pennsylvania, Fulton had met Paine’s Revolutionary wartime friend William Henry, the munitions-maker who had built a giant testing lab to explore steam power. Putting engineering aside in favor of art, Fulton began his career as a portraitist but found himself increasingly distracted by the lure of invention.

He began by improving the functioning of devices to cut marble, dig ditches, and twist rope, but like Paine, he was fascinated by river crossings and experimented with devising a method to make prefabricated iron bridges.⁵¹ He grew interested in the construction of canals, particularly a design with no locks, which initially led to his journey to France. There, he forged a friendship with Paine and his great friends, the Barlows. 

Joel Barlow also shared Paine and Fulton’s fascination with the mechanical arts and took the younger man in as a full-time, long-term guest, whom he affectionately called “Toot.” Together, one of their favorite topics was the notion of submarines, so Fulton submitted a radical plan to the Directoire. He eventually offered a self-funded submarine that he named Nautilus for the purpose of attacking British warships using what he called “torpedoes.”⁵² His reward for any successes would be a bounty for each ship destroyed, based on the number of guns on board. Over the next few years, it is likely that Paine, Barlow, and Fulton talked about Fulton’s submarine, which was eventually built and proved operational. It was during these gatherings that Fulton became a political disciple of Paine’s, adopting a kindred ideology, believing that with France’s help, Britain’s monarchical government would eventually be overthrown. 

During his years with the Bonnevilles, Paine worked diligently on plans for an improved crane and a machine to more efficiently plane wood, which he then used in building newer iterations of his bridge model. In 1801, writing from Paris to his friend, now president, Thomas Jefferson, Paine evoked the third law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, describing a self-propelled automotive carriage with wheels that were propelled by small bursts of exploding gunpowder.⁵³ His rapture at the ability to affect motion controllable by man rather than nature, i.e. wind and running water, was intoxicating. Paine saw the limitations of a steam engine as “impracticable, because…the weight of the apparatus necessary to produce Steam is greater than the power of the Steam to remove that weight, and consequently that the Steam engine cannot move itself.”⁵⁴

Paine thought outside the box with an iteration of a combustion engine. “When a stream of water strikes on a water wheel it puts it in motion and continues it. Suppose the water removed and that discharges of gunpowder were made on the periphery of the wheel where the water strikes would they not produce the same effect?”⁵⁵ How glorious, Paine thought, that an agent of death could be a pathway to a better future. He likened it to a poison that suddenly had the potential to cure instead of kill. 

With the end of the one-term presidency of John Adams in 1800 and the ascension of Thomas Jefferson, Paine’s old friend Robert R. Livingston was named the seventh U.S. Minister to France. He arrived in Paris in December of 1801 and called on Paine several times. Madame Bonneville remembered that “One morning we had him at breakfast, [Charles] Dupuis, the author of the Origin of Worship, being of the party; and Mr. Livingston, when he got up to go away, said to Mr. Paine, smiling, “Make your Will; leave the mechanics, the iron bridge, the wheels, etc. to America, and your religion to France.”⁵⁶ 

THE LAWS OF THE SEA

Paine and Bonneville both shared visions of a global peace and a universal brotherhood. Both men had written about it: Paine in Agrarian Justice and Bonneville, five years earlier, in L’Esprit de Religions. Paine was still impacted by his long-ago privateering experiences, still obsessed by oceanic inter-dependencies, and still angered by the Jay Treaty, so he gathered several articles and letters he had penned and put them together into a new pamphlet, Compact Maritime, which Bonneville translated into French and printed in 1800.⁵⁷ An English version emerged the following year.⁵⁸ The first part, “Dissertation on the Law of Nations,” was a condemnation of treaties, which “besides being partial things, are in many instances contradictory to each other.”⁵⁹ Paine applauded the Armed Neutrality pact, earlier proposed by Russia and signed by most of the maritime commercial nations of Europe stating, “neutral ships make neutral property,” but Tsar Paul’s death precluded its enactment. Why, Paine wondered, if this step could be taken, were there no international laws when it came to the seas? 

Bonneville was a philologist. He loved words, loved analyzing them, loved dissecting them down to their ancient roots. Paine had absorbed this habit and proceeded to autopsy the word “contraband” in the first part of Compact Maritime. If the Western world’s economy was driven by commerce, nations could not simply define contraband as they saw fit. The word in itself was meaningless. This was Paine’s first common sense stepping-stone to calling for the creation of international maritime protocols. Part II, “On the Jacobinism of the English at Sea,” was directed toward neutral nations. It was a call to action—a demand that nations assert their “rights of commerce and the liberty of the seas.”⁶⁰ Paine pointed to the fact that Britain’s power came from its commerce and not from land resources, “hence, upon external circumstances not in her power to command.”⁶¹ That made the nation vulnerable in his estimation. Part III spelled out Paine’s 10- part proposal for an international trade agreement, based on oceanic safe spaces. If all the neutral nations of Europe, together with the United States of America, entered into an association to suspend all commerce with any belligerent power that molested any ship belonging to the association, England would either lose her commerce or be forced to consent to the freedom of the seas. Commerce, Paine pointed out, was England’s Achilles Heel. Paine’s time with the Romantics led him to pen a very flowery, Bonneville-like conclusion. “…we see France like the burning bush, not only unconsumed, but erecting her head and smiling above the flames. She throws coalitions to atoms with the strength of thunder—Combat and victory are to her synonymous.”⁶² 

BONAPARTE’S REVENGE 

Combat and victory were also words synonymous with Napoleon Bonaparte’s incursions across Europe and into Africa. His meteoric rise from a Corsican expat to military wunderkind came to some degree through a series of fortuitous patronages. He had identified with the Robespierrists during the revolution, but somehow survived the taint of that association to catch the eye of Paul Barras, President of the Directoire, in 1795. During France’s protracted wars, Bonaparte’s ongoing military successes made him a hero. 

During Paine’s time living with the Bonnevilles in France, Bonaparte made several visits to No. 4 Rue de Theatre Français and made a favorable impression on both Paine and Bonneville as Paine tried to convince the General that a full-throttled invasion of Britain was achievable. There were three meetings arranged with the Irish Republicans and Bonaparte, in which Bonneville served as a translator, but little came of the efforts.⁶³ Bonaparte instead turned his attentions to Egypt, and Ireland was forgotten. 

The seventeenth of Fructidor (September 3, 1797) was a landmark day in France. A coup d’état backed by military force, purged royalist and counter-revolutionary elements from the government, and gave emergency powers to the members of the Directoire. In response, Paine began penning a pamphlet, To the People of France and the French Armies, analyzing the progress of the Republic, and acknowledging that the crisis was a result of the “darksome manoeuvres of a faction.”⁶⁴ He cited historical precedent for martial law to avoid bloodshed and to restore tranquility, perhaps as much to calm his readers as himself. In 1799, after a string of military victories, Bonaparte declared himself the First Consul of France, which led to a fast-growing disenchantment on the part of both Paine and Bonneville. Napoleonic France was a betrayal of the democratic values that so many had sacrificed their lives to obtain. 

Bonneville had been growing increasingly critical of the government through his editorializing in Le Bien Informé, and one day he went too far. He skewered the frequently silent Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyés, one of the members of the Directory, after Sieyés went to Prussia on a state visit, writing, “If there were organized in Berlin a club of mutes, [he] should be named president, the dean of silent men.”⁶⁵ The order came down to cease publishing, but Paine—always anxious to insert himself in the defense of the oppressed, wrote to the Directory and assured them that Bonneville was “honest” and “uncorrupted…a very industrious man—a good father, and a good friend.”⁶⁶ Paine’s appeal worked, but only temporarily. Bonaparte was also monitoring Bonneville (and by extension Paine) as a potential enemy of the government.” 

Soon after the Coup of 18 Brumaire—the day Bonaparte declared himself First Consul of the French First Republic—Bonneville likened Napoleon to Oliver Cromwell—a brutal autocrat who had orchestrated a genocide in Ireland over religious freedoms in 1649. In response, his presses were confiscated, and Bonneville was soon taken away and imprisoned. He would be silenced for several years.⁶⁷

Paine had the good sense to leave town, head for Dieppe on the coast, and then on to Bruges to stay with Joseph Van Huele, a former inmate at the Luxembourg, who had cared for Paine during his almost fatal illness.68 Paine described Van Huele as his “particular friend” in recognition of the terrifying bond they shared after Joseph’s brother, Jean-Othon Van Huele, was hurled from a top-floor window, as Paine and the Belgian watched in horror.⁶⁹ 

THE ROAD HOME 

Paine had made his disaffection with Washington well known after his liberation from the Luxembourg, and it had cost him dearly. His opinion of John Adams was even worse (and certainly there was nothing but overt contempt in Adams’ opinion of Paine). Not holding back, Paine dubbed Washington and Adams, “Terrorists of the New World.”69 So when news finally reached France of Jefferson’s ascent to the U.S. presidency, he rejoiced, knowing he would be able to return to the place he called his true home.⁷⁰ In March of 1801, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as president. A year earlier, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was signed, ending the Quasi-War, which gave Paine the opportunity to arrange for a safe journey across the Atlantic. Jefferson tried to send an official U.S. ship to carry Paine home, but Federalist opposition in the press created too much of a stir. 

Finally, a ship was found courtesy of a Connecticut sea captain that Paine was friends with and a departure date set: September 2, 1802. A few days before Paine was due to leave, he dined with the Smiths one last time, and after a festive evening, he remarked that he had nothing to detain him in France; “for that he was neither in love, debt, nor difficulty.”⁷¹ During his lengthy imprisonment, Lady Charlotte Smith had exchanged poetry with Paine, he writing from “The Castle in the Air,” and she replying from her “Little Corner of the World.” She fixed her gaze on him and remarked that it was ungallant to say such a thing in the company of women. In reply, Paine jotted off one final ditty to his cherished friend, called “What is Love?” In its first stanza, he wrote:

It is that delightsome transport we can feel 

Which painters cannot paint,

nor words reveal, 

Nor any art we know of can conceal. 

Canst thou describe the sunbeams

to the blind, 

Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?⁷²

But what of Madame Bonneville? Paine had often talked of the family coming to America, but the choice to leave France was not so easy for Madame Bonneville. She was left with four young boys and no means of support other than the charity of her husband’s father in provincial Evreux. Should she stay in France, or take advantage of Paine’s offer to care for her sons until her husband might be freed? Many years earlier, she had chosen dislocation, leaving her native Lyon and her siblings when she was barely 18 to travel to Paris in search of adventure. But Lyon was a few hundred kilometers away, not across an ocean. A decision had to be made. Choosing to protect her husband’s future reputation, she evasively recalled in her later memoir, “Some affairs of great consequence made it impracticable for Mr. Bonneville to quit France…it was resolved, soon after the departure of Mr. Paine for America, that I should go thither with my children, relying fully on the good offices of Mr. Paine, whose conduct in America justified that reliance.”⁷³ 

On September 2, 1802, with his stalwart friend Thomas “Clio” Rickman by his side to wave farewell as he sailed away, the men arrived at Havre-de-Grâce. Two British friends, Francis Burdett and William Bosville, bestowed a £500 gift upon Paine to help him settle in when he finally arrived in America.⁷⁴ It was not until October 30 that he finally sailed into Baltimore harbor after a treacherous crossing. He had been away from his adopted country for 15 years. He was 63 years old and worn by age, maltreatment, and disappointment—heartsick over the continuing sparring of warring political parties in America—tired of what he saw as the Federalists’factionalism, and the failures of some of the Atlantic revolutions. Still, as it has been said, “hope is optimism with a broken heart.” So Paine, always the eternal optimist, dug deep, believing that he still had the power to effect change. 

THE PATH AHEAD 

At the same time that Paine arrived in America, there were enormous changes afoot across the great swath of New France—the vast tracts of land that lay to the west of the Mississippi River.⁷⁵ In October 1802, Spain’s King Charles IV signed a decree transferring the territory to France, while Spanish agents in New Orleans, acting on orders from the Spanish court, revoked U.S. access to the port’s warehouses. New Orleans was well on its way to becoming one of the busiest slave markets in America by then. Paine had thoughts on the topic and wrote to Jefferson two months after he arrived back in America from France.

Spain has ceded Louisiana to france and france has excluded Americans from N. Orleans and the Navigation of the Mississippi – the people of the western territory have complained of it to their government, and the governt. is of consequence involved and interested in the affair. The question then is, What is the best step to be taken first.⁷⁶

—Thomas Paine 

Perhaps he could convince Jefferson to offer to purchase all the Louisiana Territory for the United States: not just the Port of New Orleans. He believed he understood the mindset of the French government in a unique way. Perhaps there was even an official role for him. Paine was not finished: There was still work to be done.

THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A TWO-PART ESSAY

ENDNOTES

1. The group that Brissot, Roland, and Condorcet belonged to, were known as the Girondins, because many of them were from Bordeaux in an area known as the Gironde. They were politically moderate with a specifically nationalistic viewpoint. Their opposition were often called the Montagnards, who had earned that somewhat sarcastic name—the Mountain—because they sat in the higher rows of the chamber where the Assembly met. The Montagnard’s interests were more focused on Paris and more radical. 
2. See Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, The Girondins, and the French Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 
3. Morris disliked Paine, and was happy to have him locked away. The recall of Morris in 1704, and his replacement with James Monroe saved Paine.
4. The Directory needed money to continue funding Bonaparte’s European incursions, and many French politicos were angry that John Jay allied with Britain in 1794, especially since The U.S. still owed France repayments for loans from the War of Independence. In 1796, France issues an order allowing for the seizure of American merchant ships. 
5. The Cobbet Papers in Moncure Daniel Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. 2, Appendix A. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 429-460 
6. William Cobbett was an Englishman who went from hating Paine, to becoming an ardent admirer. After Paine’s death, Cobbett and Madame Bonneville began collaborating on a homage to Paine and there are many manuscript notes prepared by Madame Bonneville in which she shares her memories. These were eventually included in “The Cobbett Papers” that were added to Conway’s Life of Thomas Paine. 
7. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
8. A fire at the Paris city archives destroyed all records of births, deaths and marriages. None of the boys were baptized in the Catholic Church so no records exist there. Benjamin Louis Eulalie (Bebia) was born April 14, 1797, and little Nicolas was born on December 5, 1793. These are the only two officially verified birthdates because we know Benjamin’s birthdate from his application to attend West Point when he was a teenager and Nicolas—who had been too frail to travel to America—from his death certificate when he was 15. Louis and Thomas’s ages (but not dates of birth) were cited on the ship’s manifest when Madame Bonneville sought refuge in America in 1802.
9. Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Desan writes, “if the state was now to be rooted in a contract freely chosen by the people, then marriage too, should rest on the free choice and contract of individuals.” 
10. Nicolas Bonneville, Le Nouveau Code Conjugal: Etabli sur les bases de la Constitution, et d’après les principes et les considérations de la loi, (Paris: L’impremier du Cercle Social, 1792).
11. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
12. Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740-1814) was a venerated playwright and his science-fiction novel, L’An 2440 was groundbreaking. Jean-Charles Nodier (1780-1844) was a book-lover from a young age. A librarian, he was also an ardent Romanticist and eventually gained fame for his Gothic novels. 
13. Maurice Cranstoun, The Romantic Movement, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,1994), 11. 
14. Paine had fleshed out these ideas in a series of letters to Thomas Jefferson prior to the pamphlet’s publication 
15. Theobold Wolfe Tone, The Autobiography of Theobold Wolf Tone, Vol II, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), 189.Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was a cofounder of the United Irishmen, and an officer in the French army under General Hoche, who led an assault on the Irish Coast in 1796 which failed due to bad weather. A second attempt in October 1798 also ended badly, with Tone captured and imprisoned. He killed himself rather than being hanged.
16. Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798.(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 24. 
17. James Napper Tandy (1739-1803) was also a co-founder of the United Irishmen and a friend of Thomas Paine’s, living in Paris at the time Paine was articulating an invasion plan of attack against Britain. 
18. See Ann Thomson, “Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen,” Persee: Études irlandaises, no.16-1, (1991), 109-119. 
19. A revolt in the Netherlands between 1794-1795 led to the birth of the Batavian Republic as a “satellite” republic under French auspices. For enemies of Great Britain, that belief was that the alliance, which had created a long stretch of coastline, as far south as the Pyrenees, would offer control of shipping, banking, and other resources through the combined fleets of two maritime powers against British trade and sea power. 
20. Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine’s Plan for a Descent on England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1957), 74–84. Through France’s alliance with the Netherlands, the French now had a large stretch of coastline on the North Sea from which to launch a possible invasion. The formation of the Batavian Republic in 1795 took place when the Dutch Stadtholder was overthrown and a French “sister state” was established. 
21. Thomas Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly, 44 no.1 (2000), 166. 
22. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet,” 51 
23. Le Bien Informé, Paris, Frimaire, and 25 Frimaire, An VI (December 14, 1797. Biblitoteque National de France
24. Le Bien Informé, January 28, 1798. 
25. Henry Redhead Yorke: Letters from France, in 1802, (Volume 2, London: H.D. Symonds, 1804), 339. 
26. Thomas Paine to James Monroe, “Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government,” 1797. Library of Congress. 
27. About 1,000 French soldiers, under the leadership of General Humbert staged a successful landing in County Mayo on August 22. There were three attempted invasions that summer, but none were successful. 
28. Thomas Paine to Citizen Peyel, 9 Ventoise, An 3. BNF 
29. On October 26, 1797, Nicolas Bonneville wrote to banker Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, a friend of Paine’s, to borrow money to purchase, with government authorization, a lottery office that would be operated by “the mother of his children.“ Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. 
30. Thomas Paine/Nicolas Bonneville to Senator Garat, 7 Nivoise, An 9, (December 27, 1800), Iona College/ Thomas Paine Archives.
31. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
32. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
33. Paine to Brune, November 1799. 
34. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. II, 443. 
35. For more on Yorke, see Amanda Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical: Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World (1772-1813), (London: Routledge, 2019.) He met Paine in late 1792 as a presenter for the Society for Constitutional Information to the National Convention, where he mixed with the British expatriate community, and witnessed the revolution first hand. 
36. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 438. 
37. Thomas Paine, Religious Year of the Theophilanthropists: or Adorers of God and Friends of Man, 2nd edition, John Walker, trans. (London: Darton and Harvey, 1797; For more, see Henri Gregoire’s “Histoire des Sectes,” tom. I., livre 2
38. Thomas Paine, A Discourse Delivered by Thomas Paine, at the Society of the Theophilanthropists, at Paris, 1798. 
39. Thomas Paine to Camille Jordan, “Worship and Church Bells,” 1797. TPHA. 
40. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA 
41. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA
42. Many historians assert that Bonneville was a Mason, but he was not. Bonneville offered a debt of gratitude to the “very dear and very respectable” Loge de la Réunion des Etrangers, but never joined. 
43. Nicolas Bonneville, Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie, et Leur Poignard Brisé par les Maçons, (Paris: Orient de Londres, 1788.) Bonneville fascinated by the Bavarian Illuminati, and wrote L’Esprit de Religion in response to that movement. 
44. Isabelle Bourdin, Les Sociétés Populaire a Paris Pedant La Révolution (Paris, 1910), 159, quoting Albert Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers pendant the la crise de Varennes et la massacre du Champs de Mars.(Geneva:Slatkine, 1975). 
45. After his death, Madame Bonneville edited out some of Paine’s more pointed anti-Catholic sentiments and had printed, On the Origin of Freemasonry, (New York: Elliot and Crissy, 1810.)
46. Nicolas Bonneville, L’Esprit de Religions, (Paris: Imprimerie de le Cercle Social,1793), 159-160 
47. Paine grew up as an only child after his sister died in infancy. His first wife, Mary Lambert, died in childbirth, and he separated from his second wife, Elizabeth Ollive, having never consumated the marriage. 
48. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
49. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
50. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
51. Alan Rems, “Man of War,” Naval History, Volume 25, No. 4, July 2011. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history magazine/2011/july/man-war 
52. Rems, “Man of War.” 
53. Cobbett wrote, “A machine for planing boards was his next invention, which machine he had executed partly by one blacksmith and partly by another. The machine being put together by him, he placed it on the floor, and with it planed boards to any number that he required, to make some models of wheels. Mr. Bonneville has two of these wheels now. There is a specification of the wheels, given by Mr. Paine himself. This specification, together with a drawing of the model, made by Mr. Fulton, were deposited at Washington, in February 1811; and the other documents necessary to obtain a patent as an invention of Thomas Paine, for the benefit of Madam Bonneville.” 
54. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
55. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
56. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, 456. Dupuis’s work was a study of comparative religions based on the thesis that argued that all religions have a common origin, which can be traced back to the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. 
57. Thomas Paine, Pacte Maritime adresséaux nations neutres par un neuter, (Paris: Imprimerie–Librairie du Cercle Social, 1800). 
58. Thomas Paine, Compact Maritime, (City of Washington: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1801). 
59. Paine, Pacte Maritime, 4 
60. Paine, Pacte Maritime,11 
61. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
62. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
63. A petition from Bonneville to Napoleon reveals that he served as an interpreter during three meetings of General Bonaparte in 1797 with the United Irish chief. Arch. nat. F7 4286 dos.16. 
64. Thomas Paine, To the People of France and the French Armies, TPHA. (In Foner, Complete Writings, 2.605). 
65. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
66. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
67. Bonneville was imprisoned for having hidden Augustin Barruel in his home, under the guise of hiring him as a copyeditor. But Barruel had described Bonneville as an “impudent continuator of the nefarious job undertaken by Voltaire and his acolytes,” in Augustin Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Fauche, 1803), 2:275–301.
68. “De filosoof Thomas Paine en zijn Brugse vriend Joseph Van Huele,” Bruge die Scone 4 (1993). 
69. Thomas Paine, “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter III), 29 November 1802, in Complete Writings, 2:918, 920; “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter VI), 12 March 1803. 
70. Beginning in October 1800, Paine wrote a series of letters, that culminated with his essay, Compact Maritime. In March, 1801, Jefferson offered Paine transportation on a U.S. ship, but Paine learned that his old friend, Robert Livingston, would be Jefferson’s minister to France, so decided to wait for Livingston’s arrival, hoping that he might be offered an official government role. 
71. The Cobbet Papers, 446 
72. Thomas Paine to Mrs. Robert Smith, “What is Love,”1800. TPHA 
73. The Cobbet Papers, 446-447
74. Mark Philp, Thomas Paine: Very Interesting People, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80. Burdett (1770-1844) was an English reformist politician who championed universal male suffrage. Bosville (1745-1813) was an extremely wealthy eccentric. He fought against the Americans during the War of Independence but left the battle impressed with the republican ethos. He was an ardent Whig and a very close friend of Paine’s friend John Horne Tooke. He and Burdett frequently socialized together. 
75. These territories were originally the dominion of France, but in 1762, after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainbleau the Francophile citizens of the region learned that they were now subjects of Spain. The entire Mississippi River Valley passed from Louis XV to his Spanish cousin Charles III as part of a secret pact at the end of the Seven-Years War, but this political sleight-of-hand changed little for the residents. French was still the Lingua Franca of the region. 
76. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, December 25, 1802, Library of Congress.

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When we hear the name Theodore Dreiser, we think of his novels, Sister Carrie (1900) or An American Tragedy (1925), adapted into George Stevens’ film, A Place in the Sun (1951). We tend to forget Tragic America (1931) or America is Worth Saving (1941), his commentaries on Depression-era America. 

Tragic America was almost immediately banned from bookstores and libraries. The Carnegie Library in Pennsylvania reportedly burned all copies. America is Worth Saving was critically dismissed with few reviews. The fact Dreiser joined the Communist Party in 1945 made his political ideas all the more suspect and suppressed. 

Did Dreiser draw upon the ideas of Common Sense, Rights of Man and Age of Reason? In the spirit of Thomas Paine, Tragic America and America is Worth Saving reflect upon the undue political and economic might wielded by the wealthy and powerful, and its repercussions. One may view them as the American Crisis papers for those times that tried the souls of Depression-era Americans. 

A century before Occupy, Dreiser in Tragic America declared, “…this system — which the capitalists would have us believe to be the work of sheer fate — is actually no more and no less than the absolutely planned and executed method by which the banks bring on a state of prosperity for only 1% of the people.” 

Dreiser, like Paine, viewed oligarchy as a serious threat to ordinary Americans, who were sacrificed to rich overlords by a complicit government. Dreiser, like Paine, urged populist action: “We want a government for all the people! No enormous wealth in private hands! We want efficient managers for the benefit of all Americans!” 

Undeterred by the repression of Tragic America, Dreiser wrote America is Worth Saving (1941). His Paineite invective railed against European aristocracy and American corporate leaders poised to gain large profits from the war, whatever their view of Hitler. 

Dreiser saw little difference between Hitler’s armies and the British imperialist armies that enslaved and decimated Indians, Chinese, and South African blacks. He opposed U.S. military involvement until Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. 

Dreiser’s ideas appear to echo Paine’s criticisms of British imperialism in Pennsylvania Magazine and The Crisis. While Dreiser’s interpretations run counter to Paine’s belief that war is a threat to commerce, a similar pacifism and desire for enlightenment resonates.

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By Judah Freed

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine had “democratic consequences,” said Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. 

In a February 15 talk at the Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle, Dr. Carvalho said, “By criticizing the adulterous connection between church and state, by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” 

As a result of Paine, he said, “The question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” These same debates continue today. 

Livestreaming on Zoom from the Memorial Building, the program signals growing global reach for the Thomas Paine Historical Association. 

Daniel Carvalho earned a doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 2017. He then served as a professor in the University of Brasília Graduate Program in Ideas. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution (Editora Paco, 2023).

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By Daniel Gomes de Carvalho

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the specificity of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795) in the context of the relations between liberalism and democracy in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The objective is to explain how Paine—as an English revolutionary and an actor, witness, and interpreter of the Age of Revolutions—developed a democratic vision during the period of the Convention initiated on 9 Thermidor (1794-1795) that distanced him from both Jacobin formulations and practices, and from legislations and speeches by Thermidorian deputies. To this end, we will also investigate other texts and letters by the author, and demonstrate his profound changes in relation to previous texts, such as Common Sense and Rights of Man. With this in mind, this text intends to open new perspectives regarding Paine’s work and its place in the history of political thought.¹

“The pomp of courts and pride of kings 

I prize above all earthly things; 

I love my country; the king 

Above all men his praise I sing:

The royal banners are displayed, 

And may success the standard aid. 

I fain would banish far from hence, 

The Rights of Man and Common Sense; 

Confusion to his odious reign,

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine! 

Defeat and ruin seize the cause 

Of France, its liberties and laws”.² 

– Arthur O’Connell

Written and published in July 1795, the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government was the culmination of Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) democratic theory, in which he advocates for universal (“non-census,” though still restricted to men) suffrage and criticizes its absence in the Thermidorian French Constitution, the third of the revolutionary period, enacted that same year. 

At this point, Paine was a prominent figure in the Atlantic world through various writings, especially Common Sense (1776), the main pamphlet of the American Revolution, and Rights of Man (1791), a defense of the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

No foreigner took part in the French Revolution as decisively and for such a prolonged period as Paine. Elected deputy for Pas-de-Calais, he was imprisoned by the Jacobin government in December 1793, along with deputy Anacharsis Cloots (of Prussian origin and Dutch descent), both under the justification of being foreigners. With the help of the American ambassador and future U.S. president James Monroe, Paine was released in November 1794. The unspoken reason for his imprisonment was his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI (although he was a republican, Paine was against the death penalty and advocated for the exile of the Bourbon king) and his closeness to Brissot and the Girondins. 

After being released from prison and once again serving as a deputy, Paine distanced himself from the former Girondins (many of whom were now Thermidorians) by advocating for universal suffrage. Paine’s opposition to them was not new: it is worth noting his defense of the Republic in 1790, even before Robespierre. However, such criticism eased during the Jacobin period—resisting the Terror and the de-Christianization movement became paramount. Once the Jacobins were overthrown, the divide between Paine and the Thermidorians gained momentum, a decisive factor in his return to the United States in September 1802. 

BEGINNINGS 

Paine had first sailed to North America in 1775 with a political stance that was unclear, which we could describe as leveling (a reference to the Levellers during the English Civil War of 1642–1649) and censitary, whereby only those with leisure and financial autonomy could vote.⁴ 4 In 1778, Paine wrote: 

Likewise all servants in families; because their interest is in their master, and depending upon him in sickness and in health, and voluntarily withdrawing from taxation and public service of all kinds, they stand detached by choice from the common floor. 

In that same letter, Paine, judging by Foner’s complete works, used the word democracy and democratical for the first time. At this point, however, he still viewed democracy in the pejorative sense commonly held, i.e., as a degenerate form of government: “Such a State will not only become impoverished, but defenceless, a temptation to its neighbors, and a sure prize to an invader.”⁵ This use, in the context of the debate over the independence of the 13 colonies, was intended to defend a constitutional government. 

In the context of the French Revolution, Paine began to condemn property qualifications for voting. In Rights of Man (1791), a response to Edmund Burke’s text, Paine argued that voting should be as universal as taxation, a radical proposal in the English context, where nearly all adult men paid some form of indirect tax. Only in 1795, in the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, did he openly defend universal suffrage. For this reason, Moncure Conway, who wrote the first well-founded biography of the author, stated that few pamphlets by Paine deserve more study.⁷ 

By the way, Rights of Man represented the second time—again, according to Foner’s complete works—that Paine used the words democracy and democratical, but this time in a positive sense: now, the notion of “democracy” was equivalent to a desirable, equal, representative government, one that was taking shape in the United States and France. The Dissertation, in turn, was the third and final time that the author used the term in his texts; in this case, although the idea of democracy is bolder, the word’s use is more restrained (it appears only twice in the text), as the author prefers the term “representative government” to refer to male universal suffrage, equality before the law, checks and balances, and human rights (between the two texts, there were Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which, as we will see, likely explains the different uses and notions). 

The terms “liberal” and “illiberal” appear much more frequently in Paine’s works (“liberalism,” in turn, is a term from the 19th century, as will be discussed). In most of Paine’s writings, the term appears in its common sense, referring to generosity (“my intentions were liberal, they were friendly.”⁸ Paine also described friendliness (the terms liberality and liberal sentiments are also frequent), or a specific type of education (such as liberal arts and sciences). 

However, as we will see below, according to some recent studies, the term “liberal” underwent transformations in 18th-century Anglo-Scottish enlightenment thought. Paine’s works seem to follow this movement. The term began to appear in his works in a compound form—such as liberal ground, liberal cast, and liberal thinking—and was related to forms of noninterference and non-oppression.⁹ For example, in a letter to George Washington, Paine stated that trade between North America and France was founded on “most liberal principles, and calculated to give the greatest encouragement to the infant commerce of America.”¹⁰ Another letter of Paine’s, concerning the Constitution of Pennsylvania, expresses this transformation of the term well, as here the word liberal can be understood as “generosity,” but at the same time as “non-interference” and “non-oppression”:

It is the nature of freedom to be free… Freedom is the associate of innocence, not the companion of suspicion. She only requires to be cherished, not to be caged, and to be beloved, is, to her, to be protected. Her residence is in the undistinguished multitude of rich and poor, and a partisan to neither is the patroness of all (…) To engross her is to affront her, for, liberal herself, she must be liberally dealt with.¹¹

Having made these preliminary observations, it is important to note that Dissertation on the First Principles of Government has never received the attention it deserves from historians. This absence is particularly evident among classic Paine scholars. Foner merely emphasized that the pamphlet addresses the issue of suffrage. Aldridge merely noted that he wrote the pamphlet in light of the “new constitution.”¹² Vincent only highlighted Paine’s defense of bicameralism.¹³ Paine biographers John Keane and Craig Nelson simply stated that Paine defended universal suffrage.¹⁴ Mark Philp and Gregory Claeys, the two historians who have best studied Paine’s thought, were brief: the former surprisingly qualifies it as “a summary of Rights of Man (1791).”¹⁵ The latter merely notes its limited reception. Modesto Florenzano pointed out the pivotal place of the text in the discussion about liberalism and democracy; however, his study, as it is more concerned with other aspects of Paine’s life and work, did not focus on an in-depth analysis of this pamphlet.¹⁶ 

Currently, the English revolutionary has received a substantial amount of study, both for his role as an Atlantic revolutionary and for his position neither strictly Jacobin nor exactly Girondin. However, the Dissertation remains secondary in the most recent studies on the author. Mario Feit cites the text only three times to address the relationship between time and rights in Paine.¹⁷ J.C.D. Clark claims that it “has little to say about France.”¹⁸ Thus, Dissertation, a “milestone in Paine’s career,” has never received the attention it deserves.¹⁹ However, in addition to filling an important gap, its analysis will reveal significant shifts in relation to Paine’s more well-known texts Common Sense and Rights of Man, and, as a result, will showcase facets of the author that have been little discussed, which may strengthen Paine’s place as a political thinker and, contrary to what Clark stated, an interpreter of the French Revolution.

To fulfill this purpose, this text will be structured in three parts: first, we will examine the publication of Dissertation within its context; second, we will analyze its fundamental ideas; and finally, the pamphlet will be considered within the political/philosophical debates of its time. The text, like all of Paine’s political works, is deeply intertwined with the revolutionary axis of London-Paris-Philadelphia, and can only be understood within these dialogues (although it also holds importance in other spaces such as Ireland and the Netherlands). 

THE THERMIDORIAN LIBERALISM 

Paine began writing Dissertation with the Dutch Republic in mind. However, after the fall of the Jacobin government on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor), the text was directed at the Thermidorian National Convention, as it discussed the Constitution of Year III. The Thermidorian Convention, which followed the Jacobin government, lasted fifteen months, until October 1795, when it gave way to the Directory. The day after 9 Thermidor, the deputies opposed the old slogan, “Terror on the agenda,” with a new counter-slogan, “Justice on the agenda!”²⁰ There was a new rallying cry, “restore social order in place of the chaos of revolutions.”²¹ Therefore, it was a government that sought to end the Revolution and justified itself negatively: neither Terror nor monarchy. 

The new declaration of rights replaced “men are born free and equal” with “equality consists in the law being the same for all,” just as the right to property, which had not been defined in 1789, was specified: “property is the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s goods, income, the fruits of one’s labor, and industry.”²² While still considering the Caribbean world, the Convention maintained the abolition of slavery and guaranteed citizenship to Haitians.

After the occupation of the Convention by representatives of the sections linked to the sansculottes, demanding bread and freedom, the Assembly appointed, in April 1795, an eleven-member commission to draft a new Constitution. The report was delivered on June 23. A well-known speech by the reporter Boissy d’Anglais is illustrative:

We must be governed by the best men; and these are the most educated and the most interested in maintaining the law. However, with few exceptions, such men can only be found among the holders of property who, consequently, are tied to their country, the laws that protect their property, and the social peace that preserves them. A country governed by men of property is an authentically civil society; a country where men without property govern is in a state of nature.²³

On June 6, 1795, Paine, alarmed by the direction the Convention was taking, wrote to Deputy Thibaudeau emphasizing that reverting to a censitary system would justify new rebellions: “How could we imagine that recruits willing to die for the cause of equality tomorrow would agree to sacrifice their lives for a government that had stripped them of their fundamental natural rights?”²⁴ Paine then published the pamphlet Dissertation on First Principles of Government on July 4, 1795. Three days later, for the first time since the fall of the Jacobins and the last time in his life, Paine took the floor at the Convention. The brief speech at the French National Convention is transcribed in The Constitution of 1795.

[the] Constitution which has been presented to you is not consistent with the grand object of the Revolution, nor congenial to the sentiments of the individuals who accomplished it…The first article, for instance, of the political state of citizens (v. Title ii. of the Constitution), says: ‘Every man born and resident in France, who, being twenty-one Years of age, has inscribed his name on the civic register of his canton, and who has lived afterwards one year on the territory of the Republic, and who pays any direct contribution whatever, real or personal, is a French citizen.’ 

I might here ask, if those only who come under the above description are to be considered as citizens, what designation do you mean to give the rest of the people ? I allude to that portion of the people on whom the principal part of the labor falls, and on whom the weight of indirect taxation will in the event chiefly press. In the structure of the social fabric this class of people are infinitely superior to that privileged order whose only qualification is their wealth or territorial possessions. For what is trade without merchants? What is land without cultivation? And what is the produce of the land without manufactures?²⁵

One of the more opportunistic traits of this Constitution was the “two-thirds decree,” which aimed to prevent monarchists (encouraged by the self-proclaimed Louis XVIII) from forming a majority in the assembly: in the first elections, two-thirds of the future deputies had to be chosen from among the convention members whose mandates were about to expire. Despite the fall of the Jacobins, the “logic of public salvation” remained, according to which the Revolution should be defended, even at the cost of transgressing its principles.²⁶ By the way, two important leaders, the former supporters of the Jacobin government, Tallien and Billayd-Varenne, openly spoke of maintaining terror against traitors.²⁷ 

On October 26, the Convention dissolved itself and, according to Sieyés’s proposal for the new Constitution, was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred (tasked with drafting laws) and the Council of Ancients (tasked with voting on them, being half as numerous, with members having to be over forty years old). The executive power (the five members of the Directory) was elected by the two branches of the legislature: unlike the other two revolutionary constitutions, bicameralism was established here, under strong American influence.²⁸ The Directory would dismiss local administration members without appeal, direct diplomacy, and could issue orders for arrests; in these respects, the Consulate was not a rupture but an intensification of the previous government.²⁹ In October, the election of the Directory took place; Paine, who never ran again, became an ordinary citizen.

That said, it is essential to acknowledge that, during the Thermidorian period, a version of French liberalism emerged, which we will call Thermidorian liberalism.³⁰ This version consisted of the idea that it was impossible to reconcile the participation of the population in the political process (democratic principles) with the protection of individual rights and liberties (liberal principles) in the post-Jacobin context. Therefore, in his speech of July 20, 1795, Sieyès criticized “the unlimited sovereignty that the Montagnards had attributed to the people, based on the model of the sovereignty of the king in the Old Regime”—he refers, incidentally, to the Jacobin regime as ré-totale, in contrast to ré-publique.³¹ It is clear that the tension between individual freedoms and democracy—frequently associated with the 1820s— was already present in the Thermidorian Convention. 

With these considerations in mind, it is possible to highlight the problem that is at the heart of this text, which is to explain how Paine, a Thermidorian deputy openly anti-Jacobin and concerned with individual liberties and the limits of the state, positioned himself at this moment. 

DISSERTATION ON THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT 

The pamphlet Dissertation on the First Principles of Government presents a clear and well-structured argument, aiming to introduce the author’s most radical point: private property cannot be a natural right that overrides others and, therefore, should not be used as a criterion for voting rights. The pamphlet is divided into five parts: in the first, Paine expresses his belief in the centrality of politics; in the second, he presents three arguments against hereditary governments, discussing his conceptions of nation, social contract, and popular sovereignty; in the third, he addresses representative government, emphasizing the irrationality of property-based voting; in the fourth, he defends bicameralism (a significant shift from his ideas in Common Sense and a departure from the antifederalists ), explains the role of the executive power and the rotation of power, and reaffirms the importance of education; finally, he concludes with a defense of tolerance.³² 

Paine begins by stating that there is no “subject more interesting to every man than the subjects of government. His security, be he rich or poor, and in a great measure his prosperity, are connected therewith.”³³ His goal, therefore, is to study and perfect what he calls the “science of government,” which, of all things, is the least mysterious and the easiest to understand.³⁴ From there, he moves away from classical subdivisions and proposes that: 

The primary divisions are but two: First, government by election and representation. Secondly, government by hereditary succession. 

(…) As to that equivocal thing called mixed government, such as the late Government of Holland, and the present Government of England, it does not make an exception to the general rule, because the parts separately considered are either representative or hereditary.³⁵

The revolutions spreading across Europe are, ultimately, “a conflict between the representative system founded on the rights of the people, and the hereditary system founded in usurpation.”³⁶ Thus, aristocracy, oligarchy, and monarchy are distinct expressions of the same hereditary system, which must be rejected. Paine also rejects “simple democracy” (direct democracy), considering it impractical: “the only system of government consistent with principle, where simple democracy is impracticable, is the representative system.”³⁷ 

Paine was a key figure in the Thirteen Colonies, transforming republicanism from an ethical ideal and “way of life,” as it was seen in the mid-1700s, into a practicable and desirable political regime.³⁸ At this point, he reaffirms his well-known departure from part of the 18th-century republican language by conceiving the English government not as mixed and balanced, but as aristocratic: “It is certain,” Paine wrote to Condorcet, “that certain places, such as Holland, Bern, Genoa, Venice, etc., which are called republics, do not deserve such a designation (…) for they are in a condition of absolute servitude to aristocracy.”³⁹ 

Thus, Paine proceeds to discuss hereditary governments: “there is not a problem in Euclid more mathematically true than that hereditary government has not a right to exist.”⁴⁰ He then lists three arguments against hereditary rule, all of a temporal nature: the first concerns the succession of governments; the second, their origins; and the third, the eternity of rights. 

Hereditary government is contrary to reason because, by its nature, it is susceptible to falling into the hands of a minor or a fool.⁴¹ If the uncertainty of succession speaks against hereditary governments, the same can be said about their origins: hereditary government cannot begin because no man or family is above others. “If it had no right to begin,” Paine says, “it had no right to continue,” for:

The right which any man or any family had to set itself up at first to govern a nation, and to establish itself hereditarily, was no other than the right which Robespierre had to do the same thing in France. If he had none, they had none. If they had any, he had as much; for it is impossible to discover superiority of right in any family, by virtue of which hereditary government could begin. The Capets, the Guelphs, the Robespierres, the Marats, are all on the same standing as to the question of right. It belongs exclusively to none.⁴²

In this regard, Robespierre’s power resembles the despotism of the Old Regime more than democracy. Unlike many liberals of the early 19th century, Paine did not see Jacobinism as an inherent danger to the egalitarian impulse of democracy, nor did he conceive liberty as an aristocratic stronghold, but precisely the opposite. 

Hereditary government is also inconsistent in considering the relationship between time and rights: even if a government began illegitimately, would its usurpation become a right through the authority of time? The answer is negative in both directions: the present generations have no duty to submit to the men of the past (as he had already stated in Rights of Man), nor do they have the right to subjugate future generations. Rights are timeless and meta-historical and, therefore, universal in time and space: “Time with respect to principles is an eternal now: it has no operation upon them: it changes nothing of their nature and qualities.”⁴³ It is up to the living to make politics, so the injustice that began a thousand years ago is as unjust as if it began today; and the right that originates today is as just as if it had been sanctioned a thousand years ago.

The notion that time does not create any form of right, reason, or authority is what definitively separates Paine from the ideas of Burke and those known as British conservatives. The historian Anthony Quinton describes, British conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries as aiming to preserve the historical arrangement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, which encompassed three doctrines: the belief that political wisdom is historical and collective, residing in time (traditionalism); the belief that society is a whole, not just the sum of its parts (organicism); and the distrust of theory when applied to public life (political skepticism).⁴⁴ 

For Paine, on the other hand, any nation that enacts an irrevocable law or tradition would be betraying, at once, the right of every minor in the nation and the rights of future generations: “The rights of minors are as sacred as the rights of the aged.”⁴⁵ Thus, since minors and future generations are bearers of rights, any law that violates these groups is illegitimate. Legal authority (that is, the power to elect representatives and formulate laws), for Paine, rests on the consent of living men over 21 years of age; however, groups deprived of legal authority are not deprived of rights: “A nation, though continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal and succession. It is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carries minors forward to maturity, and old persons from the stage.⁴⁶ In this ever running flood of generations there is no part superior in authority to another.”⁴⁷ 

Thus, if it is evident that when a family establishes itself in power, we have a form of unquestionable despotism, it would be equally despotic when a nation consents to establish a regime with hereditary powers. The principle of consent as a source of legitimacy is taken to its ultimate consequences and extended to minors and those yet to be born: If the current generation, or any other, is willing to be enslaved, that does not diminish the right of the next generation to be free. 

For Paine, including minors and future generations in the concept of the people and, consequently, protecting them by law, would prevent democracy from turning into tyranny; and, therefore, in Paine, “the subject of democracy must be understood as a subject that is both juridical (the people of citizenvoters) and historical (the nation that binds the memory and promise of a shared future).”48 However, democracy is historical precisely because it encompasses timeless human values and rights—the commitment to future generations and freedom from past generations is due to this unbreakable bond that would unite the living and the dead, which, contrary to what Burke and conservatives think, is not historical. 

That said, democracy in Paine is a prolonged exercise of commitment, often tacit. It is not, therefore, a plebiscitary democracy in the sense of consulting the people on all decisions, or a “permanent revolution,” in the sense of a clean slate of political organization and a total reformulation of institutions, laws, and customs with each generation; but, as he stated in Rights of Man, the idea that “A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.”⁴⁹ Therefore, Himmelfarb seems to exaggerate when she says that: “The political revolution called for in Rights of Man was a genuine revolution that required the abolition of all the heritage of the past (..,) and inaugurated a kind of ‘permanent revolution’in which each generation would create its own laws and institutions.”⁵⁰

However, it is important to note that, in the text, the author does not envision the possibility of granting women the right to vote, whose exclusion is not even discussed. In contrast to hereditary government, in representative government (in Rights of Man, he had already observed that direct democracy would only be feasible in small territories), there is no problem of origins, as it is not anchored in conquest or usurpation, but in natural rights: “Man is himself the origin and the evidence of the right. It appertains to him in right of his existence, and his person is the title deed.”⁵¹ 

Property-based voting, therefore, would produce a new kind of aristocracy, as a despotism installed within representative government. Private property, when used to strip others of their rights, becomes a privilege and becomes illegitimate:

“Personal rights, of which the right of voting for representatives is one, are a species of property of the most sacred kind: and he that would employ his pecuniary property, or presume upon the influence it gives him, to dispossess or rob another of his property or rights, uses that pecuniary property as he would use fire-arms, and merits to have it taken from him.”⁵²

If, in nature, “all men are equal in rights, but they are not equal in power,” the institution of civil society aims at an “equalization of powers that shall be parallel to, and a guarantee of, the equality of rights.”⁵³ While nature and civil society are spaces of inequality, political society is the space of equality; thus, democracy, inseparable from the idea of rights, guarantees a field of negotiation and compromise, creating the possibility of defending the poor against the rich and everyone against the state.

The inequality of rights is created by a maneuver of one part of the community to deprive the other part of its rights. Every time an article of a Constitution or a law is created in which the right to elect or be elected belongs exclusively to people who own property, whether small or large, it is a maneuver by those who possess such property to exclude those who do not: “it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting.”⁵⁴ 

Subjugating the freedom to vote to property relegates the right to choose representatives to irrelevance. Hence the absurdity of subordinating the freedom to vote to property, which, in the end, ties the right to things or animals:

“When a broodmare shall fortunately produce a foal or a mule that, by being worth the sum in question, shall convey to its owner the right of voting, or by its death take it from him, in whom does the origin of such a right exist? Is it in the man, or in the mule? When we consider how many ways property may be acquired without merit, and lost without crime, we ought to spurn the idea of making it a criterion of rights.”⁵⁵

Property-based suffrage, moreover, can link voting to crime, since, as the author reminds us, it is possible to acquire income through theft; in this sense, a crime could create rights. Furthermore, since, in a democracy, one can only lose their rights through a crime, the exclusion of the right to vote would create a “stigma” on those who do not own property, as if they were delinquents: Wealth is not proof of moral character, nor is poverty proof of its absence. “On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence.”⁵⁶

The worst kind of government, Paine argues, is one in which deliberations and decisions are subject to the passion of a single individual. When the legislature is concentrated in one body, it resembles such an individual. Therefore, representation should be divided into two elected bodies, separated by lot. Such separation of powers did not actually occur in England, as the House of Lords, lacking representativeness, relates to the legislative power as a “member of the human body and an ulcerated wen.”⁵⁷ 

The executive and judicial powers, on the other hand, would both exercise a mechanical function: “The former [the legislative] corresponds to the intellectual faculties of the human mind which reasons and determines what shall be done; the second [the executive and judicial], to the mechanical powers of the human body that puts that determination into practise.”⁵⁸ Magistrates, thus, are mere delegates, “for it is impossible to conceive the idea of two sovereignties, a sovereignty to will and a sovereignty to act.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the defense of the separation of powers remains intact to the unity of sovereignty. 

Similarly, Paine continues, power should never be left in the hands of someone for too long, as the “inconveniences that may be supposed to accompany frequent changes are less to be feared than the danger that arises from long continuance.”⁶⁰ 

It is precisely these checks and balances that faded during the Jacobin period. Paine, then, distinguishes the methods used “to defeat despotism” and the procedures “to be employed after the defeat of despotism,” which are the “means to preserve liberty.”⁶¹ 

In the first case, necessity predominates, calling for insurrection and violence, since, in a despotic regime, legal means for change are barred. In the second case, respect, pacifism, and debate predominate, so that: “Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced [of the importance of rights have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.”⁶² 

Therefore, the government following a revolution should not be a revolutionary government. By revolutionary government, Paine means—and this is the heart of his interpretation of Jacobinism—a regime that maintains the use of the means that were necessary to overthrow the previous regime:

“Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France and injured the character of the Revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and Every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next (…) But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party party governs principle.⁶³

In summary, Paine aligns himself with the predominant concern of the Thermidorian deputies, namely, to “end the Revolution.” However, the Thermidorians, by removing the right to vote from the population, resemble the Jacobins in despotism and end up justifying new rebellions. In a way, although Paine rejects, as we have seen, British conservatism and the Thermidorian anti-democratic perspective, he does not fail to aspire to a kind of liberal-democratic status quo that institutionalizes revolutionary measures and ideas, abolishing the revolutionary government and leaving no other path for change but legal means. Thus, he concludes his pamphlet with one of his most expressive phrases:

“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”⁶⁴

However, a note is in order: democracy, to Paine, will be incomplete if we think only of its political dimension. Its religious and social dimensions remain. At the time of the Dissertation, Paine wrote, in 1793, The Age of Reason, in which he presented revealed religions as anti-democratic, as they reinforced the authority of institutions and excluded the illiterate (who could not read the Scriptures) and those who had no opportunity to come into contact with the true religion from Truth and Salvation. Thus, deism would be the truly democratic religion, equally accessible to all human beings, regardless of where they were born or their level of education. In this text, Paine also discussed the importance of religions protecting animals other than humans. In 1797, he published Agrarian Justice, in which he argued that democracy would only be realized when everyone had minimum social conditions of existence and basic opportunities guaranteed—hence his idea of a state-guaranteed income for all citizens from a fund constituted by a universal tax on inheritances (at a rate of ten percent), a reform proposal that should serve as an alternative to the Agrarian Law. A treatment of these other dimensions of democracy in Paine will be done on another occasion. It is noteworthy, however, that Paine is far from reducing the democratic ideal to voting or mere political institutional mechanisms. 

In the meantime, a question arises: does Paine’s discourse, by defining itself as democratic, align in any way with the Robespierrist projects? There are several convergences between Paine and Robespierre: both converge in their critique of the Agrarian Law and in their defense of some form of Progressive Tax. The most glaring divergences between Paine and Robespierre occur, in this sense, in the political field. It should be noted that the Jacobin group did not have a ready-made program, as is sometimes assumed (moreover, there were no political parties as we understand them today), but an ideology always modified by revolutionary circumstances and which can only be qualified based on its speeches and practices. The same happened, by the way, with Robespierre himself, who oscillated in his defense of direct democracy (1789-1792), representative government (from the end of 1792), the importance of primary assemblies (changes of opinion are verified in September 1792), and the Constitution of 1791.⁶⁵ 

In this sense, we refer here to Robespierre during the months he was part of the collegium of the Committee of Public Safety. At first glance, Robespierre agreed with Paine, stating that property-based voting would create a new aristocracy, that of “the rich.”⁶⁶ However, although the Jacobin Constitution guaranteed universal suffrage, it did not put it into practice, as he stated in February 1794, it is necessary to “end the war of liberty against tyranny.”⁶⁷ To understand such measures, Robespierre said, one only needed to “consult the circumstances,” a thesis reproduced both by the Jacobins and by part of historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries.⁶⁸

Robespierre then accused those who called themselves moderates of being traitors (seen by him, in fact, as “moderantists”), for they desired a revolution “subordinated to pre-existing norms.”⁶⁹ Similarly, although Robespierre philosophically opposed the death penalty, he emphasized that a revolutionary government would require extreme measures: “The government owes the good citizens all national protection; to the enemies of the people, it owes nothing but death.”⁷⁰ Therefore, the opposition to the idea of a revolutionary government, as seen in the analysis of the Dissertation, is the crux of the disagreement between Paine and Robespierre—the tension “necessity/liberty,” capable of turning democracy into despotism, is rejected by the English thinker.⁷¹ 

It should be noted that, while Paine distances himself from the “thesis of circumstances” (usually associated with Marxist or Jacobin historiography), he also does not align with the notion, defended by a certain “liberal” historiography, that the terror was a logical conclusion of the Revolution, as suggested by Furet and Ozouf, or that violence was “the driving force” of the revolutionary process.⁷² The place of the Dissertation in the early interpretations of Jacobinism, therefore, lies in the reading of the terror as a deviation from the Revolution and a reminiscence of the despotism of the Old Regime (I hope that, thus, it is demonstrated that Paine’s text, contrary to what Clark pointed out, has something to tell us about the French Revolution). 

A DEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM 

In this sense, the moderate stance and the “preexisting norms” referred to by Robespierre touch precisely on what can be seen, from a certain perspective, as the liberal character of Paine’s thought—a key element that separates the positions of the two protagonists.

The earliest uses of the word liberal in reference to the ideas embodied in the revolutions of 1776- 1848 — no longer in relation to a specific education or vague idea of amicability (Simpkin, Weiner and Proffitt, 1989) — date back to early 19th century Spain. In the context of the Cádiz Constitution, the liberales referred to those opposed to representative government and the Constitution as serviles (servants). For example, in the magazine El Español, in 1811, Blanco White referred to the constitutionalists as liberales in reference to the impact of the French Revolution on Europe. In a letter to Jovellanos in 1809, the French general Sebastiani referred to “vuestras ideas liberales” (your liberal ideas) in speaking of the ideas of tolerance and equality that should lead the Spanish to ally with Napoleon against the Spanish monarchy.⁷³ In 1813, in the Diario Militar, Politico y Mercantil de Tarragona, we find the first known use of the word liberalismo: “if liberalism is (…) to desacralize a people, I detest being a liberal.”⁷⁴ 

That being said, it should be noted that in the realm of political ideas, the emergence of a specific denomination may not be understood exactly as an act of foundation, but as a gain in awareness (which is also a form of producing new meanings and possibilities for thought) regarding a situation that already possesses some degree of crystallization. In the case of liberalism, this crystallization process in the decades preceding 1820 is well-documented, as recent studies show. However, it is equally true that, in the absence of such a denomination, there is a risk of seeing in what has been established earlier a degree of coherence that might not actually exist.⁷⁵

In this sense—and considering the enormous variety of liberalisms throughout history—rather than thinking of liberalism as a doctrine, it seems more appropriate to see it as a field, or a vast space of thought with some identifiable degree of kinship, within which there is room for the creation and proposal of the most varied positions. As a space of thought, liberalism has limits, which defines the objective existence of this field and at the same time distances us from overly essentialist, dogmatic, or normative positions. 

Starting from these premises, we support the possibility of agreeing on the existence of a classical liberal language in the second half of the 18th century, prior to the actual emergence of the term liberalism, but which would share degrees of kinship with 19th century ideas. The elements and limits of this language would include, namely, the defense of natural rights, contractarianism, opposition to traditional privileges and corporate monopolies, the idea of a state of nature, and the defense of checks and balances against the excesses of the state and society. 

It is important to note, however, that such elements are often scattered (after all, it is only the emergence of the word liberalism that would attempt to create some unity and coherence) and do not appear uncontested in any one author. Likewise, they are sensitive to other discourses, especially republican ones. 

That said, to what extent is it plausible to say that classical liberalism is democratic? In other words, how did authors of the time deal with the issue of limiting and distributing power at the same time? 

The word democracy in the 18th century was rarely used in a favorable sense. Marquis d’Argenson (1694- 1757), in his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (1764), was one of the first to use it referring to political equality and rights (thus favored by the monarchy), rather than self-government. However, the terms Démocrat and Aristocrate did not appear in France and America before the revolutions—its first uses date back to the Dutch Revolution (1784-1787) and the Belgian Revolution (1789-1791). 

Throughout the Age of Revolutions, the term gained greater circulation, being associated with equal rights, popular government, or the primacy of local assemblies. For instance, Barnave referred to an “era of democratic revolutions” to characterize the period in which he lived. The uses indicate a fundamental transformation: in addition to being a form of government (democracy), the term also referred to agency (democrat), adjectivation (democratic), and actions (democratize). Thus, democracy meant both a form of government and a practice aimed at greater equality. 

Indeed, the three most frequent and favorable uses of the word democracy during the period were made by Robespierre (which, by the way, would later be a key reason for the word having a negative connotation in the following decades), by the bishop of Imola and future Pope Pius VII, and, of course, by Thomas Paine. The first time Paine explicitly used the term was, as seen, in the second half of Rights of Man, where he referred to democracy as a form, as well as a public principle of government, advocating for representation as a means of its realization. 

Nevertheless, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the field we call classical liberalism and democratic language in both Europe and North America were mismatched. The dominant position excluded from voting workers, salaried individuals, beggars, as well as women and children, as they were assumed to depend on the will of others. Property was understood by many as the means to link self-interest with societal interest, thereby ensuring access to political power.⁷⁶ Even in the 17th century, Locke, a highly influential author for this generation, believed that non-property owners lacked “full interest” in the benefit of society and should, therefore, be excluded from voting.⁷⁷ Jefferson, although reflecting critically on land and inheritance, viewed the condition for the existence of democracy as a society in which everyone was economically independent; like the Federalists Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, he linked voting to property.⁷⁸ Burke believed that society could not be governed by an “abstract principle” like popular voting.⁷⁹ Madame de Stäel, who attacked the Dissertation defended a more limited suffrage than that of the 1795 Constitution.⁸⁰ Benjamin Constant argued that “only property grants men the capacity to exercise democratic rights.”⁸¹ After the French Revolution, the so-called doctrinaire liberals concerned with the “tyranny of the majority” argued, as Tocqueville would later, for the need for firm dams against the democratic flood. 

Macpherson argued that the utilitarians Bentham and James Mill, the father of Stuart Mill, were the first democratic liberals. However, Bentham, in 1817, said that certain exclusions should be made, at least for a certain time and for the purposes of gradual experimentation.⁸² James Mill, in turn, argued that it would be prudent to exclude women, men under 40, and the poorer classes from voting. Stuart Mill, a proponent of women’s suffrage in Parliament, excluded from the franchise those who did not pay taxes, lived off charity, and argued that the more enlightened should have the right to plural voting.⁸³ 

A more recent historiography of liberalism brings new light to Paine’s work. In Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Freeden reaffirms that until the 19th century, liberalism and democracy were disconnected for two correlated reasons: fear of the “tyranny of the majority” and the “ignorance of the people” (themes that were addressed by Paine).⁸⁴ In addition, three recent handbooks on the history of liberalism bear mention. First is Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism.⁸⁴ Fawcett’s text does not reference Paine’s work, but James Traub’s What Was Liberalism briefly mentions Paine as someone who endorsed the revolutionary violence of the crowd.⁸⁵ After this characterization, Traub credits Madison with a view closer to ours on liberalism for considering the solution to the tyranny of the majority within, and not outside, democracy.⁸⁶ 

However, Madison’s democracy, as shown, was less inclusive in social and political terms than Paine’s. In The Federalist (No. 10, 1787), the Virginian, contrary to Paine, made an effort to dissociate republic and democracy: “democracies have always been the scene of disturbances and controversies, have proven incapable of ensuring personal security or property rights, and in general, have been as brief in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”⁸⁷ Finally, Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism refers to Paine in the chapter discussing the relationships between liberalism and the French Revolution.⁸⁸ The author makes an observation, which we believe is correct about Paine, arguing that, for him, the problem was not whether an individual or group was liberal, but whether the fundamental principles of a nation were. This observation is based on the distinction between “people” and “principles” made in Rights of Man, in his debate with Edmund Burke. 

Thus, it is possible to affirm that Thomas Paine was one of the first to present the formula of democratic liberalism, advocating a specific notion of equality and a broader suffrage than was common at the time, while still maintaining the foundation of natural rights, contract theory, free trade, and checks and balances. This combination, as seen, can only be understood in light of the history of the French Revolution and sets him apart from many of the positions that were overlooked by historians.

In Paine, the remedy for the ills of democracy and the protection of individual liberties does not lie in limited suffrage or repression, but in the refinement of democracy, understood as a limit to authoritarianism and greater political participation, coupled with a broader enlightenment of the population. The way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is not through restricting the vote, but by incorporating the lesser groups and future generations into the notion of the people, thus expanding the notion of popular sovereignty. The richness of these discussions in which Paine’s thought is embedded is, finally, symptomatic of the great laboratory of political experiments and ideas that constituted the Age of Revolutions. 

CONCLUSION 

The Dissertation is a seminal text in understanding the changes in Paine’s thought throughout the French Revolution and enlightening in regard to the problems and debates raised during the Thermidorian period, which became fundamental in the first half of the 19th century. The little attention the text has received from Paine is unfortunate. The text thus expresses two lesser-known facets of Paine: on one hand, his concern with the excesses of central power and the possibilities of a majority dictatorship, contrary to what was emphasized in most of his earlier texts; on the other hand, an openly democratic stance, which, although underlying texts such as Rights of Man, takes its most expressive form in this pamphlet—therefore, at once, a more democratic Paine, but also concerned with the potential excesses of such democracy, a rather distinct image from the Paine of Common Sense, who supported unicameralism and was hesitant about universal suffrage. The formulation of property undoubtedly as a right, but as a right less important than life or liberty, lies at the heart of his insubordination against inequalities. These changes, as attempted to be shown, are strongly linked to the Jacobin phenomenon itself and the practices of the Thermidorian government, which reveals the relevance of Paine studies for understanding the period.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Paine had his own contradictions. What, for some, is an ideological inconsistency and, for others, true political realism (since the enemies did not act within the rules of the democratic game and had international connections), he supported the coup of 18 Fructidor of Year IV, September 4, 1797, when the Directory annulled the March elections that had given the realists a majority. The Fructidor coup reinforced an authoritarian path that culminated in the 18 Brumaire coup of 1799. Although he rejected Robespierre’s “principle of circumstances” and “the logic of Public Salvation,” Paine did not, therefore, refrain from using the same tactic. In any case, Paine never denied the need for revolutionary violence, as expressed in his well-known break with the Quakers in 1776—only that, in the Jacobin period, he did not see such a need. The author also encouraged the Directory to invade Great Britain and, along with Bonaparte, devised a detailed plan for the French troops’ entry into the island and launched the idea of a vast popular subscription to finance the operation.⁸⁹ 

Moreover, the ^Dissertation occupies a fundamental place in the history of liberal thought, as I have attempted to show. I believe that today, the liberal field faces three primary challenges, namely: how to prevent inequality, in its most acute forms, from being harmful to life and liberty without resorting to authoritarian solutions? How to ensure that the purported universalism of liberty and human rights coexists with the contradictory diversity of thoughts, beliefs, and forms of existence? How, without resorting to some form of elitist dirigisme, to prevent men, by their own disposition, from renouncing democracy in favor of dictatorial regimes? The discussions about these issues can be enriched if Paine’s perspectives are considered.

1. This paper was originally published in 2021 in the Revista de História of University of São Paulo (USP) under the title “Thomas Paine e a Revolução Francesa: Entre o Liberalismo e a Democracia (1794-1795).” The generosity of the Revista de História in allowing the publication of this text in English is greatly appreciated. 
2. This poem was distributed by the Irishman Arthur O’Connell in 1798. Apparently, it was a rebuttal to Thomas Paine. However, if the first verse of the first stanza is interwoven with the first verse of the second stanza, as well as the second, the third, and so on, the result would be a subversive pamphlet, which was O’Connell’s real objective. Paine was an honorary member of the Society of United Irishmen, which advocated for parliamentary reform (Hitchens, 2007).
4. On the leveling position, see Crawford Brough Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, and more recently, Taylor; Tapsell, 2013. 
5. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, I, (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 287. 
6. Foner, The Complete Writings, 277 
7. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 161-162. 
8. Foner, The Complete Writings, 1238
9. Foner, The Complete Writings, 61, 127, 237. 
10. Foner, The Complete Writings, 715. 
11. Foner, The Complete Writings, 284. 
12. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1959). 225. 
13. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989. 
14. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1995; and Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations, (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006
15. Philp, Mark. Paine. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 21; and Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought, (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 
16. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
17. J.C.D. Clark, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 359-362. 
18. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
19. Carine Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. (Cham: Springer, 2018), 235
20. Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 421. 
21. Albert Soboul, A Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Difel, 2003), 108. 
22. Jean-Clément Martin, La Revolución Francesa: Una Nueva Historia. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019), 447. 
23. Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution,(London: Hachette UK, 2019), 448. 21 Foner, II, pg. 968. 
24. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989), 258.
25. Foner, The Complete Writings, 590. 
26. François Furet, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 50. 
27. Richard Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 
28. Nora citation is missing, 1988. 
29. Soubel, A Revolução Francesa.
30. Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, 429. 
31. Popkin, A New World Begins, 420, 450. 
32. It is important to remember that, at the time of the publication of Common Sense, John Adams stated that Paine’s pamphlet was “o democratical, without any restraint or even an Attempt at any Equilibrium or Counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every Evil Work” (Bailyn, 2003, p. 262). During the French Revolution, in a text likely written in 1791, Paine wrote an interesting and little-known pamphlet, organized around questions and answers, called Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Powers. The first of the four questions (which by itself is representative of the urgency of the issue) concerns the possible abuses of the executive and legislative powers. Paine is then emphatic in stating that, “If the legislative and executive powers be regarded as springing from the same source, the nation, and as having as their object the nation’s weal by such a distribution of its authority, it will be difficult to foresee any contingency in which one power could derive advantage from overbalancing the other” (Foner, 1945, p. 522). Therefore, there is an important shift in Paine’s thinking, which occurs in light of the Jacobin practices, namely, the greater importance of checks and balances in political structures. 
33. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
34. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
35. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571-572
36. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572. 
37. Foner, The Complete Writings, 584. 
38. Franco Venturi, Utopia e reforma no Iluminismo. (São Paulo: Edusc, 2003). 
39. Jonathan Israel, A Revolução das Luzes: O Iluminismo Radical e as Origens Intelectuais da Democracia Moderna. São Paulo: Edipro, 2013. 
40. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572-573. 
41. Foner, The Complete Writings, 573. 
42. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
43. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574.
44. Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott. (London: Faber, 1978). 
45. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
46. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
47. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
48. Pierre Rosanvallon, El momento Guizot: el liberalismo doctrinario entre la Restauración y la Revolución de 1848/Le moment Guizot, (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2015), 90. 
49. Foner, The Complete Writings, 254 
50. Gertrude Himmelfarb, La Idea de Pobreza: Inglaterra a Principios de la Era Industrial, (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 116.
51. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
52. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
53. Foner, The Complete Writings, 583. 
54. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
55. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
56. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579
57. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
58. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
59. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
60. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
61. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
62. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
63. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587-588
64. Foner, The Complete Writings, 588. 
65. Furet, François, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 320. 
66. Žižek, Slavoj. Robespierre: Virtude e Terror. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Zahar, 2007), 53. 
67. Žižek, Robespierre, 144. 
68. Žižek, Robespierre, 146
69. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
70. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
71. Ruy Fausto, “Em torno da pré-história intelectual do totalitarismo igualitarista.” Lua Nova, no. 75 (2008): 143–98. 
72. Schama, Simon. Cidadãos: Uma Crônica da Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989)689. 
73. Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Obras Completas, Vol 1, (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 590-591. 
74. Vicente Lloréns, “Sobre la aparición de liberal.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 12, no. 1 (1958): 53–58. 
75. Daniel Klein showed how, in English the word “liberal” underwent a dual transformation in the second half of the 18th century: both quantitative, as the word began to appear more frequently after 1760; and qualitative, as it started to appear in compound forms (“liberal policy,” “liberal views,” and “liberal ideas.” It was associated with the idea of free action, free trade, and non-intervention. The change was not drastic, and as seen in Paine’s work, the term displays clear polysemy. For example, Dugald Stewart, in the 1790s, presented Adam Smith as a representative of the liberal system and as someone who thought of “freedom of trade” as distinct from “political freedom” (the latter, for him, being typical of the French Revolution). See Rothschild, 2003; Klein, 2014; and the text by Robertson in Clark, 2003
76. Rothschild, Emma. Sentimentos econômicos: Adam Smith, Condorcet, e o iluminismo. (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2003.) 
77. Crawford Brough Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo: De Hobbes até Locke. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1979).
78. Arendt, Hannah. Da Revolução. (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1988). 
79. Burke, Edmund. Reflexões sobre a Revolução na França. (São Paulo: Edipro, 2014), 36. 
80. Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles et autres essais politiques sous la Révolution. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009). 
81. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements. (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 113. 
82. Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo, 40. 
83. John Stuart Mill, Considerações Sobre o Governo Representativo. (Brasília: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1981). 
84. Michael Freedon, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 84 Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 
85. James Traub, What Was Liberalism?: The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea. (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 18. 
86. Traub, What Was Liberalism,? 23. 
87. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. (Tese livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999), 10. 
88. Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 47.
89. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, O pensamento radical de Thomas Paine (1793-1797): artífice e obra da Revolução Francesa. Tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.8.2018.tde-12062018-135137. Acesso em 15 de fevereiro de 2020.

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Dr. Polin is Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, and Mrs. Polin is his co-reseorcher and co-author of a work nearing completion on American political thought.

Quo warranto?

By what warrant, right, or authority may a government perform such acts and functions as make law, tax, regulate industry and education, try, fine, imprison, and even execute; and such additional duties as maintain armed forces, enter into treaties, make war and peace, set standards of measurement, license medical practice, erect roads and bridges, control the traffic that travels over them or through the air, conduct elections, and grant or recognize citizenship?

A simple answer that states the encompassing principle that can legitimate a government’s exercise of such numerous and varied powers was penned by Thomas Jefferson in the dictum in the Declaration of Independence that, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The means of giving consent in a proper way for a government to have widely known, proper powers, limitations, and duties is Thomas Paine’s concern in his treatment of constitutions. Paine purposed to realize for every individual, as much as possible, the God-given natural rights and liberty of mankind. Such a goal for any nation, Paine believed, is best and most easily accomplished through the agency of a constitution that by its sequence of adoption and substantive content accorded with what he advocated in Rights of Man (1791-92).

Paine takes care to eliminate from consideration, therefore, any consideration that a governmental contract could be the basis of a valid constitution or legitimate government. A governmental contract was one that followed the rationale of a feudal relationship contract: between unequals and often entered into under duress; Paine argued especially against its usual provision of translatio: translation or permanent alienation (transfer from) of a title (i.e., legal ownership of a property). Here Paine was reaffirming that our God-given natural rights and liberty cannot be alienated from us. Paine therefore responds energetically to Edmund Burke’s obsequiouslv employed illustration in his Reflections on the Revolution in France ( 1790) that recounted use of translatio (permanent and unlimited transfer) to vest the British monarch with assertions of sovereignty in a declaration by Parliament to William of Orange and Mary in 1688:

“The Lords Spirirual and Temporal, do, in the name of the people aforesaid.- (meaning the people of England then living) “most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for EVER.” He also quotes a clause of another act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which, he says, “bind us,” (meaning the people of that day) “our heirs and posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time.”

Paine indignantly retorts:

“Every age and government must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

What Thomas Paine favors as the basis of a constitution is a social contract, an agreement among “We, the People” as equals, to set up an arrangement or constitution that is limited in kinds and duration of grant of power: i.e., it is predicated on the principle of concessio (concession of limited extent of power that is conditional and therefore withdrawable when performance is not satisfactory). Paine regarded the recent American state and Federal constitutions as examples of social compacts and proper constitutions that enabled their governments to exercise their powers justly because limited in substance and as to due process, including method of amendment.

Paine stipulated prior adoption by the people-not the government – as a necessary authorization for institution or alteration of a constitution. Thus, he agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s statement in Federalist No. 22 that, “The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” Paine presented the same idea but required the sequence of popular action beforehand:

A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government.

Paine reiterates: “A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution, is power without a right.”

For Paine, a constitution should provide the fundamental rules according to which the government is organized and operates as it decides on policies, maintains public order and safety, and protects liberty. He succinctly states: “The American Constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.”

Paine’s definition of a constitution, is not as inclusive, flexible, or authoritative as the standard one by Lord Bolingbroke (Viscount Henry St. John) in his 1733 work, A Dissertation upon Parties. Bolingbroke properly allowed for traditional, unwritten, or partially written, constitutions as well as written ones of the type Paine demanded. Paine, instead, was a more tendentious polemicist who wanted to show that the British monarchical government was exercising unconsented-to power in ways dangerous to her own and other peoples; and he also wished there to be an order of procedure that would be more likely to produce: (1) the consent of the people as a whole to a constitution; and(2) a definite, widely known description of the limits as well as powers of the government, so that the people would be more secure from and better served by it.

We should not conclude without asking when would Thomas Paine have been satisfied with a constitution? Paine himself gives us an answer:

When it shall be said in any country in the world, “My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness” – when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

Finally, we should ask what most motivated Thomas Paine in developing his socio-politico-economic agenda? Clearly, the goals he set in his statement about the kind of constitution and country he wanted, were understood by him not to be fully achievable in his lifetime; but he felt compelled to declare them in order to encourage mankind to persist in the brave new era of the Enlightenment to make a better world by following deistic-Quaker religious principles. The central purpose of these teachings was to help one another, especially when in need.

In a footnote to his “Observations on the Declaration of Rights” (1791), Paine writes of an original pactum divinum (“a covenant with the Lord”) that antedates and outranks all other pacts and authority of government: “a compact between God and man, from the beginning of time.” In accordance with this covenant, we are commanded by God to love and serve one another and to keep also God’s other commandments. Thus, the much misrepresented Paine, although by no means saintly in attitude or behavior, was in fact sincerely devout in the best sense of the word: doing God’s will. Paine’s political thought and life of action should therefore be understood as deriving mostly from his religious faith and faithfulness to the word of God as he was taught and perceived it:

It is time that because of his wise words and brave deeds, Thomas Paine should be regarded as “a son of the commandments” that constitute “a covenant with the Lord.”

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By Richard Briles Moriarty

Thomas Paine and the banning of his works have long been intertwined. Suppression of his Rights of Man by the English government raged as he joined the French National Convention. 

After King Louis XVI was convicted of treason in 1792, Thomas Paine argued that the former king had become “Citizen Louis Capet.” Rather than execute him, Paine said he should be banished to America for immersion and education in republican principles.

During his startlingly bold presentation to the French National Convention, Paine quoted Robespierre’s arguments in 1791 that “the death penalty is essentially unjust and… the most repressive of penalties,” that it “multiplies crimes more than it prevents them” and constitutes “cowardly assassinations” through which one crime is punished by another. 

As Marat assaulted Paine’s arguments, Robespierre remained silent, but likely gritted his teeth as Paine quoted his own eloquent and unanswerable plea against capital punishment. Paine’s persuasiveness nearly turned the tide. 

Paine’s position was dramatically more radical than that of Robespierre and Marat. Instead of treating Louis as a king gone bad, Paine proposed, consistent with his arguments since Common Sense, that all kings, simply because they are kings, are tyrants. 

Paine’s arguments were dangerous to the increasing yet tenuous dominance of Robespierre and the Jacobins. His plea not to kill the king was published by the French government in 1792, yet Paine’s efforts resulted in his 1793 imprisonment. 

Now jump ahead in time. Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, sculpted an eight-foot statue of Paine for unveiling in Paris on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1937. The statue showed Paine pleading to the National Convention to spare Louis Capet. 

When Nazi Germany conquered France, the statue was hidden from the Vichy Government, which at the instigation of the Nazis ordered removal of all “statues and monuments of copper alloys situated in public places and administrative locales,” purportedly “to recycle the metallic components for industrial production.” The real purpose was sending metals to Germany for recycling into military uses. 

In 1945, W.E. Woodward predicted that Borglum’s hidden statue would be unveiled in Paris in the near future, which it was in 1948. Despite plans for moving the statue to America, it remains far more appropriately in Paris on display in Parc Mountsouris. 

During World War II, Borglum’s statue was at risk less because Paine’s books were banned by the Nazis — although they were — and more because military lust demanded metal. 

Governments purportedly devoted to free speech are hardly immune to banning Pane’s books. 

R. Wolf Baldassarro observed in a 2011 blog post, “Banned Books Awareness: Thomas Paine,” that Common Sense in the 1950s was barred from U.S. Information Service libraries during the McCarthy era by the government of the United States of America, the country whose name and perhaps existence Paine created through that very pamphlet. 

For more than a quarter-century, from 1795 to 1822, Paine’s The Age of Reason was banned in the United Kingdom, reports The Banned Books Compendium by Grigory Lukin. He noted that an English publisher of The Age of Reason was sentenced in 1797 to a year of hard labor. 

In 1819, Richard Carlile was prosecuted because he included The Age of Reason in a collection of Paine’s works. Carlile read the entire book into the court record, ensuring even wider publication. He then was sentenced to a year in prison. Carlile actually served six years, Lukin wrote, because “he refused any ‘legal conditions’ on his release.” 

Lukin identified the 32 books most often banned worldwide. Two of those books, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, were authored by Paine. 

As true from Common Sense forward, governments purporting to support democracy and free speech will resist the radical impact of Paine’s thoughts. People themselves can seek out his thoughts, absorb and act on them, a bottom-up legacy which would make Paine rejoice. 

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La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique. Carine Lounissi. 894pp. Paris Honore Champion 2012. ISBN: 978 —2-7453-2359-0. £139.06. 

This fundamental contribution to Paine’s political thought, based on a Ph. D thesis at the Sorbonne, deserves to be translated into English so that it becomes available to all Anglophones interested in the subject. Dr Lounissi places his writings in context by examining the literature on which he apparently drew for inspiration, and also by discussing the often hostile reactions that they provoked. 

One can only say that previous political thinkers appear to have influenced Paine because he notoriously cited very few authorities in his publications and insisted that his ideas were original. Thus when critics dismissed Common Sense as being derived from John Locke he denied that he had ever read Two Treatises of Government. There were contemporaries who took him at his word that his political thought was homespun. Edmund Burke declined directly responding to the Rights of Man claiming that Paine had ‘not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of study or thinking—for the use of it’. 

Notwithstanding this, commentators on Paine’s political philosophy have sought to trace it back to previous philosophers. Thus despite his own disclaimer some have insisted that he was influenced by Locke since, even if he did not read his works, Lockean ideas were ‘in the air’, or he absorbed them ‘by osmosis’. Lounissi concludes that, while at first sight Paine’s thought often seems Lockean, on a deeper comparison between them differences emerge. For example both place the origins of government in a contract in which individuals agreed to set one up. Superficially these are similar if not identical models. But on closer examination they have significant differences. Locke accepted any government which was established by the contract — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or, as he claimed was the case in England, a mixture of these. Paine by contrast denied that the original contract could set up any hereditary form of government since it could not bind future generations. Only a polity in which the people had a voice was legitimate. 

Despite her scepticism Lounissi concludes that Paine’s contractual theory was sown in a Lockean soil. She also finds echoes in Paine of the contractual theories of Algernon Sidney and Rousseau. On the latter she is on firmer ground as Rousseau was one of the writers whom Paine did cite, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and other philosophes, in Rights of Man. One of Paine’s hostile critics lamented that France had been a ‘generous and gallant nation’ before it was ‘unhappily sophisticated by the late — forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine’ As with all direct quotations from English authors Lounissi commendably translates this into French in the text but quotes the original in her footnote on page 185. 

The footnote cites the original in the edition of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys, in eight volumes published by Pickering and Chatto in 1995. These publishers have rendered a great service to students of Paine with this publication and also that of Thomas Paine and America 1776 — 1809, published in six volumes in 2009 of which Kenneth Burchell is editor. In her discussion of the reception of Paine’s works Lounissi draws frequently on these collections of contemporary works. 

It might be expected that a French scholar would be more informed about Paine’s career in France than about his activities in America. Dr Lounissi, however, is a specialist in the civilisation of the United States at the University of Rouen, with a particular interest in the history of the early Republic. Her book demonstrates familiarity with politics and political theory on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Thus she points out that the constitutional arrangements for the United States outlined in Common Sense owed much to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for a union of the colonies spelled out at the Albany Congress of 1754. 

Although his proposals were sketchy, leading some to argue that Paine was more concerned with the negative task of bringing down governments rather than the positive problem of replacing them, Lounissi shows that in America he did contribute to the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era. He was not directly involved in the drafting of the radical constitution for Pennsylvania in 1776. This did not prevent his critics, led by John Adams, from associating him with its provisions for a unicameral legislature elected annually by universal adult male suffrage. He certainly supported it, at least initially, in several publications. Again he had no part in the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 which resulted in the American Constitution, being overseas in England at the time. But he did approve it to the point of recommending its adoption by the British. 

Paine did have a direct input into the drafting of the abortive French constitution of 1793, being appointed to the committee chaired by Condorcet charged with drawing it up. Unfortunately, as Lounissi points out, it is impossible to discern precisely what his role in the process was, though she does deduce that parts of the document were influenced by passages in Rights of Man, while the prefatory declaration of rights owed much to Paine too. He also had a say in the debates which resulted in the setting up of the Directory in 1795. Although his contribution to them, mainly objecting to the restriction of the franchise, has been long known, Lounissi’s familiarity with the French sources adds details not available elsewhere. 

She also demonstrates a formidable knowledge of English sources. For example, she places discussion of the welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice in the context of the debate on the poor laws in the late eighteenth century. Her research unearthed an anecdote about Paine unknown to his biographers. Thomas Ruggles, in The History of the Poor published in 1793, recounted how he had recently sat next to Paine at a dinner, who informed him that, when his grandfather was an overseer of the poor at Thetford fifty years before, the poor rate was under £40. Now it was between £300 and £400. “In a short time if this evil is not stopped the friends of liberty will, with the greatest ease, walk over the ruins of the boasted constitution; its fall wants no acceleration from the friends of Gallic freedom.’ To this a gentleman instantly replied ‘Thomas, thy wish is father to the thought’.” 

After discussing Paine’s ideas on poverty and property Lounissi proceeds to investigate his republicanism. She concludes that he was not a republican in the eighteenth — century tradition of the commonwealthmen. These, also known as classical republicans, argued that governments always sought to reduce the liberty of their subjects and that it was the duty of the virtuous citizen to be constantly vigilant to detect attempts to do so and resist them. One method rulers employed to distract citizens from their machinations was to corrupt them, for instance by encouraging trade in luxury goods, which allegedly reduced their will to defend their rights. Classical republicans were therefore opposed to commercial expansion. Paine by contrast welcomed commerce and industry, not only because they stimulated economic growth but also because he believed free trade helped to disseminate ideas of liberty in other areas of human activity. 

Lounissi also investigates Paine’s credentials as a historian. He announced his intention of writing a three – volume history of the American Revolution and then of giving an historical account of the French Revolution. Neither of these ambitious projects was ever realised. As she observes, Paine had a certain talent for missing rendezvous with historiography. His only major contribution to the history of the American Revolution was an open Letter to Abbe Rayne! objecting to his interpretation of it. Raynal put the quarrel between Britain and the colonies down to a dispute about the right to raise taxes. Paine insisted that the British government all along plotted to provoke the Americans into violent resistance to its measures in order to deprive them of their liberties. 

Paine absorbed what he had so far written on the Revolution in France into the first part of Rights of Man. Just as his account of the American conflict was written to correct Raynal, as Lounissi observes, so that of the French was to put Burke right. She checks Paine’s account of the events he describes and demonstrates that he frequently got them wrong. In summing up his accounts of the two revolutions she concludes that he was more a theorist than a historian of them. 

Paine’s second sojourn in America, following his return from France, is a period of his life that has been frequently skipped over quickly. Yet during his last few years Paine continued to publish quite prolifically. Lounissi and another French scholar, Marc Belissa, are now doing justice to his later works. For as Lounissi points out, even if these publications did not necessarily add new aspects to his thought, they are nevertheless important. Thus his political writings against the Federalists led by John Adams contributed to the debate over whether the ideals of the American Revolution were in danger until they were rescued by Thomas Jefferson. 

After dealing with Paine’s last years Lounissi ends the book with another account of his political activities in France. Thus she goes into detail on his role in the trial of Louis XVI, and publishes three appendices of contributions he made in the debates on the king’s fate. Two of them have not previously appeared in any collection of his writings, while only inaccurate versions of the third were ever published. 

This exhaustive investigation of Paine’s political thought, which covers all his speculative writings except those on religion, is a colossal achievement. Its range is indicated by the bibliography, which takes up sixty five pages. It is a pity that the index is confined to the names of people mentioned in the text, and even then omits some. But a comprehensive index would have made an already lengthy book unwieldy and more expensive. 

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Thomas Paine, an Englishman born in 1739, first became interested in politics when he was living at Lewes in Sussex. Here he joined the Headstrong Club, a society for young men who wished to debate current affairs, politics and poetry. Subsequently he went to work in London where he attended meetings of the Royal Society. Here he had the opportunity of meeting many learned men. This was the beginning of his programme of self-education. In London Paine met specialists in many fields. The one, which intrigued him most, apart from politics, was astronomy, and he drew on his knowledge of this subject many years later when he was writing The Age of Reason. Books on Paine have been published by scholars’ seeking to salvage him from oblivion. However they have either aimed their works at other scholars or have failed to reach a popular audience, beyond the academic community. Politicians and polemicists regularly quote him as one of their own; but they usually invoke him only by pulling a phrase out of his texts for present- minded utilitarian purposes. Such partial references to him offer no sense of the man, and distort him into a convenient icon. But, Paine is too important a leading political philosopher of his day, too significant in his exposition of democratic thought and prophecy into the future, to merit this treatment. This paper will discuss Paine’s involvement in the American and French Revolutions. Though he participated in a wide range of activities related to these events, his most effective contribution was through his writings, Paine’s involvement in the American War of Independence will be considered in two sections, relating to “Common Sense and the Pennsylvania Magazine”, and “the War of Independence against the forces of King George III” together with the Crisis pamphlets. This paper will then set out Thomas Paine’s involvement in the French Revolution, covering his “Reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution”, “Paine’s the Rights of Man”, and the “French National Assembly and Committee to formulate the Declaration of the Rights of Man”, and finally “Thomas Paine’s return to France for the next 10 years.”

At present work is being done both in North America and in England (Gary Berton, past President of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, on the Committee of their Journal and their Research Committee and Audrey Taylor. Assistant Honorary Secretary or the Thomas Paine Society in England), which is aimed at authenticating how much the American Declaration of Independence depended for content and form on Thomas Paine. It is well known that Paine came close to losing the fight to establish democracy within the ruling circles in the American Colonies, because of the wish of John Adams, an American Federalist Congressman, who wanted to have a monarchy in the new United States of America. Paine would never have accepted this, because, to him, democracy was everything.

Paine’s Involvement In The American War Of Independence 

Works arrived from Moscow and were translated from Russian into local languages. Therefore it can be said that Thomas Paine was influential from his lifetime to the present day whenever a country has sought its independence.

This was the first indication of Thomas Paine’s influence after he wrote Common Sense in which he finally recommended a separation from Britain of these Colonies which he named the United States of America. Thomas Paine decided to join the Colonists’ Army following the British Army’s massacre of the British Colonists at Lexington and Concorde. He was then asked to become our equivalent of a war correspondent and then he wrote the American Crisis series. When there was a tremendous shortage of money in America he made a visit to France to ask them for financial help, which Louis XVI was only too willing to make. By the end of the War of Independence the British Colonists were ready to prepare their Declaration of Independence in which they set forth the rules by which their new country would be run, as suggested by Thomas Paine. 

Unfortunately they did not take his advice where slavery was concerned and so had to wait for the outcome of the Civil War before being forced to give slaves their freedom. Paine told the founding fathers that they were unjust in demanding their freedom from Britain when they were not giving freedom to their slaves, who were separated from their families and never paid. 

American War of Independence and the Crisis 

Series Paine enlisted in July 1776 with the ‘flying camp’ , a mobile body of one thousand men forming the militia of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Paine was attached to the Pennsylvania division. He served first as volunteer secretary to General Roberdeau and then at Fort Lee on the western bank of the River Hudson, where he became aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Green, retreating with the Continental Army to its winter base in Brunswick, New Jersey. 

In Modern terms, Paine was asked to be a war correspondent, enlarging on his series of pamphlets called Crisis (December 1776 to December 1783) on the ideas and principles first . sketched in Common Sense, which had crystallized, at least in part, in the Colonists’ bold Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. They began at a genuine moment of crisis for the American troops. In the summer of 1776, the American army had retreated across the Hudson River to New Jersey: Among Americans hatred of the British army ran high: They were as Paine noted, with some sharpness, in many cases not even British, but Prussians, Brunswickers, German dragoons and Indians with scalping knives. There were even Russian soldiers with their typical weapons the knout. 

George Washington, leader of the Colonists’ Army, could only muster five thousand men at the Delaware River, although later they were joined by General Williamson’s group of soldiers and the Philadelphia militia. This was all the Americans who were available to fight the entire force of soldiers led by the British General, Sir William Howe. Washington had been pressed back along the Hudson River, while Howe occupied Manhattan Island, Long Island and Staten Island, and in December, Paine says that Washington wrote sadly: 

“Your imagination can scarce extend to a situation more distressing than upon the speedy enlistment of a new army. If this fails I think the game will be pretty well up, as from disaffection and want of spirit and fortitude, the inhabitants, instead of resistance, are offering submission and taking from General Howe in Jersey.” (Quoted in Paine’s The first Crisis, 23rd December 1776)

The army’s situation as Washington had informed the President of Congress, was extremely bad as many of the troops were so thinly clad as to be unfit for their jobs. It was a bitter, icy winter with Arctic winds penetrating the men’s scanty clothes and with their feet wrapped in rags, owing to the lack of shoes and supplies. In November, Fort Lee had been surprised and Paine with the soldiers of Washington’s Army had retreated in haste, abandoning the boiling kettles and much-needed food baking in the American ovens, to the British. 

To his relief Paine had discovered that he did not lack physical courage. However he discovered a different weakness and wrote of it in one of the earliest issues of Crisis, addressed to Howe. He wrote with typical sympathy of a soldier’s psychological problems: 

“We cannot alter nature, neither ought we to punish the son because the father got him in a cowardly mood. However, I believe most men have more courage than they know of, and that a little at first is enough to begin with. I knew the time when I thought the whistling of a cannon ball would have frightened me almost to death: But I have since tried it and from that I can stand it with as little discomfort, and, I believe, with a much easier conscience than your lordship.” (Ibid)

His sincerity was not in doubt When Paine was at Trenton with the Pennsylvania Navy Board, he urged the men to set fire to the British fleet on the Delaware River, and was restrained with difficulty from personally carrying out the project. In December 1776, alarmed by American defeats and determined to bolster the cause of independence, Paine published the first of 4 his Crisis essays, (Ibid) which built upon the foundation of Common Sense. Washington’s great Christmas victory at Trenton, a notable turning point of the war, was achieved by troops heartened and inspired by this publication. No.1 contains the most quoted passage that Paine ever wrote: 

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” (Ibid)

Refuting British arguments for American surrender, rallying the Americans’ morale and exhorting the Revolutionaries to continue the war, Paine carefully timed his essays and other articles for maximum political effect. The Crisis series proved as popular and successful as Common Sense, although once again he was never paid for these works. Paine’s series provided ample reason for George Washington and other leaders to esteem him and value his writings as essential to the maintenance of the American cause. 

In April 1777 Paine became secretary to the Continental Congress’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, a title that Paine later shortened, misleadingly, to Secretary for Foreign Affairs. As he worked constantly for the Revolution and urged the creation of a truly national knit of government for the fledgling United States of America, Paine allowed himself to be drawn into the factional in-fighting of the Continental Congress. It was here that Paine showed that his sharpness in writing political documents was not matched by equally sharp debating skills, and this soon became evident to his friends and to his enemies as well. 

Thomas Paine’s problem was that he was a seeker of truth, totally unable to’ countenance anything underhand or corrupt. Quite undiplomatically he wrote and published his views about this, using his pen name Common Sense. It seemed to him (and he was later to be proved right when letters belonging to the persons concerned came to light), that some American notables, as well as several foreigners, were seeking to make their profits from the American War of Independence. This involved contributions from the French government to help the American colonists in their war with Britain. 

The factions within Congress lost no time in aligning themselves on opposite sides of the controversy surrounding Silas Deane, who was the agent for the transactions, together with the author Beaumarchais, but Paine seemed to disregard the political situation, looking rather simplistically at the overall affair. As a result he played into the hands of those he criticised, who became his enemies. In 1779 they tried to have him dismissed, but Congress partially 5 exonerated him and refused to dismiss him. Paine angrily resigned from his position. He filed a memorandum with the Pennsylvania legislature, detailing his services to the Revolution, and was duly given a position as a clerk. 

A new American envoy to France, Colonel John Laurens, was asked to negotiate further contributions from France to help the American war effort. As he was a very young man, he was loath to take on such a responsibility alone, so he asked Thomas Paine, a friend of his father, to accompany him as secretary. Paine took with him a copy of Common Sense to give to the French King, where there was no mention of monarchy or aristocracy. Although Paine did not speak or understand French at that time, he and Laurens managed to make themselves understood and Louis XVI was most generous to the American Colonists, who were fighting the enemies of the King Louis, the British. The negotiators were very successful and sent three shiploads of silver and goods back to America. 

Throughout this period Paine continued to write the Crisis essays analysing the events of the war and other pamphlets calling for American unity and governmental reform. The most noteworthy of these was called Public Good, which was published by Paine in 1780, perhaps the bleakest year of the War. In this essay, Paine argued with passion and conviction for the strengthening of the central government, so that the loose confederation of states could truly become one nation. In particular he urged that Virginia cede to the Confederation its claims to western lands, the settlement of which, Paine argued, would help to provide revenue for the United States. In the years following the Revolution and the winning of independence, Paine continued to write essays and pamphlets pleading for a strong national government. It was at this time that Paine met the Marquis de Lafayette„ who was going to remain his lifelong friend. Lafayette came from France to fight with the Colonists against the British. 

(At the end of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States formed the League of Nations exactly following Paine’s advice but Wilson was not then on good terms with the leaders of Congress, who would not agree to America joining the League. However the United Nations was formed at the end of the Second World War, with its headquarters in New York.) 

Paine’s involvement in the French Revolution 

Reply to Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’

Edmund Burke was a well-known Whig political orator, whose notable characteristic was a love of order. He resisted when, as he thought, sympathisers with the French Revolution wanted to abolish the government 6 He claimed that he loved liberty but only if it was connected to order. He had a distinct veneration for the accumulated wisdom of centuries of experience, and held that liberty should be treated with great caution. He claimed that a political system that had lasted a long time, seemed to him to be an argument that it was fit for a current purpose and should not be changed rashly. With views like this it was inevitable that he would not agree with such a revolution and in fact he threw himself violently into the opposition camp. He could not see the hopeful things emanating from the revolution and he was unable to discriminate between man and motives. His book showed great wisdom and practical insight and led the reaction in England. The book created fame for him within Europe. 

The French Revolution had already begun when Thomas Paine went to live in France as an honorary French citizen and an elected member for the Pas-de- Calais region of France in the new government. His great friends and colleagues were the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American War of Independence, the Marquis de Condorcet and Georges Jacques Danton, a lawyer, orator and leader of the Revolution. Although Paine was unable to speak or write French, he was able to take part in discussions in the government, since one or other of his friends would interpret his speeches and let him know what was happening. Condorcet and Paine were elected to a committee to design a new constitution for France, together with its declaration of the rights of man. 

Through the Marquis de Lafayette who became the leader of the King’s Guard, Paine was able to keep abreast of everything that was happening in Paris. Following the storming of the Bastille and the massacre on the Champs de Mars, there was a lull during which, from time to time, Louis XVI and his Queen made several unsuccessful attempts to leave France: 

During a search of the royal apartments a lead safe was discovered containing… copies of correspondence between the French King and Queen and various crowned heads of other European countries. This was written evidence of treason against the people of France and they were arrested. Paine spoke in the King’s defence saying that while he was against the system of monarchy, he found it hard to speak against the King who had been so generous to the British Colonists in America and without whose aid there might not have been an independent republic so soon. He pleaded for their lives as people and not as royalty. He claimed that all the time they were alive it would preclude relatives trying to rebuild the monarchy and this would postpone a genuine republic being formed in France. Paine was proved to be correct in his prophecy, because France_did not truly become an independent republic until Louis Napoleon DI, his wife and son were granted asylum in Britain by Queen Victoria at the end of the 19th century.  

Paine had promised his friends in France that as soon as Burke’s book was published, he would ensure that a copy went to them for translation into French. However in January 1790 Burke made a speech in the British Parliament relating to his book, which he was to publish in the autumn of that year. His speech was so contrary to all Whig beliefs, as well as to anything, which he had discussed previously with Paine, that the tatter decided to analyse carefully Burke’s speech, and then his writing, when the book was eventually published. The speech’s warning gave Paine a headstart in writing his book, the first part of which was almost finished by the time that Burke’s book was published in November 1790. 

Paine’s book the Rights of Man, was to go down in history not only as a reply to Burke, but as a document of human rights which was to sound the clarion call for Chartism and the Reform Bill of forty years later, and for the universal franchise and social security in our own time. In 1781 Burke had even introduced a Reform Bill, including a proposal to prevent King George ITl from using large amounts of money from the Civil List on corruption, so there was nothing in Burke’s earlier political career to suggest that he would join the King’s Party physically or mentally. 

Paine and Burke had visited France some sixteen years previously but Burke had not visited it again and his book was based on third party information. Paine was receiving updated information about the Revolution from his friend Lafayette, and therefore considered that he was more likely than Burke to know the true facts of the situation in France. Lafayette was put in charge of the National Guard to the King of France, upon his return from America where he had fought the British. There was a popular revulsion in France against the activities of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the clergy, by whom the country was dominated. France was in a financial state bordering on bankruptcy and a parliament of 144 notables had been unable to resolve anything. At that time there appeared to be no intention of removing King Louis XV1 from the throne of France. The States-General had become the National Assembly, consisting of nobles and clergymen who were considerably outnumbered by the Third Estate, comprising lawyers such as Maximilien Robespierre coming from Arras, and intellectuals such as Volney and the astronomer Bailly, as well as a handful of artisans. 

The presence in the movement for reform of leaders such as the Comte de Mirabeau and Lafayette, demonstrated that the group included aristocrats and property-owners, who were certainly not anti-monarchial. Mirabeau was to hold the country together, bridging the gap between the King’s party and the revolutionaries. But the ordinary people of Paris, fearing some mischief from the King, stormed the Bastille. This was the destruction of a symbol of power rather than anything else. 

The Assembly met to arrange for some new regulations to be put in place. They abolished feudal privileges, serfdom and tax privileges. They clipped the wings of the wealthy priesthood, but this largely backfired because the effect rebounded on the poor dergy. There was even to be a democratic election of bishops. 

But the main target of Burke’s rage as set out in his book, was the march of the women of Paris to Versailles in October. Burke painted a lurid picture of a violent, uncontrollable mob storming Versailles and bringing the “mildest of monarchs and the most beautiful of queens”v” back to Paris in a state of fear. They had ruled over a spirited, honourable and cultivated nobility, a respectable clergy and an independent judiciary. (Burke, E.M. author of Reflections of the French Revolution. edited by J G A. Pocock, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989, page 153.) 

Paine challenged Burke point by point in his sober straightforward narrative in the Rights of Man, many of his facts having been obtained directly from Lafayette. Since then Paine’s account has largely been substantiated by contemporary historians. This march was mainly a protest from half-starving housewives. Lafayette followed the march with the National Guard and soon everything was under control. 

The marchers’ demands were presented to the King by Lafayette personally. The King agreed to them all, and was content to return to Paris the following day; but in the morning disaster occurred. One of the King’s bodyguards saw the crowd beginning to stir from sleep and fired on them. This enraged them and they broke into the palace. This relatively sober explanation was carefully ignored by Burke who presented it as a dramatic and very gory scene. 

Paine returned from England in the winter of 1789 to follow the progress of the revolution and to discuss it with his American and French friends in Paris. • Neither the Jacobins or the Girondins had yet acquired any strong leaders and there was still no question of the King losing his throne. Louis XVI had become a constitutional king and, if he had been a clever diplomat, he could easily have preserved the situation. Unfortunately he was surrounded by the courtiers and other sycophants. He was unduly influenced by his wife who was anxious to return to her native Austria. Under these conditions he was quite unable to adapt to the circumstances he now found himself in. 

Lafayette had put before the National Assembly, proposals for a Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen, which gave Paine the title for the book he was writing and would publish. While in Paris Paine had written to Burke to advise him on how well everything was going. 

Paine’s attitude to Burke’s book indicated that Paine feared the possibility of war. He said that he had seen enough of war’s miseries to wish he might never see one again, and hoping some other way might be found to settle differences, which occasionally arise between neighbouring countries. He observed that the state of harmony, which then existed between America and France could have been achieved also between England and France. Counter- revolutionary forces from other countries invaded France and induced a panic which led to the revolution’s temporary collapse. 

Paine’s rational reply to Burke, pleading for human rights for the common people, reached even more readers than Burke’s book in England overseas. But its greatest impact was in reinforcing the views of those already converted, and in convincing the poor who had nothing on which to stake a claim. Yet the Rights of Man did have an effect on the rich and powerful, because it alarmed the Pitt government, which instituted repressive measures and a level of censorship which Britain had not experienced for many years. 

There was a lot of political fighting in America and England at the time of the publication of the Rights of Man, doubtless due in part to the fact that the British government was discussing a trading affiance with the American government.. Perhaps Paine was tactless to have addressed his Rights of Man to the American President, George Washington. 

Paine’s description of the French Revolution, both from his own experience and from the information he received from Lafayette, the Marquis de Condorcet and other French friends, is said by modern historians still to be a valuable historical document. t. At a time when few men were like this, Paine was still able to be impartial in his comments. 

Paine tried at all times to be truthful and unbiased, as exemplified by the fact that he did not minimize the incidental loss of life. He said there was no doubt that it was the crowds of ordinary people who committed the burnings and who carried the heads of the beheaded upon pikes in Paris, but then this was not new to Britons who had seen similarly at the time of the English Civil War. 

The Rights of Man must also be regarded as a blueprint for a new society. Paine contradicted Burke, who claimed that the English Revolution of 1688 had set a pattern of English government ‘for all time’ and that the country could only be governed by the privileged classes and the aristocracy – to both of which groups he had recently himself been elevated. His claim was that only these men had the necessary experience. Paine considered this to be a violation of democratic human rights, and he said once again that the privileges of monarchs and aristocrats could not be inherited. Everyone, according to Paine, had the right to elect their own government, on condition that they did not require it to be imposed on the next generation. Paine’s theme was to stand up for the rights of the living, not of the dead. 10 

At Easter 1791 the French King and Queen tried to leave Paris for their residence at Saint-Cloud under the protection of Lafayette and the National Guard. Everything seemed to be very calm but there had been widespread rumours in Paris, that the royal couple were planning to escape abroad. The crowd found their carriage, and Lafayette, faced with a mutiny by a large section of his Grenadiers, was unable to protect the King and Queen unless they returned to the Tuileries. This caused the King, no doubt on the advice of his Queen, to complain to the Assembly. It was at this point that Lafayette began to feel that the royal family had not told him the truth about their plans and his loyalties became divided. 

One wonders how long it took the usually sharp-witted Paine to realize how Lafayette’s basically republican feelings were in conflict with his care of the royal family. In June the royal family again escaped from the Tuileries and the following morning Lafayette hurried to tell Paine. Paine would have been pleased if the royal family had reached a foreign country; in this event the Revolution could have continued and the King and Queen would not have been killed. Paine recorded that apart from some wild attacks on aristocrats being released from prison, Parisian life continued throughout the revolution period with the theatres, bars and restaurants being lit up and full of people. 

Paine was faithful in his friendships and could not support Marat, whose writings including those in L’ami du Peuple, took every opportunity to demand the downfall of Lafayette. But Paine was also ready to show his Republican principles and actively worked to disseminate them. He wrote and issued a Manifesto, which was translated and signed by a French friend, Achille du Chatelet, who may have made minor alterations to Paine’s text, which he had to sign, as the law required published documents to be signed by a French citizen. There was still little support for a republic and until September 1792, even Marat favoured a very restricted monarchy. 

Madame Roland, who held political discussion groups in her home, thought, like Paine, that it was a misfortune for the royal family to have returned to Paris. As well as sharing Paine’s views she also predicted that Louis would continue to obstruct the Assembly, and would make use of the armies of France’s enemies. In the Societe Republicaine, Paine published an article extending the ideas of the Manifesto and referring to the King as ‘Louis Capet’. He challenged Montesquieu’s theory that republicanism can only occur in small countries, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view that ‘Liberty diminishes the larger the state becomes’. 

Paine believed that a Constitution for all to read, as being a likely remedy for the French people, as well as it had salved American ills. He said that France could only be called a civic empire when it had its own Constitution conforming to its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. II 

National Assembly and Committee to formulate the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

Paine had returned briefly to England and, according to Clio Rickman at whose home he was staying, Achilles Audibert, the French radical, arrived at the house on the 12th September, straight from the French Convention to request Paine’s personal assistance in their deliberations. Audibert came from Calais, which was one of four constituencies, which invited Thomas Paine to represent them in the Nations] Assembly. On 26 August the Assembly had conferred the title of French citizen on a number of distinguished foreign sympathizers including Paine, Wilberforce, Washington and the American poet friend of Paine’s, Joel Barlow. the accompanying invitation read: 

“Your love for humanity, for liberty and equality, the useful works that have issued from your heart and pen in their defence, have determined our choice. It has been hailed with universal and reiterated applause. Come, friend of the people, to swell the number of patriots in an assembly which will decide the destiny of a great people, perhaps of the human race.” 

Thomas Paine returns to France for the next ten years 

This then was the reason for Paine’s return to France, and not – as maintained by many of his critics – his arraignment for seditious libel in England. A thorough study of all Paine’s writings, and a great number of biographies and critical analyses of his works, leads to the conclusion that the Thomas Paine who leaps at you from the written page, would have been divided as to which he wanted more: the opportunity of being physically and actively further involved in the making of the French Republic, or the wonderful opportunity of standing up in court and disputing the charge of seditious libel, from which he would undoubtedly have derived great satisfaction. 

In 1791 on the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, a republican petition had been prepared by Paine against the King’s reinstatement. The excited crowds in the Champ de Mars, lynched two men of whom they were suspicious, and the Mayor of Paris was obliged to call out the National Guard. Lafayette arrived with the Guard to be greeted by a hail of stones. The National Guard fired upon a largely unarmed crowd causing a massacre of some 50 people. 

On 22nd September 1793, the National Convention declared a Republic at which point the newly-named first month, Vendemaire, of Year One began. Paine’s first triumph at the National Assembly was to cross swords with Dutton, newly elected Minister of Justice on a judicial matter. Paine’s inability to speak French was not a problem since he was able to converse with Danton in English. Danton had moved that judges should be chosen from any section of the community, irrespective of legal training or knowledge of the law. However Paine resisted this proposal as being too revolutionary, on the rational and commonsense basis, that justice could only be effectively administered by men of good legal knowledge and training. He further maintained that reforms in the law, where needed, could only be effective if planned as a whole, and not piecemeal. Paine won his point and Danton capitulated. 

The young Maximilien Robespierre took over the Convention in the autumn of 1793 and Paine found they had much in common. Incorruptibility, war and the death penalty were three main areas of agreement. Paine heard with pleasure of Robespierre’s proposal to abolish the death penalty. The liberal moral code of both Paine and Robespierre, included their belief in religion without intermediaries, and Robespierre envisaged replacing the Church by an “Etre Supreme”. There would be celebrations to this personage on the Champ de Mars in Paris for everyone to enjoy. 

Louis XVI was unable to defend himself at his trial, because a quantity of correspondence with the enemies of France had been found in the royal apartments. The object of this correspondence was the enemies’ successful invasion of France and the restoration of the King on the throne as absolute monarch. Paine, the humane idealist who could never forget the help of Louis to the American cause, tried to help him. In a paper read to the Convention on 21 November, he stated the following: 

“I think it necessary that Louis XVI should be tried; not that this advice is suggested by a spirit of vengeance, but because this measure appears to me just, lawful and conformable to sound policy. If Louis is innocent let us put him to prove his innocence; if guilty let the nation determine whether he shall be pardoned or punished.” (Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press. p.167)

When Louis was found guilty on 17 January 1793, Paine wrote, as a member of the National Assembly, confessing that he was far more ready to condemn the Constituent Assembly, when he thought of the unaccountable folly, which restored the King’s executive power. Paine suggested that the United States of America could become a royal asylum, bearing in mind the amount of help, which Louis XVI gave to the American War of Independence. There, Louis might learn from the constant aspect of public prosperity, that the true system of government consisted in fair and equal representation. Paine submitted the suggestion, remembering the debt of gratitude, which America owed to every Frenchman_ Paine said that he was normally the enemy of monarchy, but he could not forget their human frailties. He reminded the court it had already been proposed by Maximilien Robespierre, that the death penalty should be abolished.  

In his Address to the People of France, Paine was both adulatory and optimistic, ending with the suggestion that they should begin the new era by instructing, rather than taking revenge, and by ensuring a greatness of friendship to welcome the approach of union and success. He was delighted when he was appointed to the Committee for framing a new French Constitution. This Committee originally had been the idea of the Marquis de Condorcet, and it was he who led the discussion while Paine drafted a Declaration for Rights to accompany the Constitution. These documents were adopted after many amendments, on 25 June 1793. 

Paine’s apparent friendship with the American Ambassador, Gouverneur Morris had added to Marat’s dislike of Paine, because Morris was distrusted by the Revolution due to his relationship with the English Court, and the Assembly had finally written to America asking them to replace him. The Assembly was also suspicious of Paine because of the stand he had made for saving the King’s life. Paine had written to Marat, whose suspicions of Paine may have been lulled as a result, so that when Robespierre demanded a more stringent law against foreigners, Paine was one of two foreign deputies, who were accepted. 

Ten months in the Luxembourg Prison and then return to America 

Paine had been warned against attending the Assembly, because Danton was to be arrested, and, as a friend of Danton, possibly Paine would also be arrested. Paine had been advising Barere, in charge of the Committee of Public Safety, on a project for sending commissioners to America in order to obtain American food aid for France during the war with England. Barere feared a massive country-wide famine. At his request Paine wrote long and lucid arguments for Barere to use, and spent a good deal of time taking the matter up with American sea captains whose vessels had been held up in Bordeaux, because the French feared that the English navy would seize them. The captains appealed personally to Paine after their useless application to the American Ambassador, Morris. 

Barere instigated the Reign of Terror, when he presented a report to the Convention on 5 September, which contained the words: “Let us make Terror the order of the Day”. Paine had already published Part 1 of The Age of Reason,  and planned to leave it with the American poet Joel Barlow, if there was a risk of him being arrested. It was also Barere who made the speech leading to Paine’s arrest. He gave some very incredible excuses to Paine, but at least in his Memoires, he told the truth about Paine’s help in saving France from famine. 

When Paine was arrested he found an excuse to visit Joel Barlow’s lodgings with his captors and was able to leave with him Part 1 of The Age of Reason, without his captors’ knowledge. Various reasons have been put forward as to 14 the reason for his imprisonment, but none of them have been confirmed. Paine was able to complete the second part of The Age of Reason despite his poor state of health while in prison. When James Monroe was brought in as the new American Ambassador Paine was at last released. At first Paine was nursed by Mrs Monroe when he was so ill that they feared he would die. Gradually he recovered and moved into the home of Nicholas de Bonneville, who produced a radical newspaper in Paris, and his family. With the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte came an amnesty for all emigres and Paine finally was able to return to America. It has been said that he actually met Napoleon Bonaparte while staying with the de Bonneville family and that Bonaparte had read many of his works and found them ‘most interesting’. However I must say that there is no actual proof of this meeting. 

Paine’s involvement in British and Irish affairs 

Paine had drawn up a detailed topographical plan for the invasion of Britain but this must have been kept with the rest of his manuscripts, which he left for safe keeping with Madame de Bonneville, who gave them to her son. Nicholas de Bonneville was a French Radical friend of Paine and when he knew that Paine was returning to the U.S.A. he asked him to take his wife and three sons to America where de Bonneville thought they would have better lives. However following his death Madame de Bonneville inherited everything belonging to Thomas Paine and his land and house were divided between the two elder de Bonneville boys, who had remained with Paine. His manuscripts were subsequently passed to General de Bonneville and were “accidentally” lost in a fire at the General’s home. 

When Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Theobald Wolfe Tone asked Thomas Paine to obtain French ships and men to invade Ireland the French government was not averse to helping them, but on the advice of an Irish American they did not do so immediately because he recommended waiting until the United Irishmen were more of a cohesive group. It is believed that this Irish American was a Colonel William Tate who later led a French invasion force to Bantry Bay, but on their first attempt they were prevented by violent storms. The very fact that this fleet had been sent encouraged the United Irishmen particularly since the British then used military coercion in Ulster in 1797. The rebellious Irish were mixed Catholics and Protestants and the rebellion was severely squashed. 

The first French-based raiding party after that was due to attack Newcastle where the Legion Franche were to burn the docks and shipping and destroy the coal mines. The second party was to land at Bristol going on to Wales and Liverpool with the Legion Noire. These two groups of soldiers comprised mainly convicts. It was a weak plan based as it was on expecting great military action, but using the poorest quality of troops. Martell° Towers 15 had been built on Bere Island in Bantry Bay and were the forerunners to those later built by the English. 

Britain had been saved because none of the French troops spoke or understood English and only the aristocracy could speak and/or understand French so that there was no rapport between the French and the English. The non-appearance of the British Navy, the one, which Pitt had reassured Parliament in October 17% was the “national defence of this kingdom in case of invasion” did nothing to persuade the ordinary Englishmen that this was a cause for them to join in. After the recapture of [(Biala, Wolfe Tone was captured by a British warship and committed suicide. The utter failure of the Irish invasion did not stop the related diversion raid against Wales. The French arrived at Fishguard in February, for what was to prove to be the last time that Britain was ever invaded. It was not planned to harm the British people but to be the first step in liberating the oppressed poor of the country from the domination of the English ruling classes, thereby alighting the fire of independence and democracy. 

The French had left Brest in Brittany on 18 February and anchored to the north-west of Fishguard. From information received from a captive, they were misled as to the size of the fort’s militia and they sailed out to Carreg Wasted Point, out of reach of the militia’s guns. Meanwhile the French soldiers were looting and setting fire to churches in a manner hardly conducive to encouraging the local people to join in a revolution and rise up against their oppressors. Lord Cawdor on behalf of the British Army demanded Tate’s surrender. 

All of these events led to a run on the Bank of England and it suspended cash payments, but instituted bank notes to the value of El and £2. People were suspicious of these novel notes and many found them hard to use in a commercial way. Things gradually calmed down and normal trade continued. 

With the failure of the French-aided attempts at invasion of the British Isles followed by Admiral Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet in Aboukir Bav in 1798 the immediate threat of further invasions seemed to disappear until Napoleon created himself Emperor when considerable monies were spent on fortifications such as 74 lvlartello towers on the South Coast of England and 40 on the east coast. Each tower had a cannon on top with a one mile range. They cost £3,000 each to build and were to carry 24 soldiers each. 

This was the time of the Royal Military Canal being built from Rye towards London and Birmingham and when Weed on Beck in Northamptonshire was planned to be the emergency capital of Britain in case London were to fall. Chatham was the next fallback position and this time led to the birth of the semaphore system between Chatham and Portsmouth. In 1852 when Louis I6 Napoleon 111 came to power further large sums were spent on fortifications against the French.” 

Paine’s involvement in Russia 

Common Sense reached either St Petersburg in Russia or, more probably, Leipzig, where it had been translated into German. The young Russian Radical, Alexander Radishchev, was studying jurisprudence there at the instigation of Catherine the Great. Several books have been written on the subject of Radishchev: “The First Russian Radical”, by David Marshall Lang while Jesse Clardy wrote another, but the most up to date information has been researched and written by a fellow Russian, !Cara Rukshina, who is presently working in the U.S.A. [n her work she established that Radishchev was familiar with Common Sense from its inclusion in G. Th. Ravnal’s A History of the Two Indies (1780 edition). Until now the question of Paine’s influence on Radishchev has received no scholarly attention, writes Rukshina This was probably due to the fact that when Common Sense  was first published it did not have Paine’s name on it as the author. 

Ravnal described Common  Sense  as the ideological foundation of the French Revolution. However Rukshina claims that Radishchev had an excellent command of English and could have read an original English-language copy when he was at Leipzig University or in the famous multi-lingual library of his employer, the Count Vorontsov. The main difference between Paine’s book and that of Radishchev’s A  Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow is that Radishchev considered the monarch’s death essential and unavoidable while Paine only wanted the position of the monarch to be removed. 

Radishchev’s ideas laid the groundwork for the revolutionary tradition in Russia. Karl Man is said to have had a library containing two copies of each of Thomas Paine’s works and Nikolai Lenin was known to have read Radishchev’s work as well as that of Raynal, and, during his time in London was to have read the rest of Paine’s works in English. Therefore the thinking behind the Russian Revolution of 1917 can be said to have been influenced by Thomas Paine. 

Cuba and South America influenced by Paine 

Copies of Paine’s works had been circulated throughout Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico since 1816, so they had been read and considered by the Castro family and other revolutionary-minded young men for generations before Fidel Castro came on the scene in 1953. In 1955 Castro went to Mexico and teamed up with the Argentine doctor, Che Guevara. 

Fidel Castro had tried several times to overcome the right-wing government of Batista in Cuba and did not succeed until, accompanied by his brother Ratil 17 and Dr Ernesto Che Guevara, they won a rousing victory with the backing of the ordinary people in January 1959. Castro assumed control of Cuba and governed without a formal constitution until 1976. Castro frequently asked for financial aid from the government of the U.S.A. but when this was not forthcoming, he publicly proclaimed his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism on 2 December 1961. Although Castro retained political independence from the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy came to depend on billions of dollars in Soviet aid. 

Che Guevara was a keen follower of Thomas Paine, and Fidel Castro in his defence before the court of Santiago de Cuba in 1953, claimed that “Thomas Paine said that a just man deserves more respect than a crowned rogue”, thereby indicating that he was well aware of Paine’s political writings. 

In Latin America Common Sense and the American Crisis papers were only translated in part, but were used as symbols by leaders of independence movements. In South America no biographical details about Paine were known and his political writings were concentrated. upon Paine was a symbol of toleration and individual human rights. In Argentina a Spanish translation of Common Sense circulated in Buenos Aires during 1816 and inspired heated discussion in the local press. A number of political documents such as the Declaration of Independence and several state constitutions were circulated in translation but only Paine’s major political works attracted comments in the press. 

The works of Paine, which were readily available consisted of parts of Common Sense the Dissertation on First Principles of Government, the Rights of Man, the Dissertations on Government the Affairs of the Bank and Paper Money. The sections from Common Sense include Paine’s famous distinction between government and society, and his demonstration of the superiority of republican over monarchical government. Paine’s forthright method of expression was well received in Buenos Aires. 

It could be argued that Paine’s ideas were foremost in the minds of Central and South American revolutionaries, because they were all reared on the works of Karl Marx and Lenin. It is also possible to argue that wherever revolutions have taken place in the world in modern times, the leaders were also educated in Marxism or Leninism. Either Paine’s works arrived in countries, directly in English, say from America, and were then translated into local languages, or his work was directly translated into Spanish or Portuguese. 

CONCLUSION 

Few men could have led such a fascinating life as Thomas Paine. He saw two momentous revolutions at the end of the 18th century, in America and France and was heavily involved in both of them. He always felt that the only one which was a true Republic was America, though he could easily be accused of prejudice where “America was concerned. Nevertheless by 1802 when Paine left France, the country had an imperial monarchy ruled every bit as tyrannically as that before 1789. Paine had forecast that this would happen and events proved him right By contrast the U.S.A. was, and remains, a genuine republic. 

Paine never claimed that his writings were original; what was original was the way in which he wrote. He used a simple, straightforward style, which was very easy to understand. Paine did not write for the academic audience but for the ordinary people and it can be argued that following the publication of Common Sense followed by the Rights of Man and the tremendous number of copies of each that were sold or borrowed or available in taverns or reading rooms, his words did not reach exactly the people to whom they were addressed. It can be said therefore, that Paine achieved what he set out to do, which was to make the ordinary people understand that they could eventually enjoy the social reforms, which he talked about He did not guarantee when this would happen, nor that it would happen without them being involved in pushing their politicians to take action. 

If taxation was tackled – and he showed how this could be done equitably – there would be sufficient money to carry out all the social reforms, which he had described. His aim in life had been to improve the life of the ordinary people, who had nobody else to speak for them. He considered that if a government was run according to the plans he had suggested, then people would be happy. Paine said that insufficient food, clothing, housing and work was not sufficient to make people happy. 

Without the benefit of modern communications, Paine was able to act as a prophet to two revolutionary bodies: the American fight for independence and the French for liberty, equality and fraternity. Equally he made major contributions to the English evolution towards extended suffrage. His failure to make the American Revolution into an egalitarian movement must have been a bitter blow to him. It was the English, after Paine’s death, who made policies out of his proposals. 

Paine is still a controversial figure, but his ideas have never lost their power or their appeal. To read any of his works today is to read a modern, well written and easily understandable text.

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THE French Revolution has not been the subject of much impartial consideration in the United Kingdom, indeed some of the strongest influences on public understanding of this cataclysm in human affairs seems to have been purely fictional works, such as A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, or the even more fanciful exploits of The Scarlet Pimpernel Readers may perhaps be re-assured to learn that the greatest source of information for the present note is, A History of Mathematics by Carl B. Boyer, formerly Professor of Mathematics at Brooklyn College, published by Wiley and Sons, in which work Chapter 22 is devoted to ‘Mathematicians of the French Revolution’ and Thomas Paine is afforded very slight notice en passant However, since this work sets the world’s major mathematicians in the contemporary context of their lives (as well as describing their contributions to their discipline), it affords valuable insight into the progress of human thought, notwithstanding that the actual mathematics are largely incomprehensible to a general reader (like myself) who retains only the sketchiest recollection of the differential and integral calculus of his schooldays. 

It is important to remember that in Paine’s day learning was not selective in the way that it has largely become today and an inquiring mind then ranged over many aspects which are now generally treated as specialised subjects. Paine himself clearly demonstrates this generalised way of thinking, as we see him debating a sermon in his childish mind, purchasing globes to facilitate his studies of astronomy, sermonising the good folk of Dover and Sandwich as a Methodist preacher, advocating increased salaries for his fellow excise officers and writing some of the most important and influential political tracts of all time. And we know also that he rarely passed a few minutes without endeavouring to utilise them to improve the vast store of knowledge that he committed to his exceptional memory. To such a man the philosophies which he observed developing in Paris during his years of residence there would have proved of absorbing interest in their widest scope, not merely in the localised revolutionary practices which dominate most accounts of his French experience. It is well, therefore, that we should glance at the progressive Frenchmen of his day, whose thinking he would have followed eagerly in all its aspects as he mixed freely with them as an equal, playing an active part in the contemporary scene just as they did. 

During the 14th. century, Paris had ranked with Oxford as one of the scientific centres of the world, but subsequently seems to have played a much quieter role, and only recently have the French mathematicians of revolutionary times come to be seen as laying the foundations for the wide-spread scientific explosion of later centuries. Boyer has singled out six of Paine’s contemporaries in Paris as worthy of notice from his specialised viewpoint, but he discussed them in far wider context. 

The six French mathematicians, diplomatically listed in order of their births, are: 

1. Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) who is the only member of the sextet with origins other than wholly French. He was born and educated at Turin, where he became professor of mathematics in the military academy there, before securing the patronage first of Frederick the Great of Prussia and later Louis XVI of France. His wealthy parents enjoyed both French and Italian backgrounds, and he was the only one of their eleven children to survive infancy. He distinguished himself as an astronomer as well as a mathematician and published notable works in both fields. 
2. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794), the only member of the sextet who has been generally associated with Paine. The two men admired each other’s work and sometimes co-operated closely. Condorcet however fell victim to the contemporary vicissitudes, becoming forced into hiding, from which he emerged when he felt his protectors were thereby bringing themselves into danger; he was then arrested on sight and imprisoned, only to be found dead in his prison on the following morning, presumably from suicide; but his final resting place was to be the Pantheon. An aristocrat and philosopher, Condorcet had been an associate of Voltaire, with whom he shared a hatred of injustice; he believed implicitly in the innate goodness of human nature, a characteristic which would have facilitated his rapport with Paine, and he was an enthusiastic advocate of social reforms, such as the introduction of universal education which he saw as an antidote to vice; he unsuccessfully presented a plan for reform to the Legislative Assembly, of which he became Presiden• His earlier writings included books on probability and the integral calculus, but he later devoted himself to social affairs, including a defence of variolation – the predecessor of vaccination as we know it. Like Paine he originally entertained high hopes of the Revolution, but became disillusioned by its excesses. True to his principles, during his period of hiding he wrote his celebrated Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which culminated in a prediction of the bright future he imagined would follow from the Revolution (an English translation by June Barraclough was published in 1955 in New York by Noonday Press). 
3. Gaspard Monge (1746.1818), son of a poor tradesman, was perhaps lucky that his exceptional ability attracted the attention of a lieutenant-colonel who secured for him opportunities to study at a military academy where he rose to become a teacher himself. Teaching appears to have been his natural vocation and his wide interests in physics and chemistry as well as mathematics had made him one of the best-known French scientists by the outbreak of the revolution; it was his unusual experience that part of his most famous book, Gecnnetrie Descripling was banned from publication in the interest of national defence. He was also active in the political scene, and as Minister of the Navy it fell to him to sign the official record of the trial and execution of Louis XVI. His concern for adequate national defence led to his advocacy for a training school for engineers, which was to be established as the famous Ecole Polytechnique, of which Monge was a distinguished administrator as well as instructor. His great aptitude as a teacher resulted in a stream of exceptional pupils who more than made up for the reluctance of Monge to publish very much himself, although he made discoveries which still bear his name. And it speaks well of his reputation and judgment that Napoleon took him on both Italian and Egyptian campaigns and entrusted him with the delicate decisions of which works of art were to be carried back to France as prizes of war! He was to become the outstanding scientist in his various fields that the revolutionary era produced. 
4. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), kept a low profile in the political scene, which does not seem to have interested him although he mixed freely with colleagues who were prominent. He became the most distinguished astronomer in the post Isaac Newton period, and this caught the attention of Napoleon (an admirer of men of science) who appointed him Minister of the Interior; but in this high-ranking appointment Laplace proved so undistin- guished that Napoleon, displaying his own interest in the calculus, quipped that Laplace ‘…carried the spirit of the infinitely small into the management of affairs’. It is of far greater importance in our present context that Laplace’s astronomical theories would have become known to Thomas Paine, also a life-long student of the heavens, but one whose interpretation of heavenly movements was very different, with the possible major result for world philosophy which is suggested below. 
5. Adrien Marie Legrendre (1752-1834), seems to have had an exceptional influence on posterity, particularly in America, and in the field of mathematical physics. His Elements of Geometry was apparently the antithesis of practical maths, yet it was published in more than twenty editions during his lifetime and it was still being re-issued in America as late as 1885. The scope of his writings was very wide, but since he was primarily a ‘mathematician’s mathematician’, his work is very difficult for a non-mathematical mind to comprehend, notwithstanding its great importance and his famed exceptional clarity in exposition. 
6. Lazare Carnot (1753-1823), the youngest member of the sextet, had the most spectacular career of them all during the revolutionary years and enjoyed immense popular acclaim. He shared the military background which recurs in the personal histories of these men, and in the difficult years when the Revolution came under external threat, it was Carnot who organised the armies and laid the basis of their successes. Although intensely republican in his views, he avoided involvement with factions and actually defended royalists against false accusations (including charges that they mixed powdered glass into flour intended for republican soldiers). He antagonised Robespierre, but when a call for his arrest was made the assembled deputies rose in his defence, noisily acclaiming him as the ‘Organiser of Victory’ and it was Robespierre who fell not Carnot. But in spite of his brilliant career, he was to fall himself through maintaining his independence throughout later major political changes, and as he departed into exile his chair as professor of geometry was voted to Bonaparte, whose ascent to power had owed much to Carnot’s genius for organisation. In exile Carnot wrote a famous work, Reflections on the Metaphysics of the Injinitessimal Calculus which was philosophical rather than scientific in tone; Boyer’s comment on this work displays the permanent influence of Thomas Paine, for he remarked that even in times that try men’s souls, mathematics finds many devotees. Carnot’s grandson, Sadi Carnot, was to become the 4th President of France in 1887. 

The varied origins of the sextet, who largely came together in projects under revolutionary aegis, possibly indicates the broad levelling effect of the revolution, before when a military career was heavily influenced by status; indeed it was a saying at the military academies, ‘The competent are not noble and the noble are not competent’. All six achieved prominence in their fields by 1789, when the Revolution erupted, and it was to offer opportunities which they could not have expected to enjoy before that date. It is ironic that only Condorcet had held views that encouraged reformist activities, and that he alone was to lose his life in the turmoil, the others all surviving him by decades. But there was much more to the Revolution than politics, and Condorcet was to play a notable part in projects which were extensively debated in committee, were finalised and implemented and still stand today in testimony of practical achievements to which the sextet heavily contributed. These developments constitute a memorial to the Revolution and to the many men who genuinely strove for progress within it. But it is not a memorial in stone, it is expressed in every-day use which has continued to expand extensively, even in our own recent years. 

Early in the Revolution, Tallyrand proposed a revised system of weights and measures, and a committee was set up through the Academie des Sciences to consider this reform; Condorcet and Lagrange were both founding members of this committee and during ensuing changes Laplace, Legendre and Monge also joined in its deliberations, which were so important, and called for so much expertise and judgment, that it is to be wondered how the eventual decisions and their implementation were arrived at in a comparatively short period. 

First, the committee had to decide on a question which even modest scientific minds have always dreamed about – what was to be the numerical base on which the new units were to stand? It was not without considerable debate that the decimal system was decided upon, rather than the duo-decimal of twelve which even today is sometimes advocated as the more desirable, since twelve is divisible by three and ten is not. Discussion then centred on the new measurement of length, for which one suggestion was the length of a pendulum which would beat in complete single seconds, a proposal which is deceptively simple-sounding, but which presented certain practical problems (the pendulum was to evolve to a scientifically accurate measurement of time in England, not in France). The day was carried by the accuracy shown by astronomers (notably Legrende), in their measurement of the earth’s latitudes, which are constant around its surface, unlike the variable degrees of longitude; the metre was then decreed to be the ten-millionth part of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, a precise distance which the present author confesses his inability to verify to any degree of accuracy whatsoever! The committee, however, had completed their metric system in all essentials by 1791. 

It is not conceivable that such dramatic changes in measurement could have been thrashed out in committee without exiting keen interest from every man in France who had a professional interest, whether practical or theoretical, in the technical operation of making measurements, not only in length but in the higher degree of measurement of volumes, which reaches its most complicated form (in normal commercial practice) in the process of gauging, the mysteries of which were legendary, at least in poetic legend, for Oliver Goldsmith in his idyll of country life, The Deserted Village, extolled the wondrous skills of the schoolmaster in seemingly hushed tones ‘and e’en the whisper ran that he could gauge’; and there was one man in Paris who had begun his professional government service as a gauger of brewers’ casks in Grantham, the former exciseman Thomas Paine. And Paine, the close associate of Condorcet, would certainly have been a most eager gatherer of every nuance of the arguments which were debated by the committee and retailed to him by Condorcet. But, alas, the many biographers of Paine have given us little information about his widespread activities and interests in his Paris days. Fortunately, from the point of view of a general reader (like myself) trying to follow Paine’s thinking and its development, he left several autobiographical leads to posterity in The Age of Reason, his most important writing during this period. This uncharacteristic action may have been accidental, but I personally think it was deliberate on the part of a man who had seen ‘many of my most intimate friends destroyed’, and had come to accept the likelihood that he would soon follow them along the same fateful path. 

The technique of putting thoughts to paper varies widely between authors, as does also the technique of setting musical compositions into manuscript, which latter has been more extensively studied. For example, Beethoven’s development of themes is illustrated, • at least to some degree, by the jottings in his notebooks, but Mozart seems to have composed mainly in his head, and inscribed finished works directly to paper. The manuscripts of Mozart, including the paper itself and its revealing water marks, have proved valuable sources of information, but there never seems to have been any comparable study of the manuscripts of his contemporary Thomas Paine, and this, I think, is a pity because it has long been my opinion that Paine’s technique resembled Mozart’s, in that many sections of Paine’s writings were similarly composed and rounded out in his head, then committed to his remarkable memory much as other authors nowadays commit finished work to computers from which they can be retrieved at will. In my younger days I sometimes had the pleasure of listening to a professional elocutionist reciting long passages from standard works (particularly from the novels of Charles Dickens), to an attentive audience marvelling at his memory; Paine seems to have had similar extraordinary powers of verbatim recollection. I imagine that he first developed this technique in his days as a Methodist preacher so that his words could seem fresh and original to his hearers. In later life, Paine’s contemporaries spoke of his lengthy accurate quotations from his already-published works, and also of the swift fluency of his writing (e.g. of articles for the Pennsylvania Magazine), once he had settled his mind to his task, when his pen appears to have been able to reproduce as essay previously committed to memory as a modern computer furnishes a print-out. 

It is now appropriate to consider Paine’s actual writing of The Age of Reason. He himself informs us in his prefatory profession of faith that he had been envisaging a revolution in religion since soon after he had helped produce a revolution in government in America by publishing his pamphlet, Common Sense and he further informs us that it had been his intention for several years past to publish his thoughts on religion. Following the views expressed in the previous paragraph, I conjecture that quite a lot of these thoughts on religion had already been arranged in his memory-files and possibly partially committed to paper. Paine also tells us the events in Paris had convinced him that he should prepare for publication, but he does not specify at what point the decision to publish was actually taken; however, in his preface to the second part he reveals that after action was taken in the Convention against its two foreign members (Cloots and himself) he ‘sat down and brought the work to a close as speedily as possible’. Clearly, at that stage Part 1 was well advanced and required only a few days intensive writing for completion. However, Paine also made a very curious statement which I think important; his printer had been furnished with only thirty-one pages out of the total of seventy-six which were to compose the final draft of Part 1. I have worked at this division of Part I into two sections, and now that I have read chapter twenty-two of Boyer’s, History of Mathematics. I have come to the striking conclusion that pages one to thirty one may effectively have comprised the whole of Part 1 of The Age of Reason as Paine originally envisioned it. I now proceed to explain this conclusion, but in doing so I beg to invoke Paine’s sentiment, as expressed in his dedication to his fellow-citizens of the United States, that I maintain my right to my own opinion just as I insist on every other man’s right to his. 

The Age of Reason as we now have it, consists of two parts, of which the seventy-six pages Paine had passed to his printer when he entered the Luxembourg prison in December 1793, is now known as Part 1, and it is with this, the earlier part, that I am mainly concerned in this present essay. But this Part 1 itself comprised two sections, which were specifically described by Paine himself as consisting of thirty-one pages for the first section and forty-five pages for the second (and it is as first section and second section that I refer to them in the remainder of this paper). Without seeing the original manuscript, it is not possible to be certain of the position where the division between them occurs, but since it is probable that Paine was reasonably consistent in his writing of complete manuscripts intended for publication, it is also reasonable to assume that the separate pages would have had similar word-content, and the division is therefore likely to have occurred after about thirty-one seventy sixths of the finished work, and this is approximately two-fifths through any subsequent reliable printing. By this criterion, it appears that the division was probably after the passage headed ‘Of the New Testament’ and before that headed, `Defining the True Revelation’. In my view this position proves on examination to separate Part 1 of The Age of Reason into two sections of very different character. 

The first section (apart from a few sentences, which could have been last-minute alterations) is devoted to a review of religious writing with the accent heavily on the Old Testament which is termed the Bible. It is a beautifully-written criticism, which I have personally read and admired many times, but it could have been written or committed to Paine’s memory at any time during the preceding two or three decades. It may have originated in Paine’s studies when he aspired to ordination in the Established Church, his subsequent disillusionment, and his renunciation of that ambition. It is, in substance, very much an amplification of the message which George Fox (founder of the Quakers and mentor of the elder Paine and his son the young Thomas) had declared as corning to him • from the Almighty: 

I was sent to turn people from the darkness to the light, and I was to bring people off from all the world’s religions, which are vain, that they might know the pure religion, and I was to bring them off from all the world’s fellowships, and prayings, and singings, I was to bring people off from Jewish ceremonies, and from heathenish fables, and from men’s inventions and windy doctrines, and from all their images and crosses, and sprinklings of infants, with all their holy days (so called) and all their vain traditions, which they had instituted since the apostles’ days…. 

The first section, with possibly a little rounding, could well have been printed as a self-contained pamphlet. But Paine gives us two reasons why he did not take this course. First, he intended The Age of Reason ‘…to be the last offering I should make my fellow-citizens of all nations…’ and so was concerned to delay it as long as possible, no doubt because he wished to publish his thoughts in their most mature form. But he also knew that the religion of ordinary people had wider implications than the observance of mere dogma; thus he wrote ‘that many good men have believed this strange fable, and have lived very good lives under the belief (for credulity is not a crime), is what I have no doubt of.’ Like most people of mature thought he did not wish to throw the baby out with the soiled bath-water, or, as he much more elegantly wrote, ‘…lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of theology that is true.’ It is a fair reply to destructive criticism of harmless religious practice to ask, “What do you propose to put in its place?” I believe Paine found his response to that question in revolutionary Paris. 

In the first section he refers to biblical comment, ‘What! Is Saul also amongst the prophets?’. On re-reading the second section in light of Boyer’s chapter twenty-two, I found myself asking, “What! Is Paine also amongst the mathematicians?” For, there, he is at pains to associate himself with the growing knowledge of the sextet of mathematicians who have been identified in the early pages of this paper, to whose company, conversation and debates his association with Condorcet would have given him access. It is not to be assumed that l’aine claimed equality with their expertise, although he cited Newton and Descartes in his arguments, he made no claim to familiarity with analytic geometry, or the calculus. Instead he detailed his own education in Thetford, revealing that although he was not himself a Latin scholar, he familiarised himself with the contents of all Latin books in the school. By implication, he explains how through association with the leading mathematicians of his day he became familiar with the development of astronomical theories which he could follow from his early studies in London after purchasing a pair of globes and attending lectures at the Royal Society. At last it became apparent why Paine, normally so reticent in personal details, chose to make these details known in the unlikely context of combating the spread of atheism in revolutionary Paris! He was preparing his ground, in case he afterwards had need to justify the astronomical knowledge on which he bases his assertion of the true revelation the Almighty has made to all men in terms that transcend all languages and all domestic situations. 

He proclaims this new theology: 

The Almighty Lecturer, by displaying the principles of science in the structure of the universe, he has invited man to study and to imitation. It is as if He had said to the inhabitants of this globe that we call ours, “I have made an earth for man to dwell upon, and I have rendered the starry heavens visible, to teach him science and the arts. He can now provide for his own comfort, AND LEARN FROM MY MUNIFICENCE TO ALL, BE KIND TO OTHERS.” 

Paine introduces his new revelation in the very first words of the second section. It is his cry of EUREKA; it is a clarion call, such as he might have proclaimed in his days as an evangelistic preacher! He proclaims it now in jubilation and with urgency. 

But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no Word of God, no revelation? I answer, YES; there is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human intervention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His munificence? We see it in the abundance with which He fills the earth. Do we wish to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the creation.

Having once impressed upon his readers the message that the Almighty speaks to all men through science, Paine hastened to emphasise its unlimited capacity for adaption throughout the ever-expanding field of human knowledge and awareness. 

The scientific principles…. relating to the motion of the heavenly bodies, are contained chiefly in that part of science which is called trigonometry, or the properties of a triangle, which, when applied to the study of the heavenly bodies, is called astronomy; when applied to direct the course of a ship on the ocean it is called navigation; when applied to the construction of figures drawn by rule and compass it is called geometry; when applied to the construction of plans or edifices, it is called architecture; when applied to the measurement of any portion of the surface of the earth it is called land surveying. In fine. it is the soul of science; it is an eternal truth; it contains the mathematical demonstration of which man speaks, and the extent of its uses is unknown. 

The second section contains scant reference to biblical text, just as the first section contains scant reference to science; but both sections were addressed to Paine’s whole wide audience, and in later years, when he wrote Part 2 of The Age of Reason, he disclosed that the spate of dissent which Part 1 aroused was based on what its dissenters termed scripture evidence and bible authority. He recorded no dissent from the scientific world to his presentation of scientific progress as the new Revelation. This must have been a source of great satisfaction to him, since (as I pointed out in 1979) his prime purpose in publishing Part 1, comprising the first and second sections set in contrast, had been to challenge the emerging scientific world to recognise his own need of a creative God, whom their specialised language he termed The Almighty Lecture); rather as Freemasons refer to their conception of the Almighty as The Architect Divine. 

There remains to be considered the question of what had finally decided Paine that the time had come to publish his thoughts on religion, as he had been minded to do for a number of years. The obvious answer, the attack in the Convention on foreigners, is not sufficient, for it is apparent that Paine had by then already dispatched his first section (possibly in updated version) to his printer, and the attack on Cloots and himself had only the lesser effect of provoking him into hurried completion of the second section. I now put forward my own answer to this question, which I base on present knowledge of the activities of the French mathematicians who were for years much in the public eye since they were playing an important practical role which had been allocated to them in consequence of their reputation as scientists. And of these activities by far the most important, in the context of this paper, are those of Laplace, the outstanding astronomer, whose theories were widely and openly discussed (with Napoleon in person, for example) and which would have riveted the continuing interest of Paine. 

Laplace was a prolific writer who issued many publications over a period extending at least from 1774 to 1776; he is credited with having brought to its culmination Newton’s theory of gravitation, and in his astronomical research he made extensive use of higher mathematics. In other words, he did not merely propose a theory, he set out to demonstrate mathematically that the natural laws of the universe supported its plausibility. He is strongly associated with a theory that the solar system originated in a mass of rotating gas, which as it cooled from its edges inwards formed the planets and left the rotating sun as the remaining rotating core of the original huge mass of rotating gases. Such a theory, with its on-going complicated mathematical calculations could only have developed over a long period of time; and to Paine, whose conception of God was of a first cause, a theory that antedated the solar system he knew and had studied would have proved endlessly fascinating. But from Paine’s standpoint, Laplace’s philosophy, within which he developed his theories, presented an irresistible challenge. 

Napoleon has been shown above to have taken an interest in Laplace, as he did in any prominent thinker, Thomas Paine included. And as Napoleon was far more than just a military genius, his discussions with thinkers was wide-ranging, as befitted a leader who was to become an outstanding head of state. Boyer recounts that when discussing with Laplace the long-developing theory that the solar system had originated in a rotating mass of gas, Napoleon observed that Laplace included no mention of God. Laplace is said to have replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis”. According to the same sources this attitude of Laplace was not universally held amongst scientists, nor even amongst the members of our celebrated sextet, for Lagrange, on hearing of this interchange between Napoleon and Laplace, is said to have commented in his turn, “Ah, but it is a beautiful hypothesis”. Paine, with his absorbing interest in the theory, and all related aspects, must have become aware (possibly through direct conversations with Laplace) of this deep division between eminent scientific minds, and after observing it he could not possibly have remained a passive onlooker but would have been compulsively driven to contest the spread of atheism by throwing his powers of persuasion against it. 

In this urgent task that he set himself; Paine again conferred to posterity a valuable clue as to the pressure of circumstances leading to his decision to publish The age of Reason he set this out in The Author’s Profession of Faith, which reads to me as his final preface to what we now know as Part I of The Age of reason, but which he originally presented as a complete work contrasting false revelations with newly-appreciated truth. A lesser mind might have sought to present his message as yet another revelation to a single human being, as George Fox had done; Paine, much more humble before his God, saw his role as interpreting the workings of a first cause to all men, not all of whom had yet realised the import of the unravelling of the mysteries of “the starry heavens”, even though they themselves were participating in the unravelling. Paine tells us in the clearest possible terms, “As several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow-citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine…” He does not identify these informants and he does not tell us how they communicated to him their personal creeds. He certainly does not say that they published them or publicly proclaimed them, rather is the tenor of his comment that he received them in a series of private examinations of beliefs during his many discussions with his contemporaries of pressing topics of the hour. Paine acknowledges these differing personal creeds, but he does not reveal or criticise them; he builds upon them. 

Paine was not a remote academician writing for readers of succeeding centuries; he was a living creature of immense vitality acutely observing the essential features of contemporary times, avidly joining in dis..ussion and influencing progress through his eloquent pen; and he seized time by the forelocks when he realised that delay could cost his fellows their right of overt individual approach to God. His first section might well have been composed long before as an overall view in a historical perspective, calling for no urgent presentation and committed to his memory for eventual publication as a last offering to his fellows; it was when his many contacts with influential personages of his day brought realisation that there was em”-ging an on-going battle for the possession of men’s minds and souls that he found himself driven to publish his personal Pilgrims Progress recounting the advancement of knowledge and opening a new approach to God for his fellows.

And amongst his fellows he found widely varying willingness to accompany him upon this new path and a broad division between two distinct lines of thought; there is little doubt in my own mind that these two groups can be typified by the two mathematicians whose comments are recorded above; one, the atheistic brilliant young non-political administratively-incompetent astronomer, Laplace; the other, the slightly older, deistically-inclined Lagrande who shared with Paine the benefit of having lived and worked in three different countries and had enjoyed high contacts in each of them. 

Thomas Paine lived through a series of stirring events of unprecedented importance, none of which were foreseen by even the best-informed of his contemporaries during his youth, but which he came to see as a natural development in the affairs of western peoples; and he himself was no idle spectator of its progress. His participation was continuous, beginning with England, where his efforts have been largely unexplored (except by myself, notably in my papers, ‘The First Excise Period’ and ‘The Methodist Influence’, published in the TPS Bulletin in 1978 and 1979. I hope to add to these in the not-too-distant future). Paine soon saw that the American Revolution was only a beginning which would eventually embrace a revolution in religious thought, as he made clear in his first section of The Age of Reason.

Soon after I had published the pamphlet “Common Sense”, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it has taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. 

The revolt of the American colonies, enormously important though it was, was not internal but was directed against a very distant external power (naturally it had some opponents, such as Oldys, who vented his fury through his hostile biography of Paine after retreating across the Atlantic). However, when revolutionary fervour spread to France, the French Revolution took the very different internal form aimed against the domestic government and its supporting factions, amongst which the church stood high. But in this second major revolution Paine took no originating part (other than the example of his American participation), not even in the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion and compulsive articles of faith, although he had long anticipated that such a result would follow internal revolution in government; for the natural impetus of the French Revolution brought about this result without his aid as a natural consequence of its new thinking. Paine merely observed the fulfilment of his expectations, until circumstances forced his active concern with the right of freedom of worship of each individual Frenchman and Frenchwoman, to whom he offered a new revelation which every one of them could accept. And it is to be observed that when Paine later wrote of the opposition provoked by The Age of Reason, he mentioned no dissenters in France. 

It is also to be observed that although Paine’s knowledge of the patterns in the Creation was not extensive, his understanding was wide. Thus although he did not know that the three satellites of Jupiter, lo, Europa and Ganymede, rotate around the planet in 1,77, 3.55 and 7,16 days, almost exactly in ratio 1-2-4, he had already covered this extraordinary circumstance by his observation that the extent of mathematical demonstration in the heavenly bodies is unknown, and while he would not have known of the numerical sequence devised by Leonardo Fibonacci about 1200, and its modern application to questions in botany, he had made an astonishing prescient forecast of the exquisite mechanism…of…vegetable bodies in The Lewes Writings.

Thomas Paine was not by nature a revolutionary; he was a reformer. His early attitude towards both government and religion was benign, and when his early history is finally presented to the public it will at last become apparent that he was originally a conformist. But Paine’s conformity was not blind. He recognised injustices, and when he saw abuses practised by authority, whether civil or ecclesiastic, he exposed them, at first by public speaking, but later by the telling arguments flowing from his fluent pen. That he has become associated with the advocacy or revolution stems from the hostility of established figures to his philosophy (which they resented from a man of his modest birth) and to their great fear of his skilled powers of persuasion by a technique he disclosed in The Lewes Writings, and specifically re-stated in Part 2 of The Age of Reason. Thus, when cognisance of The Age of Reason spread widely from France, high church dignitaries feared sever weakening of their own authority and lies were disseminated to discredit Paine, the visionary who uniquely advocated universal revelation with associated global deism, misrepresenting him as an atheist in a disgraceful attack on his intellectual integrity in order to preserve their own privileges and power. 

But it would be unfair to single out the church alone for lies spread to counter Paine’s influence in revolutionary times; secular England also resorted to invention. The Charter that King John forced upon the rebel barons at Runymede, which they rejected in favour of civil war and the installation of a French usurper, was misrepresented in a myth that the self-seeking barons had protected the people of England, notwithstanding that the Runnymede Charter was never English law, that it disappeared for centuries (until its terms were first published by Blackstone in Paine’s hey-day), and that the real Magna Carla, with its complimentary Charter of the Fares-4 was issued by John’s son in 1216 as his contribution to the evolution of the Charters of Liberty (these facts have also been brought to notice in The Bulletin, and no historian has ever been able to refute them). 

The greatness of The Age of Reason, in my personal opinion, stems from the original publication now called Part I, which was written on a high intellectual level, outclassing the Bible, the New Testament and the Koran, from none of which Paine needed to quote in his exposure of the false bases of many accepted religious tenets. Part 2 certainly has interest, mainly from the further topical and autobiographical disclosures of Paine, but his detailed refutation of biblical text therein has little persisting value, except for those who hanker after religious dispute rather than crvr a basic philosophy of good living. Paine produced a detailed study of the Bible, but he did not examine the Koran, which he had also dismissed earlier in its entirety, and this perhaps was a pity, for had he done so he might have observed that the futility of argument between believers and disbelievers about dogma had been put into rational context by Mahomet centuries before, when he declared: 

O ye UNBELIEVERS! I worship not that which ye worship, And ye do not worship that which I worship; I shall never worship that which ye worship Neither will ye worship that which I worship. To you be your religion; to me be mine.

I began this paper by referring to the common practice of seeing the events of the French revolution in terms of popular fiction, in which heroes save intended victims from the guillotine, a form of swift sure execution introduced for reasons of humanity in substitution for prolonged public sufferings such as those long exhibited at Tyburn. But it can be rationally argued that there is a basis of truth in such tales. And indeed there is, for not all who came under threat perished. The reasons some did not are varied, although no authentic record exists that I know of showing an intended victim surviving through voluntary substitution by a friend who took his place on the scaffold. During the highly publicised Reign of Terror, which all rational minds deplore (although rarely comparing it with the far greater scale of executions by other regimes in our own century), some who thought themselves in danger made their escape from France. Thomas Paine did not, although he enjoyed considerable opportunity for doing so. Even when he saw the prospect of execution looming inexorably before Cloots (who was guillotined) and himself, he devoted himself not to his own preservation but to more intensive pursuit of the cause for which he had remained, the preservation of spiritual freedom. 

Verily truth is stranger than fiction. In fiction heroes offered themselves in substitution for those whom they had warm ties of affection. The emotional affection of Thomas Paine for other people is little known, for he valued his privacy. But Paine foes not seem to have entertained any doubts that his proper course was to continue his life’s work, even though he knew that thereby he was almost certainly condemning himself to the guillotine, because by offering the sacrifice of himself he was simultaneously offering to his fellows through the completion of his great work, a prospect for survival of the better elements of religious belief. 

Note: 

The author offers this paper as a belated supplement to his paper, `Thomas Paine, The Methodist Influence’ (TES Bulletin, 1979. 6.3. 59-78). He freely concedes that some of its points are matters of opinion, but feels it has a logic which merits attention and would welcome independent critical analysis by competent scholars, as he would of his paper, ‘Thomas Paine and the Myth of Magna Carta’ (TES Bulletin. 1982. 7.2. 29-52).

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Debate Aborted. Burke, Priestley. Paine And The Revolution In France. 1789 – 91. P. O’Brian. 283pp. Paperback. Bishop Auckland. The Pentland Press. 1996. £12.50 

It is a long time since I have read a book on the controversy Edmund Burke launched with his Reflections on the Revolution in France that I have not only thoroughly enjoyed but also learned a great deal from. Dr. O’Brien discusses Burke’s opinions in detail while contrasting them with the criticism made of them by Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley. There were. of course. many other replies to Burke, most are largely forgotten even amongst academics. In fact Priestley’s reply has for the most part been lost sight of. For example, in Professor Keane’s recent political biography of Paine. Priestley receives minimal attention. In focusing as much on Priestley as on Paine. Dr. O’Brien restores an all important balance. for the criticism made of Burke by Priestley excellently supplements what Paine has to say. Indeed we often find in the extensive quotations reproduced in this book, that both men arc saying much the same thing. though Priestley’s language is all too frequently stolid when compared with Paine’s method of expressing himself.

The author’s title may at first appear something of a puzzle for it can be said that far from being aborted the debate Burke initiated continues still. however. Dr. O’Brien considers Burke’s failure to enter into the debate by curbing it with his rather weak and puzzling. An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, published anonymously in 1791. This has been seen as an attempt to reply to Paine’s Rights of Man but if so it must be counted as a dismal failure. Burke the controversialist had clearly got cold feet. 

Like Paine, Priestley was to leave England for America, where he settled. He shared Paine’s political radicalism, but not his revolutionary attitude. In fact he knew Paine personally. but he was to part company when he published a bitter criticism of The Age of Reason, Priestley’s attack is perhaps one of his poorest works and rightly forgotten. Debate aborted though, goes a long way to restore Priestley’s political reputation and to remind the world that he was not just a scientist. 

The author acknowledges Burke to have been a ‘great man’ but one who was ‘scarcely rational about human rights’, who resorts to sneering when he fails to have better of an argument. ‘This man’ concludes the author, ‘must have had a large mental block’. One criticism. Throughout his book Dr. O’Brien uses the title The Rights of Plan rather than Rights of Man. Paine’s choice of title was deliberate as he did not restrict rights. Hence it is important to use the correct title.

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In 1843, the Memoirs of Abraham Raimbach the engraver (1776-1843)  were published by his son. Raimbach was a friend of David Wilkie, the painter, and highly regarded in his profession. In 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, like many more British artists, he crossed the Channel to France to see the great assemblage of works of art collected by Napoleon from all over Europe, and stayed there two months, meeting  many French artists, and drawing in the Louvre. He timed his journey  to arrive in Paris in time for the Bastille celebrations, travelling from London to Brighton on Thursday July 8th, crossing to Dieppe, and arriving in Paris by the evening of the 12th. In the course of his  extremely interesting account of these two months there, he includes this passage (pp.78-80):  

“Still in their ashes burn their wonted fires!” 

`Few men have had greater influence in their time for good or evil than Thomas Paine. As the able and active disseminator of these  democratic and irreligious principles which, though apparently crushed  and extinguished, and threaten from time to time to set the world again in a  revolutionary blaze, this extraordinary man was a subject of interest and  curiosity both in what he had been and in what he had become. He was  now a fallen meteor – poor, friendless, and almost dependent for his  daily bread upon the casual bounty of some of his compassionate  fellow-countrymen. He was at this time constantly to be seen at an  obscure cabaret in an obscure street in the Fauxbourg St. Germain (Cafe  Jacob, Rue Jacob).

The scene, as we entered the room from the street – it was on the groundfloor – was, under the circumstances, somewhat  impressive. It was on a summer’s evening, and several of the tables were  occupied by men, apparently tradesmen and mechanics, some playing  at the then universal game of dominoes, others drinking their bottles of  light, frothy, but pleasant beer, or their little glass of liqueur, while in a  retired part of the room sat the once dreaded demagogue, the  supposed conspirator against thrones and altars, the renowned Thomas Paine!

He was in conversation with several well-dressed Irishmen, who  soon afterwards took their leave, and we placed ourselves at his table.  His general appearance was mean and poverty-stricken. The portrait of  him engraved by Sharp from Romney’s picture of him is a good  likeness; but he was now much withered and care-worn, though his dark  eye still retained its sparkling vigour. He was fluent in speech, of mild  and gentle demeanour, clear and distinct in enunciation, and his voice  exceedingly soft and agreeable. The subject of his talk being of course political, resembled very much his printed opinions; and the dogmatic  form in which he delivered them seemed to evince his own perfect  self-conviction of their truth.

Among many predictions that subsequent  events have not verified, he expressed himself quite confident that the  Bank of England would never resume cash payments. Paine had been a member of the National Convention; and it is pleasant to know, as an Englishman, that on the trial of Louis XVI, he voted for the King’s  being pardoned. He was imprisoned during the time of terror, and narrowly escaped with his life. I understood afterwards that Colonel  Cosville, of Yorkshire, had shewn him great kindness, and enabled him  to return to America, where he dragged out the few remaining years of  his life in neglect and poverty.”  

Note on Bosville (Dictionary of National Biography). Bosville, William  (1745-1813) bon vivant. Lieutenant, 1769; served in American war;  retired from army, 1777: travelled in France, Italy and Morocco, and subsequently settled in Welbeck St., London, where he became renowned for his hospitality.  

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