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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By Gary Berton 

Part Two of Two Parts – See part one here.

Thomas Paine’s first principles built the structure of democracy. The mechanisms central to Paine’s political theories are rooted in his ideology of first principles. The basic foundation of these principles is equality, and as a direct result, justice. If equality is practiced, then people share equal justice. 

“Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation,” he wrote in Common Sense, “the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” 

“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic (for the word REPUBLIC means the PUBLIC GOOD, or the good of the whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government) when, I say, they agree to do this, it is to be understood, that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support and maintain this rule of equal justice among them. They therefore renounce not only the despotic form, but the despotic principle, as well of governing as of being governed by mere Will and Power, and substitute in its place a government of justice.” (Dissertations on Government, 1786) 

The structure of his democratic theory is like a house: the foundation of that house is equality and justice; everything else rests upon it. If this principle is compromised and weakened, the whole structure is vulnerable to corruption and oppression.

Inherent in the equality/justice principle are rights. both natural and civil — civil rights arising from natural rights. Natural rights are inherent and received upon birth, without exception. Defending these rights is the object of democratic government. 

Resting on this foundation of rights are four support pillars constructing the structure of democracy. (1) Rejection of precedent, (2) No one should live worse than in the state of nature. (3) Recognition of the natural sociability of humanity. (4) Enlightenment and reason solve problems. A few thoughts on each:

1. Rejection of precedent 

Precedent got us into the problems of government. They represent the failures to ensure equality and justice. Precedent is the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution; it’s the way things were always done, which is the excuse to maintain “tradition.” Precedent is the wall preventing people from building the democratic structures of a better world, Precedent reinforces structures that promote elitism, privilege, and injustice. 

2 No one should live worse than in the state of nature. 

If civilization has progressed, why are masses of the people worse off than if they lived in small groups in nature? That is not progress. The wellbeing of every person is what democracy insists upon. If many or most people live worse off than as small groups in nature, civilization is not progressing; it’s regressing. Why is another discussion for another day. 

3. Recognize the natural sociability of humanity. 

Humans evolved as social animals. The human mind, Paine wrote, is “unfitted for perpetual solitude.” That natural sociability is the basis of democracy. Building upon it is fundamental to democracy.

4. Enlightenment and reason solve problems 

Knowing and using the real world around us must be the basis for knowledge, and applying that knowledge to solve problems. Anything else is invented to manipulate and confuse the people in their decision-making, which is anti-democratic. 

Atop the pillars is a roof protecting the structure of government from outside elements. The roof consists of constitutions with democratic structures and laws. 

Building the opposite structure is the bizarro world of Edmund Burke, whose political theory is oligarchy. His foundation is order, not equality. Burke’s pillars are “defending historical precedent,” following “tradition,” (not the Enlightenment ideals Paine advocated). Burke sought continuity, not change for the better. Burke saw humanity as a collection of “disconnected individuals.” His roof atop government is prescriptive for elite rule, not democratic order, government by the people. 

Paine challenged and changed the entire philosophical structure of government, not just for the people in the 18th century, but for everyone in the world today.

The post Thomas Paine: Founder of Modern Democracy: Part 2  appeared first on .

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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Edited excerpt from “Here’s to Tom Paine — the Forgotten Founding Father,” originally published on Medium, June 10, 2024.

In 1789, Thomas Paine wrote to his American friend, Kitty Few Nicholson: 

A thousand years hence (for I must indulge in a few thoughts), perhaps in less, America maybe what England now is!…When we contemplate the fall of empires and the extinction of nations of the ancient world, we see but little to excite our regret than the mouldering ruins of pompous palaces, magnificent monuments…. of the most costly workmanship. But when the empire of America shall fall, the subject for contemplative sorrow will be infinitely greater than crumbling brass or marble can inspire. It will not then be said, here stood a temple of vast antiquity…. but here, ah painful thought! the noblest work of human wisdom, the grandest scene of human glory, the fair cause of freedom rose and fell! 

Today, 235 years later, we grapple with the same freedom issues confronting Paine and his British contemporaries. We may even say the situation is worse, given our knowledge and seemingly more abundant resources.

There’s little doubt Paine would probably be deeply disappointed with his adopted country — its downfall arriving much sooner than he anticipated. 

Much of what Paine wrote in Rights of Man about 18th century Britain fits 21st century America: 

When, in countries that are called civilised, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy…. 

Civil government does not exist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age, as to exclude, as much as possible, profligacy from the one and despair from the other. Instead of this, the resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings, impostors and prostitutes; and even the poor themselves, with all their wants upon them, are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them. 

British Whig and Tory members of Parliament then pulled the strings of government with their riches. Today, American Democratic and Republican members of Congress (mostly millionaires and billionaires) continue the charade that social and economic equity prevails, that anyone can go from “rags to riches.” 

The U.S. pay-to-play system makes all candidates rely on their personal wealth and contributions from their deep-pocket donors. This guarantees only the voices of the rich are heard. Citizens United opened the door wide to corporate donations. 

Paine would not have been surprised. After all, he observed that: 

A change of ministers amounts to nothing. One goes out, another comes in, and still the same measures, vices, and extravagances are pursued. It signifies not who is minister. The defect lies in the system. The foundation and superstructure of the government is bad. Prop it as you please, it continually sinks and ever will.

The perception of a government rigged for the elites can explain both Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and the January 6, 2021 melee at the White House, where many had faced financial insecurity across the past decades. Again, Paine’s words are prescient: 

As a great mass of the community are thrown thereby into poverty and discontent, they are constantly on the brink of commotion… Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by which society is to be preserved. 

I believe it’s no accident that current social beliefs and trends uncannily reflect those in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many Americans still believe that assistance to the poor encourages sloth. Meanwhile, there is little interest in funding public K-12 education or in making higher education more affordable. 

We are fully ensconced in 18th century style nepotism, indicated by the recently coined term, “nepobaby.” The idea of meritocracy is almost as much a sham today as it was back then. 

If Instagram and Tiktok offer clues, we still venerate “Old Money” as much as characters in any Jane Austen novel. Let’s not forget that the very ideas of old money in America is racist — given centuries of slavery while prohibiting immigration from Asia — for only whites were allowed to accumulate great wealth. 

If the top one percent chooses to blindly immerse themselves in the 18th century, perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to revisit Paine’s Rights of Man and right the wrongs ourselves. 

Enough is enough!

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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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By Frances Chiu 

An incorrigible Europhile for much of my youth, I was not terribly interested in Thomas Paine. The fact that Ronald Reagan was an admirer of Paine didn’t help either: Paine must be a conservative, right? But then I realized that to understand William Blake’s revolutionary sentiment, I had to read Rights of Man, Paine’s defense of the French Revolution. 

As I turned the pages of Rights, I was pleasantly surprised. Wait, was he actually what we’d consider a liberal rather than a conservative? Paine challenged hereditary rule and privilege! He proposed welfare — along with progressive taxation, a prototype of Social Security, while sanctioning unions. I was blown away by his prescience, seeing that his words could as easily apply to 1993 as 1792:

When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy. 

Also appealing to me about Paine was his modern, accessible prose, so different from his 18th-century peers. He presents the most visionary ideas in the least pretentious language — for instance, this passage defending the rights of man: 

Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion, yet it may be worth observing that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam. Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves between, and presumptuously working to unmake man. 

Although the subject of my doctoral dissertation changed once I entered Oxford, I continued to study Paine. I admired him more when I read Age of Reason and articles from the Pennsylvania Magazine. 

In 2004, I gained a more complete picture of Paine as a man from reading John Keane’s biography of him. I almost fell head over heels in love with him. 

I was impressed that he donated all of his proceeds from Common Sense to the Continental Army. I was impressed that he walked from Trenton to Philadelphia one late December night to publish his first American Crisis paper. I was impressed that Paine didn’t just hang out with the wealthiest and most prominent men, but also appreciated the company of ordinary men. I was even more impressed by all his efforts to end slavery in America and his unusually appreciative views of Native Americans (or “Indians” as they were called). 

When I reached the end of the biography, I wept for him. How sad it was that Americans had forgotten his selfless efforts to win American independence and build the new country. How profoundly sad it was that only a mere handful of Americans — six people, including two Black youths — attended his funeral, given the tens of thousands who attended the public funerals of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. 

I became determined to remind other Americans of Paine’s contributions. I figured I would never get a chance to write academically about Paine since my PhD was in English literature, not history or political science, so I decided to teach the first class in the U.S. devoted to Paine and his contemporaries at The New School — 

“The Age of Paine: Religion, Revolution, and Radicalism” Three years later, shortly before Christmas, I organized a symposium there on Paine for the bicentenary of his death. I recall feeling astonished at the overflow crowd. Who would have imagined such a large turnout amid last-minute holiday shopping? 

Then the unimaginable happened: I was invited to submit a book proposal to Routledge on Paine’s Rights of Man, the very work that first made me a “Paineite.” I didn’t think it would ever happen because the majority of my publications had focused on the history of the Gothic novel. 

In writing a Routledge guide, I rediscovered why I admired Paine the way I do. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008, expansion of George W. Bush’s wars from two to seven, the crackdowns on freedom of the press and the right to protest, I realized Paine’s ideas within Rights of Man were quite possibly even more relevant today than when first published in 1792. 

Beyond Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, Thomas Paine is the “founding father” we need to heed more than ever in these times that try our souls!

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In honor of Banned Books Week , I decided earlier this month to revisit Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

Originally published in England as two separate pamphlets (in March 1791 and February 1792), the 200-page book is still widely considered Paine’s most important and influential work.

It is also, according to the American Library Association “one of history’s most banned political narratives.” In England, it was contraband for decades. Selling this work of “seditious libel” could get you arrested, fined, imprisoned – or even, as in one case, transported. Both a defense of the French Revolution and an ideological take-down of English monarchy, Rights of Man caused a political furor almost unimaginable for us today. (Yes, even in the age of Trump). In 1792, brought to trial by the Crown, Paine fled his native England to avoid being hung as a traitor. He would never return.

Since that time, Rights of Man has remained controversial, a regular target of censorship efforts around the world. Even in the United States it hasn’t always been safe from challenges in schools and libraries.

Nor is it difficult to understand why. Paine’s insistence, conveyed in plain language, that ordinary citizens had an inherent, always-existing right to choose – and if necessary to change – their governments was and continues to be toxic to authoritarians of all political stripes.

I first encountered Rights of Man around 2010. Having read The Age of Reason and Common Sense, I was prepared for the conventions of eighteenth-century language, as well as Paine’s impressive gift for both lucid explanation and (often hilarious) sarcasm.

I was not prepared for the sheer breadth and compass of Paine’s democratic vision – nor the depth of his feeling for the oppressed. Of the supposedly “vulgar … ignorant mob,” the lowest of the poor classes throughout Europe, Paine offers this insight, two centuries before activists had a word for marginalization:

It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature. A vast mass of mankind are degradedly thrown into the back-ground of the human picture, to bring forward, with greater glare, the puppet-show of state and aristocracy.

The book is filled with such insights.

Yet, even after a second reading, I still find Rights of Man a difficult work to fully absorb. It is nearly impossible to summarize, because it is so many things at once. Far more than a polemic, it is also reportage, protest, political theory. It is at once sober journalism and withering satire, careful analysis and impassioned plea for justice. The late commentator Christopher Hitchens describes it as “one of the first ‘modern’ texts,” and “both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society” (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: a Biography, 11).

In its reach and complexity, the book is different, even, from Paine’s other writings. Unlike Common Sense or The American Crisis, it’s less a call to arms than a spur thought and reflection – though it is filled with evocative metaphor and stirring language. Unlike The Age of Reason, it doesn’t target a specific foe, such as organized religion – unless that foe is monarchy and “hereditary government,” which will strike most readers of today as last century’s news.

Ironically, the main barrier to fully appreciating Rights of Man in 2017 may be that its critique of “government” has been largely blunted over time – by the very progress that Paine himself hoped for and advocated. What was “seditious libel” worthy of trying to hang an upstart writer back in 1792 is today the “common sense” of nearly all modern democracies.

As Paine states in “Letter to the Addressers.” his summary and defense of Rights of Man, “I have asserted … and by fair and open argument maintained, the right of every nation at all times to establish such a system and form of government for itself as best accords with its disposition, interest, and happiness; and to change and alter it as it sees occasion.”

That is – people, meaning ordinary citizens, are the creators and shapers of government. And those same people have the right to change and reshape their government if they so choose.

Paine doesn’t need to convince us that such a belief is right, just, or natural. We presume those truths to be self-evident. What shocks us is that anyone might believe – or have ever believed – otherwise.

Americans in particular have been telling ourselves this story of how governments are best formed for over two hundred years. We tell it this way because we learned it from our Founders, including and especially Thomas Paine.

So what, if anything, can a work like Rights of Man say to us today, if so many of its precepts are already ingrained in our worldview? Haven’t we already absorbed all this business about representative democracies and written constitutions?

Well … perhaps – but it is helpful to remind ourselves of how much reality – political reality, in particular – is invented.

Rights of Man – like all Paine’s work, like the writings of all our Founders – was created at a time when modern democracy was experimental and widely mistrusted. Words and concepts matter. Historians point out that in Rights of Man, Paine transformed the meaning of the word democracy itself, giving it the largely positive connotation it carries today. In the late eighteenth century, thinkers and writers were still using democracy as a slur – a synonym for anarchy, lawlessness, “mob rule,” and the unmooring of civil order. John Adams understood the word in this sense, and like others of his time, characterized democracy as a kind of contagion – as “Paine’s yellow fever.” The statesman Edmund Burke became Paine’s ideological rival – and the catalyst for the writing of Paine’s book, when he dismissed as irrelevant some “paltry sheets about the rights of man.”

American political discourse has been, and continues to be, one long debate about rights: who has them, who should, what they entail, how they are to be enforced, what puts them under threat. When the Supreme Court hears a case, whether on health insurance or campaign funding or immigration, it acts as an arbiter of rights. Many of its most important cases historically have referenced and interpreted the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, better known to all of us as the Bill of Rights. We are nearly incapable of imagining a world without rights – or at least a theoretical assertion of them – as a given.

It has perhaps become too easy for us “post-moderns” to forget that there was a time in which rights were a foreign and forbidden language, a cause to charge writers with madness and treason, to jail booksellers and publishers and to burn authors in effigy. The media of Thomas Paine’s day cast his work in precisely those terms, whether through vicious editorial cartoons of “Mad Tom, the Man of Rights” or a scurrilous government-funded “biography” packed with falsehoods.

Yet Paine – and his ideas – have persisted.

Among many other things, Rights of Man advocates for a progressive tax structure and what we might today call a welfare state: government pensions for the old, education for the young and the unemployed, help for the impoverished and for new parents. Many of these ideas did not see fruition for a century and more after Paine’s death. Many others have yet to be even tried. Paine did not live to see most of the changes that his words helped bring about.

And just as he failed to see the coming Reign of Terror in France – an oversight that nearly got him killed (there were a great number of things in Paine’s life that nearly got him killed before he actually died … at the age of 73) – so he also failed to see that the dissolution of monarchy would not bring an end to war. Nor could he have known that democracy wasn’t a cure-all, and that many of the abuses he attributed to “the monarchical system” would prove a hazard to representative systems as well. The presidency of Donald Trump is far from the earliest example, but of course it springs most easily to mind. In reading Paine’s various descriptions of monarchy as afflicted by the ills of both youth and old age, it’s hard not to keep seeing Trump, the would-be emperor of America, with his alternating temper-tantrums and breathtaking ignorance.

It is government through the medium of passions and accidents. It appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. It reverses the wholesome order of nature. It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of nonage over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government …

Likewise, in contemplating the phenomenon of “alternate facts” and “fake news” that we read about daily, Paine’s warnings about the “the puppet show” and “mystery” of government take on new resonance.

Yet for me, as always, the most moving aspect of Paine’s writing is never ideology – or even bold, strong language, but compassion – and the kind of open-hearted idealism that our cynical culture loves to deride as naive fantasy.

There are moments, more perhaps in Rights of Man than any of his other works, when Paine’s faith in his fellow human beings – that is, in us, ordinary Jane-and-Joe Average citizens like you and me – is not only profoundly touching, but unsettling. Throughout the book, it is clear that Paine rests his faith less in a specific form of government than in his fellow human beings – in “we the people” and our willingness to assert and protect not just our own rights – but those of others. Representative democracy will work, he tells us, not because of this or that party or leader, but because “the nation” (in the Rousseauist sense, meaning “the people”) has the ultimate power to shape and control government.

“Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it,” he tells us. “Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. …. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.” Those are rousing and hopeful words – words fit to encourage a resistance.

Paine also believed that we the people could see through the orchestrated lies that government (or the media) so often peddles. In “Letter to the Addressers,” he writes:

… how easily does even the most illiterate reader distinguish the spontaneous sensations of the heart, from the labored productions of the brain. Truth, whenever it can fully appear, is a thing so naturally familiar to the mind, that an acquaintance commences at first sight. No artificial light, yet discovered, can display all the properties of daylight; so neither can the best invented fiction fill the mind with every conviction which truth begets.

In Rights of Man, this sentiment is even more streamlined and poetic:

… such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness.

In this age of floating signifiers, fake news, and tweeting presidents, it is challenging, even daunting, to adopt Paine’s optimistic stance on the self-evidence of truth. Media and technology have changed all of that, we keep hearing. We may (rightly) ask if Paine was being naive – and whether we are naive to trust what he says.

But we should not forget that speaking truth to power has never been a magic trick or a one-time proposition. Truth may “only” need to appear – but most of the time it needs to appear over and over again before it sinks it. Paine knew this, even if he doesn’t say so here. We can tell that by the number of times that he did, in fact, repeat those democratic ideals that we think we know, but rarely expend the effort to examine or teach or defend. Paine did all these things throughout his life, very often at great personal risk, over, and over, and over again.

Thomas Paine persisted – on many fronts beyond the printed page. And through those efforts, his thoughts and ideas have persisted into our own time.

We need to remember that, and follow his example.

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2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest works of modern British history, E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. While a celebration of the emergence of collective class consciousness, this magnificent study is not without key personalities and individual inspirational figures, not least Thomas Paine of Thetford, an inveterate pamphleteer and veritable ‘citizen of the world’. 

Paine is the key individual catalyst instigating Thompson’s narrative. It was his great gift for communication his ‘intellectual vernacular prose’ – which broke through the elite and gentlemanly conventions of 18th political debate to render the message of natural rights and rational republicanism accessible to ‘members unlimited’, the strapline of the new Corresponding Societies of the 1790s (whose membership extended to those designated by Edmund Burke, Paine’s protagonist, as the ‘swinish multitude’). A great communicator rather than original thinker, it was citizen Paine who opened up the prospect of a new age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) would no longer be denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. 

Thompson’s interpretation underlined Paine’s importance in what was labelled by historians as the ‘Atlantic-Democratic Revolution’. In the 1960s, my undergraduate days, this exercise in comparative history breaking through the constraints of nation state historiography was as fashionable as Thompson’s history from below. In light of events in Syria which have prompted the US to remember France as its ‘oldest ally’, the Atlantic Democratic Revolution might come back into fashion again. 

Paine traversed the Atlantic world, personifying, as it were, the democratic revolution with its universal message, a motif which informed ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’, the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans. Here, for example, are the first and fourth verses: God save great Thomas Paine, 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain 

To every soul. 

He makes the blind to see What dupes and slaves they be, 

And points out liberty, 

From pole to pole. Why should despotic pride Usurp on every side? 

Let us be free: 

Grant Freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless, 

Plant through the universe 

Liberty’s Tree. 

Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of corset-making, he tried a number of other occupations (most notably serving as an exciseman in Lewes) before sailing for America in 1774, having recently separated from his second wife. Here he made his name with a pamphlet, Common Sense(1776) which, in advocating complete independence for the American colonies, argued for republicanism as the sole rational means of government the mostly widely distributed pamphlet of the American War of Independence, it has the strongest claim, the Dictionary of National Biography notes, to have made independence seem both desirable and attainable to the wavering colonists. Relishing the freedom of the new world (and its potential for commercial progress) Paine readily cast aside the restrictive and gentlemanly conventions of British politics, not least the exclusive tone of Whig ‘republicanism’, a form of ‘civic humanism’, premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of seventeenth century constitutional struggles. Far from democratic, ‘republicanism’ of this order accorded political primacy to independent landowners. Guardians of the constitution, it was their duty to resist imbalance and corruption in the polity through civic virtue, by active participation in political affairs. Paine, however, was altogether more democratic and inclusive. Looking beyond the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation, he sought an end to executive tyranny and what we would now call ‘sleaze’ through the ‘virtue’ and common good of representative democratic republican government. Hence his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, by which time he had returned to England. 

His democratic natural rights republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a publication sensation- on the most conservative estimate between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were sold in the first three years after publication. In the frenzied atmosphere of the early 1790s, Paine’s writings rendered a fundamental division between the gentlemanly ‘Friends of the People’ and the plebeian ‘Friends of Liberty’. His insistence on natural – as opposed to historicist or constitutional – rights broke through elite constraints, not least the identification of political rights with property rights. Indeed, his democratic republicanism mediated a genuinely radical value-system, oppositional in all its aspects. In calling for a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution, he sought a decisive break from the conventional ways and means of reformers such as petitioning. Regarded as a highly dangerous figure, he was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792. Having been accorded honorary French citizenship, he gained election to the French National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some surprise) the execution of Louis XVI and the fall of the Girondins, after which he himself soon fell victim of the Terror. During imprisonment, he began work on his Age of Reason (two parts, 1794-5), an ill- timed deist attack on organized religion. 

Thereafter his fame and fortunes declined. According to most accounts, he died in miserable circumstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased – although some responses to my BBC history piece suggest otherwise. Ken Burchell contacted me from an email address, Paineite@gmail, to inform me that Paine’s financial worth at time of death was in the region of $15,000, that with a consumption of a quart of brandy per week he drank far less than either Washington or Jefferson and that he was no more depressed than any other elderly dying person. The fact is, Mr Burchell insisted, ‘prudish, evangelical, pro-temperance and most of all Federalist writers attacked Paine’s personal character in order to blunt his personal influence … just as they do today’. Paine’s legacy has certainly proved controversial and contested. 

Within my working life as an historian, there has been considerable change. There was a marked decline in his historiographical standing as the radical 1960s receded. By the time of Thatcherite Britain, mainstream historians were dismissing Paine and his autodidact artisan audiences in the Corresponding and radical societies as an insignificant minority, accorded disproportionately tendentious attention by Thompson and other ‘marxisant’ practitioners of ‘history from below’, ideologically predisposed to ignore the beer-swilling, male chauvinist, xenophobic, beer-swilling, flag-waving majority. Furthermore, the historical establishment insisted, ‘Painophobia’ the reaction proved by Paine – proved stronger than the radicalism he excited. Compelled to answer the democratic Jacobin challenge, conservative opponents of reform developed a convincing defence of the existing order: indeed, it was the conservatives who won the unprecedented battle for the popular mind in the 1790s, although here it was conceded that rhetorical strategy and propaganda device took precedence over ideology and intellectual argument. Burke had already set the tone, recapturing the language of nationalism for the conservative cause in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Vindicated by the subsequent course of events in France, Burke’s prescient pronouncements duly confirmed the supremacy of the accumulated wisdom of precedent and prescription over the wild (and un- English) fanaticism of Paineite abstract reason. Two particular aspects of Paine’s un-English fanaticism were seized upon by the conservative spin doctors of the time to telling effect: levelling and infidelism. 

While extolling Paine as a popular communicator, Thompson had also insisted that he provided the programme as well as the language to attract working people to politics. Paine provided the missing link between parliamentary reform and social and economic progress, drawing distressed workers away from spontaneous rioting into organized political agitation. As Thompson saw it, this was the great achievement of Part Two of The Rights of Man, published in February 1792, a volume which confirmed that Paine was much more than a talented populariser of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits. 

Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation the ‘soft’ right to charity into a theory of ‘positive liberty’ the ‘hard’ right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation (a programme expanded in his later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, 1796). Judged over the long term, Thompson was correct: Paine made a decisive contribution to the politicisation of discontent. At the time, however, it was the misrepresentation of his ideas rather than the inspiration they provided – which mattered more. The charge of ‘levelling’ or economic equality, promptly emerged as the crucial factor in the loyalist triumph over the radicals. Where Burke looked back to gothic feudalism and past glories, loyalist popular propagandists celebrated Britain’s commercial progress, the contemporary wealth of the nation threatened by the spoliation and anarchy of republican egalitarianism. In defending inequality and hierarchy, loyalists stood forward to save Britain from the pre-commercial ‘primitivism’ of natural rights republicanism. 

Paine’s inopportune avowal of deism in his Age of Reason (1794-5) enabled loyalists to add infidelism to the charges of primitivism and levelling. Here the propaganda victory of the loyalists over the godless republican levellers should not be attributed to superior argument but to what sociologists call ‘resource mobilisation’. Where loyalists triumphed was in quantity not quality. Untroubled by the authorities or lack of funds, loyalists deployed every medium and resource to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders, from parish pulpit to national organisation – Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was the largest political organisation in the country. Many of the corresponding societies fell victim to this conservative onslaught, given physical form by Church and King mobs. The surviving societies judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. The violence directed against the radicals was recorded in the second verse of ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’: 

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’ 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow: 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, Patriots vow. 

While radicals struggled to retain a public presence, loyalists chose to treat the crowds to an increasing number of patriotic demonstrations to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. The success of these free holidays and licensed street festivals at which effigies of Paine were often burnt – was not without irony, as I noted by way of conclusion in my BBC piece. In confronting Paineite democracy through such popular nationalist participation, loyalists had established what the radicals had failed fully to achieve, the extension of politics to a mass public. As subsequent events were to show, this public expressed its loyalty to the nation, not necessarily to the status quo. Patriotism indeed was soon to acquire a radical inflexion, upholding the rights of the freeborn Englishman. 

After the polarization of political rhetoric in the 1790s, the opening decade of the 19th century was a time of considerable flux and confusion as war, patriotism and reform were all reassessed and redefined. Once Napoleon’s imperial ambitions became apparent, the character of the war effort changed. Having previously opposed the war – an aggressive conflict against a neighbouring country which simply wanted to reform its internal system of government – radicals now came forward as ardent patriots at the head of recruiting and volunteering drives. 

Having redefined their role as guardians of national virtue, radicals began to attract a wide audience as a series of scandals suggested a connection between military incompetence and parliamentary corruption. Disaffected loyalists joined the radicals in condemnation of the depredations of the fiscal-military state. Among such converts were William Cobbett, the most prolific and influential radical journalist of the early 19th century, and Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire gentleman farmer turned radical orator. Defiantly independent, these former loyalists injected a mood of impatience and intransigence, insisting on the right of all to engage in constitutional protest, to attend meetings, sign petitions and demand nothing less than universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the ballot. While refusing to compromise their new radical principles in subservience either to the Whigs or to commercial interests, they studiously avoided adherence to Paineite rational republicanism. 

In typically English pragmatic and eclectic manner, natural rights arguments were subsumed or concealed within a patriotic appeal to history and precedent. Major Cartwright devoted a lifetime of study to uncover hallowed Saxon principles and practices of popular sovereignty, an original purity defiled by the ‘Norman Yoke’. Open and inclusive in procedure and programme, the mass platform which emerged after 1815 amidst the transition from war to peace without plenty, deliberately exploited ambiguities in the law and constitution, drawing upon the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and ‘people’s history’ in demanding restoration of the people’s rights. Radicals proudly claimed descent from ‘that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and scaffold with their pure and precious blood, for the liberties of the country’. The appeal to the rights of the freeborn Englishman was perhaps best expressed in poetic form: 

Shall Englishmen o’ercome each foe 

And now at home those rights forgo 

Enjoy’d by none beside? 

Degenerate race! Ah! then in vain 

Your birthrights sacred to maintain 

HAMPDEN and SYDNEY died! 

The great hero of the mass platform and advocate of ‘the cause of truth’, Orator Hunt was hailed in the north of England as ‘the intrepid champion of the people’s rights’. ‘The good old character of an independent country Gentleman was surely there in him’, a correspondent wrote to the Manchester Observer. 

I had almost compared him to an English Baron in the time of Magna Charta, but that Mr Hunt’s motives were so much more praiseworthy: he was not there as they met that worthless King at Runnimede, to advocate the rights of a few, but of all. 

Mobilised by Hunt, those without the political nation stood forward to demand radical reform in open constitutional manner and in Sunday best clothes, relying on the proud and disciplined display of numbers (marshalled by demobilised ex-servicemen) to coerce the otherwise inexorable government ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must. The popular format introduced by Hunt constitutional mass pressure from without for the constitutional democratic rights of all continued to inform radical agitation throughout the age of the Chartists. Radicals – renovators as they were initially called – looked to the mass petitioning platform to reclaim their rights, ignoring Paine’s key tactical prescription of a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution. 

My work on Hunt and the mass platform thus led me to question Thompson’s claims about Paine and his breakthrough language of universal rational republicanism. As my research demonstrated, natural rights republicanism and conventions of the type prescribed by Paine did not feature in early 19th century radicalism. Instead, the crowds rallied to a populist platform of mass petitioning justified by history, the constitution and the rule of law, a potent blend of patriotic and national notions. While querying Thompson on the language of radicalism, I am not seeking to belittle Paine. Like Thompson, I recognise him as a seminal influence in English radicalism, the inspirational figure in the politicization of discontent. As Thompson noted, it was Paine who supplied the missing link, underlining the importance of politics to those enduring economic hardship. Thanks to Paine, spontaneous, backward-looking rioting was steadily replaced by forward-looking political agitation, a great advance which William Cobbett opined, the nation should acknowledge. 

The implacable opponent of ‘Old Corruption’, Cobbett gained much of his political education about The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance from Paine’s critical insights into the operation of the ‘system’ (or ‘the Thing’ as Cobbett himself called it) which produced lucrative profits for political peculators and financial speculators at the expense of an intolerable and demand-stifling tax burden on the poor. To honour his mentor, Cobbett reclaimed Paine’s bones from their American grave and brought them back to England (they have since disappeared). 

Educated by Paine, later by Cobbett, 19th century radicals persisted in explaining inequality and exploitation in political terms even as the industrial revolution continued apace. Just as the war-inflated ‘funding system’ had been built on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the capitalist system and denied the worker the right to the whole produce of his labour. The ranks of radical demonology grew throughout the age of the Chartists: alongside fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other tax-gorgers, there now sat cotton lords, millocrats (note the significant political terminology) and other capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from their monopoly of political and legal power. Whether directed against tax- eaters and/or capitalists, the radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour alone unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law. 

Paine’s influence was thus fundamental, albeit not in the way that we might suppose. There were periodic attempts to impose his rational republican formula in purist form, by those disillusioned by the cyclical pattern of mobilisation and collapse of the mass platform, with its vacillating crowds, blustering orators and populist idioms. One such was Richard Carlile, an incorruptible Paineite ideologue who in the aftermath of Peterloo and the collapse of the post-war mass platform subjected himself to a regime of ideological purification and physical Puritanism with comprehensive counter- cultural rigour. A trenchant critic of the empty bluster and personalized style of Hunt’s ‘charismatic’ leadership, Carlile subsequently displayed the worst faults of an ‘ideological’ leader, provoking innumerable schisms among the votaries with his dictatorial pronouncements on doctrine, so different in tone from the eclectic and undogmatic nature of popular radical argument. He insisted on strict conformity to the infidel-Republican Paineite formulary, the exegesis of which (at different times desist, atheist and spiritualist) he reserved for himself alone. In this intensely sectarian and ideological form, rational republicanism failed to engage with the general gut republicanism — the irreverence, scepticism and anti-authoritarianism — which often ran deep in working-class culture. 

No longer committed to the platform, mass agitation and volatile crowds, Carlile looked to the freedom of the press to promote the ‘march of infidelity’, the progress of scientific materialism against superstition, myth and ignorance, but here he found himself in unwelcome alliance with commercial pornographers and the like. Unlike the pornographers, however, Carlile and his ‘corps’ of supporters were libertarians not libertines. In the sanctity of their ‘temples of reason’, these votaries of Paineite republicanism, ‘zetetics’ as they were called, advocated contraception, female equality and free love, a programme of sexual radicalism articulated in the language of the liberal Enlightenment, of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Infidel, republican and sexual radical, Carlile, the doctrinaire individualist, was also the proselyte of orthodox political economy. His pioneer advocacy of birth control was motivated by Malthusianism as much as by feminism, by his conviction that distress was caused by the people themselves through bad and improvident habits and the ‘excess of their numbers in relation to the supply of labour that can employ them’. ‘You cannot be free, you can find no reform, until you begin it with yourselves… abstain from gin and the gin-shop, from gospel and the gospel-shop, from sin and silly salvation’. By the end of the 1820s Carlile stood widely divorced from popular radicalism, culture and experience, a lone opponent of collective endeavour. Interpreted – or rather misinterpreted in this way, Paine plays no part in the making of the English working class. 

Eschewing ideological schisms and the like, mainstream popular radicals never denied the inspiration provided by ‘immortal’ Thomas Paine, but they ensured that his memory was preserved within a patriotic pantheon in which the universal rights of man were subsumed within the historic and constitutional rights of the freeborn Englishman, the charter of the land. The citizens of the world was honoured as British patriot.

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Chris Staples went to this talk with some foreboding, as a person of left wing sympathies, I had felt alienated by Christopher Hitchens’s progression from a broadly left-wing position to that of being a high priest of the right. However, I knew that Hitchens was about to publish a new book about Thomas Paine and that his talk was to inaugurate a regular series at the annual Brighton Festival about a fascinating historical figure who spent much of his early life in the nearby town of Lewes.’ Moreover, I hoped to hear an articulate case put forward by an admirer of Paine for supporting Bush, Blair and their allies and their foreign policy. 

The best part of the talk came in the first five minutes when Hitchens projected a short poem of two verses composed by Arthur O’Connell when being sentenced for being an Irish patriot.

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’

Confused to his odious reign

That for to princes, Thomas Paine!

Defeat and ruin seize the cause

Of France, its liberties and laws!

At first sight this appears to be an attack on Paine and his doctrines but closer examination reveals a different story. 

If one reads the first line of the first verse and follows this with the first line of the second verse followed by the second line of the first verse and then the second line of the second verse and so on, its true meaning is shown. So we have:

The pomp of courts and pride of kings

I fain would banish far from hence

prize above all earthly things

The Rights of Man’ and ‘Common Sense’

etc.

After this promising start, the talk degenerated into a very generalised account of Paine’s life, which did not provide any insights, which would be new to any TPS member. Hitchens took an inordinately long time over this exercise but I hoped that the question and answer session might prove more scintillating. 

As was to be expected, most of the questions revolved around current issues and about Paine’s likely attitude to these. The answers were extremely ponderous and by the time Hitchens had finished his replies, one had almost forgotten the original question, which, when one could remember it, he had not actually answered! There were also many factual errors in his replies and snide comments about the motives of those who did not share his views. 

I will give a very few examples. When questioned by a man from Pakistan about the worldwide hatred of the USA because of its uncritical support for Israel, he countered by a long attack on Pakistan. When asked about the injustice meted out to the Palestinians, he grudgingly accepted that they did have some grievances but the reply was mainly an attack on Bin Laden. It failed to answer the accusation that the suffering of the Palestinians has increased Bin Laden’s following dramatically, a connection which Paine would surely have made. It would be perfectly fair to attack Bin Laden — how one wishes Bush had taken him seriously before 9/11 and, indeed, after that grotesque event instead of being sidelined into adventures in Iraq. 

Hitchens criticised Bin Laden again for opposing the independence of East Timor from predominantly Muslim Indonesia. He appeared to be ignorant of the fact (or chose not to mention it) that US President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger had given the green light to the Indonesian dictator, Suharto, to take over that unhappy country in 1975. This, of course. brought about the deaths of at least 100,000 of its population and probably more so. Had Ford and Kissinger not made this recently revealed, though long suspected, deal, East Timor would never have become part of a Muslim state in the first place.

Islam itself was dubbed as merely an Arab tribal religion, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not Arabs. Those who opposed the violence of attacking Iraq were branded as supporting the violence of the insurrection in that unhappy country. He was pleased that the USA now attacked dictators like Saddam rather than democrats like Allende of Chile. I suppose this IS progress of a sort! Of course no mention was made of the fact that the USA had supported Saddam for a very long period. There was no mention, naturally, of strategic oil. He alleged that British support for the war in Iraq is something to be proud of and he prophesied that we would all reap the benefits of this. This seems an extraordinary view for an alleged Paineite. It seems certain that Pain would have attempted to understand the CAUSES of ‘terror’ in the world today and would have been horrified to see the role being played by his adopted country. 

Hitches may be a polemical writer but, judging by this performance, is certainly not an effective public speaker, except that his inordinately long and ponderous replies to questions, a technique perfected by many politicians, makes it difficult to challenge his highly controversial views I shall be interested to read review of his forthcoming book on Paine but I am unlikely to read it myself and will certainly not be adding it to my fairly large collection of works by and about Thomas Paine.

1. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, A Biography. London, Atlantic Cooks, 2006. Reviewed in News Briefing 37. P.9.

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Last December my wife and I moved from a sizable bungalow to a flat for oldies (sheltered accommodation). Losing our loft necessitated shedding many books and loads of paper going back many years – the accumulation of an indiscriminate hoarder! There are still box loads which have yet to be pruned to yield further fascinating discoveries. One recent treasure to emerge was a slim booklet (price twopence) of 51 pages, which I had studied in late schooldays, more than sixty years ago. It was an encyclical Letter emanating from Pope Leo XIII entitled Rerum Novarurn, with the English subtitle, The Workers Charter, published in 1891. I still remember being impressed with it at the time (probably 1939).

With great interest I again read the opening paragraph and, in the light of other material studied since then, my immediate reaction was: “That could have come from the pen of Thomas Paine”. Then I noticed the date; 1891 was the centenary of Rights of Man. Could this mean that the Pope, or one of his advisers, being familiar with Paine’s work, and considering relevant changes through the intervening century, decided that the time was ripe for reassessment and fresh recommendations? 

I have gone back to Rights of Man and compared it carefully with The Workers Charter. I would find it hard to believe that this new work, coming on the centenary of Paine’s, was merely coincidence and of no further significance. But, although there is evidence, I cannot assert proof. It has been suggested to me that this is another instance of Paine being plagiarised, as he was by Edmund Burke, but this is not so, because nowhere in the papal document is Paine quoted either with or without acknowledgement. 

So let us consider the writing and leave readers to reach their own conclusions, either from what I present, or from studying the original texts which are still readily available. But, first let us consider why the papacy might fail to acknowledge a philosophic debt to Paine. Christian denominations in general were affronted by his publication in 1793-95 of The Age of Reason and ceased to rate what he had previously achieved. So it might have been considered poor tactics for the Vatican to acknowledge him at that time. 

The Age of Reason which adopted the Deist philosophy of Robespierre and other French philosophers was highly critical of Judeo-Christian scripture, although Paine’s background was certainly Christian and his Rights of Man reflects this. His mother was Anglican, the church in which he was baptised, confirmed and married. His father was a Quaker and he writes of: the affectionate and moral remonstrance of a good father. In early days at Grantham he heard John Wesley preach and followed him for a time into Methodism as a lay preacher, hoping to be ordained, but in this he was stymied due to his lack of Latin and Greek. Later, after experience in America and France he would proclaim, “My country is the world and my religion is to do good”; whilst criticising “governments, putting themselves beyond the law as well of God as of Man”. 

There can be no doubt as to his moral approach in considering the ills besetting society at that time, and most of this is to be found in Rights of Man, Part II, chapter 5, ‘Ways and Means’, where his opening comment is on ‘widespread poverty and wretchedness…. in countries that are called civilised we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows…. Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity’. 

He blames much on inequity in taxation by saying that, ‘Civilised relationships between nations could reduce taxation’. Poor Rates he saw as a direct tax with a considerable part of its revenue expended in litigation, ‘in which the poor, instead of being relieved are tormented’. These rates effect the labourer who ‘is not sensible of this, because it is disguised to him in the articles which he buys’. Is this so different from the VAT we have today, which inevitably falls most heavily on the poorest in society since many essentials cannot be purchased without paying up? He goes on to comment that ‘the poor are generally composed of large families of children and old people past their labour’. He pleads for `good provision for primary education’, also to address ‘problems of the aged, ex-soldiers, worn out servants, poor widows and middling tradesmen’. This should be a matter of ‘enlightened support… and not a matter of grace and favour’.

Then he summarises his major recommendations: Family allowance, old age pensions, a marriage grant, maternity benefit, a death grant for funeral expenses, provision for the casual poor in inner cities (our cardboard cities today), Army and Navy pensions, provision for widows with children to maintain, and Education for all, commenting that: ‘It is monarchical and aristocratic government only that requires ignorance for its support,… Many a youth comes up to London with little or no money, and unless he gets immediate employment he is already undone…. Hunger is not among the postponable wants.’ 

Finally, returning to worship and belief he reviews his own situation: `Why may we not suppose that the great Father of all is pleased with variety in devotion’ (he would surely welcome today’s ecumenicism).’I am fully pleased with what I am now now doing, with an endeavour to conciliate mankind, to render his condition happy, to unite nations that have hitherto been enemies… to break the chains of slavery and oppression, is acceptable in His sight, and being the best service I can perform, I act it cheerfully’. 

In Rights of Man Part I, in his ‘Observation on the Declaration of Rights’ by the French National Assembly, he comments on the query raised: whether the tenth article sufficiently guarantees the right it is intended to accord with. This article states that: no man ought to be molested on account of his opinions, provided his avowal of them does not disturb the public order established by law. He then comments, ‘It takes off from the divine dignity of religion and weakens its operative force upon the mind, to make it a subject of human laws’, adding in a significant footnote: 

`There is a single idea which, if it strikes rightly upon the mind either in a legal sense, will prevent any man, or any body of men, or any government, from going wrong on the subject of religion which is that before any institution of government was known in the world there existed, if I may so express it, a compact between God. and Man, from the beginning of time; and that as the relation and condition which man in his individual person stands in towards his Maker, cannot be changed, or anyway altered by any human laws or human authority, that as religious devotion, which is part of this compact, cannot be made subject of human laws; and that all laws must conform themselves to this prior existing compact, and not assume to make the compact conform to the laws, which besides being human, are subsequent thereto. The first act of man, when he looked around and saw himself a creature which he did not make, and a world furnished for his reception, must have been devotion, and a devotion must ever continue sacred to every man, as it appears right to him; and governments do mischief by interfering’.

He also touches lightly on Workmen’s Wages, a topic scarcely considered in society generally at that time and where he had his own very bitter experience, when his first pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), caused him to he dismissed from that service, whose members had no Association to argue for their rights, so that his campaign was largely single-handed. He stood alone and could be swept aside! 

So how does all this impinge on Pope Leo XIII in 1891 with his Workers’ Charter? Much had changed in the course of a century, but much still remained for the following century. We start where his thesis has just left off with Worker’s Rights and the need for Organised Labour, since that is where his Encyclical kicks off, considering: ‘The fortunes of the few and poverty of the masses’, the need for ‘self reliance and mutual combination of workers…relative rights and mutual duties of rich and poor, capital and labour’, then commenting on ‘ the ‘misery and wretchedness’ experienced by a ‘majority of the working class’ due to the `hard heartedness of employers…greed of unchecked competition by covetous and grasping men…little better than slavery itself. 

Next comes a note of caution regarding Socialism which is ‘striving to do away with private property’ and warning that the ‘working man… would be the first to suffer’. But here there is obvious confusion between what we now regard as Socialism and atheistic Communism, and remembering that the Russian Revolution is still some decade ahead, we can understand that the far sighted Paine would never have approved of Stalin’s system. The Charter asserts the ‘motive if work is to obtain property’ 2hich it sees as ‘necessary for maintenance and educa- tion…every man having by nature the right to possess property as his own. … For man… being master of his own acts, guides his way under the eternal law and power of God. … Man precedes the State…and there is no-one who does not sustain life from what the land produces… providing that private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature…the results of labour should belong to those who have bestowed their labour’. But we should question whether if labour is bestowed on behalf of an employer the produce should then belong to the labourer? Paine would hardly have gone that far. 

‘A father should provide food and necessities for those he has begotten… but extreme necessity should be met by public aid. … Paternal authority can neither be abolished nor absorbed by the state’. The Charter goes on to assert that ‘the child belongs to the father’, but modern theology surely rejects such an extreme view, and would concede that a father who fails in his responsibility or abuses his child must, in extreme cases, give way to properly constituted, caring authority. What would Paine say?

The Charter, as we would expect, has much to say on the role of the Church, and in particular in upholding the rights of labour, asserting that ‘men will be vain if they leave out the Church’. However, there have been times when the Church has lapsed into a state of decadence, and lost its authority. Paine, in France during the Revolution, was well aware of this, as were many others. It is worth consulting Hilaire Belloc’s small tract on the French Revolution. A firm Catholic himself and born in France (though with an English mother, descended from Joseph Priestley) he strongly asserts the Church was merely reaping what it had sown through autocracy, arrogance and the aristocratic attitude of hierarchy, hand-in-glove with aristocracy. However, by the end of the 19th century much had changed and Pope Leo was standing on firmer ground. His Charter asserts that ‘the Church improves and betters the conditions of working men by means of various organisations’. 

However, it is ‘impossible to reduce society to one dead level. …People differ in capacity, etc.’, although this is a ‘mistaken notion that class is naturally hostile to class. …Religion teaches the wealthy owner and employer that work people are not bondsmen. …Labour for wages is not a thing to be ashamed of. …Employers must never tax workers beyond their strength, nor employ them in work unsuited to sex or age. …Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need…giving to the indigent out of what is over…remembering that: It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts XX:35). Christian morality…leads to temporal prosperity…restrains greed for possessions and thirst for pleasure’. 

`Safety of commonwealth is government’s reason for existence. …When the general interest of any particular class suffers…public authority must step in. …Rights must be religiously respected. …It is the duty of the public authority to prevent and punish injury, and to protect everyone in the possession of his own. …The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves’. 

Next the issue of Strikes is addressed: ‘The chief thing is the duty of safeguarding private property by legal enactment of protection. Most of all it is essential, where passion of greed is so strong, to keep people within the line of duty, for if all may strive to better their condition, neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands upon other people’s possessions. Most true is that by far the larger part of the workers prefer to better themselves by honest labour rather than by doing any wrong to others. But there are not a few who are imbued with evil principles and eager for revolutionary change, whose main purpose is to stir up disorder and incite their fellows to acts of violence. …When working-people have recourse to strike it is frequently because the hours of labour are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this is not uncommon occurrence and should be obviated by public remedial measures; for such paralysing of labour, not only effects the masters and their work-people alike, but is extremely injurious to trade and to the general interests of the public. …The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal, in good time, of the causes which lead to such conflicts’.

It is also important, ‘to save unfortunate working-people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments of money making. …Those who work in mines and quarries should have shorter hours in proportion as their labour is more severe and trying to health. …In regard to children care should be taken not to place them in workshops and factories until their bodies and minds are sufficiently developed’. In general, ‘proper rest should be allowed for soul and body’. And there is an ‘obligation of the cessation of work on the Sabbath’. 

A Living Wage: ‘…Without the result of labour a man cannot live, and self-preservation is a law of nature’. A Just Wage: `Let the working man and the employer make free agreements. …Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well behave wage earner. …Circumstances, times and localities vary widely, for example, hours of labour in different trades, the sanitary conditions to be observed in factories and workshops. …Thus it is advisable that recourse should be had to (appropriate) Societies and Boards’. 

`The law should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many as possible to become owners. …Property will become more equitably divided. …The result of civil change and revolution has been to divide society. …On one side is the party which holds power because it holds wealth…on the other is the needy and powerless multitude. …Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them…provided that a man’s means be not drained by excessive taxation’.

The Encyclical turns next to: ‘Societies for mutual help and benevolent foundations established by private persons to provide for the workmen and his widow or orphans in case of sudden calamity, in sickness and in the event of death, institutions for the welfare of youngsters and the elderly’. Then to Trade Unions: ‘Most important are Working Men’s Unions. …History attests what excellent results were brought about by the Artificers Guilds of olden times. …It is gratifying to know that there are not a few associations of this kind (at present) consisting of workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together’. Then, quoting Holy Writ: ‘Woe to him that is alone, for when he failed’ he has none to lift him up’ (Ecclesiastics IV:10). And further, ‘A brother that is helped by his brother is like a strong city’ (Proverbs XVIII:19). 

Next, on doubtful organisations: …’Many of these societies are in the hands if secret leaders, and are managed on principles ill-according to Christianity and the public well being; and that they do their utmost to get within their grasp the whole field of labour, forcing men either to join them or starve’. Then to the contrary influence of religion: ‘…that Gospel, which by inculcating self restrain, keeps men within the bounds of moderation, and tends to establish harmony among the divergent interests and the various classes which compose the state. …There are not wanting Catholics blessed with affluence, who have cast in their lot with the wage-earners, and who have spent large sums in founding and widely spreading Benefit and Insurance Societies, by which the working man may acquire…the certainty of honourable support in days to come. … Working-men’s associations should be so organised and governed as to furnish the best and most suitable means of attaining what is aimed at…for helping each individual member to better his condition’. 

In the relevant Societies, ‘It is important that the office bearers be appointed with due prudence and discretion’, to ensure that ‘difference in degree or standing should not interfere with unanimity and goodwill. …Prejudice is mighty and so is the greed of money’. 

Then in final summary: ‘…Masters and wealthy owners must be mindful of their duty; the working-class, whose interests are at stake, should make every lawful and proper effort. …The main thing needful is to return to real Christianity. …All must earnestly cherish in themselves, and try to arouse in others, charity…which is the fulfilling of the whole Gospel law, which is always ready to sacrifice itself for others’ sake, and is man’s surest antidote against worldly pride and immoderate love of self. Then, rounding off with a quotation from St.Paul on Charity, which simply means Love: ‘Charity is patient, is kind, …seeketh not her own…suffereth all things…endureth all things’ (I Corinthians XIII:4-7). 

A true appeal for tolerance and understanding. 

It is inevitable that readers will react in a variety of ways to what has been presented here, and it must be appreciated that the material has had to be edited, and considerably and selectively reduced, but with material from both sources which, not surprisingly, has its own bias. The aim has been not to introduce any fresh bias, but to present the extracted text as truly and as simply as the task demanded. Then, in the final analysis, any and every reader can search out the original texts to verify what has been on offer. I myself have a high regard for both Thomas Paine and Pope Leo; I would not wish deliberately to misrepresent either.

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Poland in the 18th century was in decline. The first partition of the country among its three neighbouring powers occurred in 1772 without contradiction on the part of Europe and with England’s acquiescence. Thomas Paine could have been aware of this because the  English press published information about it and even satirical  engravings appeared illustrative of this unprecedented event which violated the principle of the balance of power (equilibre European).  

However, the first partition gave rise to the awakening of the Polish  nation. In order to save the state and its endangered independence  fundamental reforms were to be undertaken and all social power and  activities activated. The privileges and habits of magnates had to be  curbed and parliamentary anarchy overcome. In Poland in the last quarter  of the 18th century the splendour of the enlightenment was glorified in  an attempt to overcome the country’s backwardness in comparison to  Western Europe.  

The reforms of the Four Years Diet (1788-1792), which is called the  Great Diet, amongst the best known being the Constitution of May 3,  1791, were a result of these endeavours. Next to the Constitution of the  United States, the Polish Constitution was in advance of even the  French Constitution of September 1791. The most important article of  the May Constitution was the law of towns which gave civil rights to the  burghers. This gave birth to the Tiers Etat in Poland where the nobility  voluntarily renounced part of their privileges and the peasants given the  protection of the law. In place of an hereditary monarchy an elective monarchy was introduced and the elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus was elected heir to the Polish throne with his daughter having  the possibility of becoming his successor.  

Decisions were taken concerning the security of the state and  financial measures adopted to pay for the defence forces. The  Constitution was for the most part based upon Anglo-American models  which aroused admiration although it also roused doubts and  opposition. The Polish court was following European attitudes and  attitudes resultant upon the publicity changes had brought, as are  recorded in newspapers as well as diplomatic and private correspondence.  

Amongst English politicians it was Edmund Burke’s eulogy which  resounded the loudest and was included in his pamphlet Appeal to the  New Whigs, a polemic against Thomas Paine and his radical supporters.  Within the context of polemics Paine’s name appears for the first time in Poland, where his ideas soon gained support. During his time in the United States, Paine had met Tadeusz Kosciuszko and it may be he also met other Polish volunteers taking part in the War of Independence, although no information on this reached Poland, where lengthy extracts from Paine’s, Common Sense, were published in translation in the Polish press (Gozeta Warszawska, May 25, 1776), although it was wrongly ascribed to John Adams’ Manifesto. Large parts from Common Sense also appeared in the Polish translation of Abbe Raynal’s work (1783). It can be presumed that the Polish press also reprinted excerpts from the Crisis papers, although these are not easy to identify as the Polish press printed many comments and opinions about the American Revolution.  

Following his return to Europe, Paine travelled between France and England. In Paris he associated with a circle of friends which included  Jefferson and La Fayette and through these he came into contact with  the Polish Princess Lubomirska, S. Potoki and S. Piattoli. He also became  acquainted with American agents working for the Polish king, Stanislaw Augustus Poniatowski such as Lewis Littlepage and Philip Mazzei. He was also familiar with John Adams’ Defence… (1784), which has a critical chapter dedicated to Poland. Paine also took an interest in the Polish monarch, Stanislaw Augustus, described as ‘le Roi Philosophe’ or  `Citizen King’, and told Thomas Christi that although being an enemy of monarchy he would like to take away much of the power from existing  kings and hand it over to Stanislaw Augustus (T. Christi to the Polish king, May 22, 1791. Ms. Czart, Krakow, No.938 – pp.633-655). To judge by this letter, Christi not only told the king about Paine’s Rights of Man but also included a copy along with his own pamphlet replying to Burke. S. Piatolli purchased a copy of Rights of Man for the library of Ingnatius Potocki the leader of the Polish Patriots. There is, however, no reference to Polish changes in the first part of Rights of Man, although the Diet was in full session when it was written.  

In England news about the new Polish Constitution was well received, and because of the events in France excited much interest. To conservatives the Polish Law of Government was considered a different reform to what was taking place in France and was considered to be based on the British parliamentary monarchy (Burke), while the left Whigs as well as the radicals considered it as a revolutionary step and another step in the process began by the French Revolution.  

The Polish ambassador in England, Francis Bukaty, reported that Paine was unpopular with the English government and steps had been taken not to ban any celebration of the anniversary of the outbreak of the French Revolution, festivities for which had been announced for July  14, 1791 and in which Paine was to have participated. Despite government hostility around 900 supporters of the Revolution gathered together at the Crown and Anchor tavern to celebrate. Amongst the many toasts proposed was one expressing ‘good wishes to the Polish revolution’.  

Paine does not refer directly to changes in Poland in Part Two of Rights of Man, but he does state that in contradiction to a hereditary monarchy ‘Poland, through an elective monarchy, has had fewer wars than those which are hereditary’, adding, ‘and it is the only government that has made a voluntary essay, though a small one, to reform the condition of the country’. A few pages further he characterises features of a republic and considers Poland a country which have effected to style themselves a republic. ‘Poland called itself a republic, which is an hereditary aristocracy, with what is called an elective monarchy’. And  that is all which was written about Poland in transition.  

Although Thomas Paine did not say much about Poland he was regarded there as a supporter of the Polish Constitution, probably because of the words of praise for it from his circle of friends. Paine’s name was also associated with celebrations and demonstrations commemorating the Polish Constitution. When the first anniversary of the Constitution was celebrated in London on May 3, 1792, the participants were supporters of Paine, though the Polish ambassador, who was invited to the gathering at the Mitre Court tavern, anxious not to upset  the court and the government, apologised for not attending because of  official duties. The meeting also supported the notion of universal revolution and Burke came in for condemnation for his political blindness. Revolutionary songs were sung and the author of Rights of Man toasted. The last demonstration at which such slogans were expressed occurred when the third anniversary of the French Revolution was celebrated at a time of Russian military intervention in Poland was occurring and war was taking place with France. The demonstration was supported by the extreme radicals and Thomas Paine cheered and the desire expressed that the ‘Revolution in France and Poland be a challenge to all despots on earth’. 

The last gesture of friendship of the English nation towards Poland was a goodwill subscription with support from representatives of governmental and parliamentary circles, merchants and businessmen as well as the radical opposition (letter of T. Christi to the Polish king, AGAD Warsow. 2b. Popiel Coll. 206. 3 August 1792), as the latter were supporters of Thomas Paine they preferred anonymity in order not to evoke the animosity of the bitter enemies of the French Revolution. In a long letter to Stanislaw Augustus, Thomas Christi characterised the feeling at the celebration as being of general sympathy for the Polish cause and the wish to help it (August 3. 1792. AGAD Warsaw. Popiel Coll. 206). The May 3 Constitution was abolished in Poland following the second partition of the country by victorious despots. 

Thadeus Kosciuszko, who took part in the American War of Independence and, like Paine, an honorary citizen of France, did not give up the struggle for independence. With the support of the then Girondistic legislature he set off the insurrection as a last fight to save, if not the country, then at least its honour and dignity. 

In the days when Thomas Paine fell victim to Jacobinic terrorism the Polish people struggling for their rights had recourse to his ideas. This idea came from “Polish Jacobins” and from the leaders of the insurrection and, one can suggest, from Kosciuszko himself. A German edition of Rights of Man had been prepared in Poland. The editor of The Free Warsaw Gazette (Gazeta Wolna Warszawska), the newspaper of the insurrection, stated that: ‘The work of Thomas Paine Rights of Man had reached in a short space of time nine editions, 50,000 copies of which had been bought with enthusiasm in England alone, it will always remain for mankind of inestimable value and for despots a fearful act’. 

Paine’s later works, The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice also found their way to the libraries of Polish statesmen. Paine’s close friendship with Kosciuszko was renewed after his captivity. R.R. Palmer, the author of the fundamental work, The Age of Democratic Revolution, says Paine considered the possibility of applying for Polish citizenship, although no confirmation of this can be found.

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Some time ago, being aware of the approach of the 200 anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, I thought of various ways I could do to arouse interest in Paine and his most enduring and famous work and the republican ideals he espoused. Initially I approached a publisher over writing a new biography only to be told they were just publishing one. This was David Powell’s, Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile, and though this did not get much attention by the way of reviews, it scotched my own attempt at a new biography. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and my next effort went into composing a letter which I sent to eighteen Labour Party members of parliament. I reminded them that on their re-election to a future parliament (supposing they made it) their first act on entering the House of Commons would be to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, thus perpetuating for another parliamentary term the unjust constitution foisted on the people of this country by the parliament of 1688. 

I wrote, ‘If you don’t make the challenge in your lifetime, you will die knowing not only that you have betrayed your duty to the people who elected you, but also to the people of the country, and further you will have been responsible for the perpetuation of injustice’. 

In all I received some five replies. The first simply said, ‘I don’t agree with you about the Crown’. The second enclosed a draft Commonwealth of Britain Bill which contained a schedule detailing an oath to be taken pledging faith in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Great Britain and which had no chance under the present parliamentary set-up of ever being passed – imagine the Lords relinquishing their privileged power! The third said, ‘The people who elect me to parliament expect me to defend and further their interests…none of them have ever expressed any concern to me about my taking the oath…’ The fifth thanked me for my letter and continued: ‘When I first entered the Commons, I protested to the Speaker about the so-called oath’. 

That concluded my attempt to rouse some republican spirit in the Labour Party if in power. 

I next thought I would write a play about the life and times of Thomas Paine, but was slanted by the wide geographical scope of his life, his involvement in America during the War of Independence, in France with the French Revolution, with odd visits back to his native country concerning his bridge project and also by the cast-list that would include the first president of the United States of America, the deposed and decapitated king of France and various other historical figures. 

I then decided on writing a first-person dramatisation of his life, which at the bright suggestion of the first actor to take the role, Alan Penn, we entitled, ‘A Wicked and Seditious Person’. 

This had its first performance at the Plymouth Arts Centre in 1992 and subsequently at Conway Hall in London and later at the Arts Centre in Exeter. Each of the performances has been greeted with enthusiasm and genuine appreciation, and I am only sorry that to date we have not been able to organise a tour. 

The dramatisation was not the only result of my enthusiasm for popularising Thomas Paine’s republican ideals. Two hundred years after the first publication of Rights of Man, I also gave a talk at Conway Hall which was subsequently published in the society’s journal, The Ethical Record, and I later expanded this into a book of some 25,000 words entitled, Towards a Republic. This has been graced with a preface by the second Labour MP to respond to my letter mentioned earlier, one Tony Benn. I have as yet to find a publisher for the book.

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