Paine, Thomas

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PAINE, THOMAS

PAINE, THOMAS (1737–1809), political philosopher, pamphleteer.

Thomas Paine was one of the most colorful and successful political pamphleteers during the age of the American and French Revolutions. Born in Thetford, England, he emigrated to Pennsylvania when he was thirty-seven years old after pursuing a series of failed careers in making stays for women's corsets, teaching school, operating a general store, and collecting excise taxes. In Philadelphia, Paine wrote short pieces for such journals as the Pennsylvania Magazine. His first major pamphlet, Common Sense (1776), argued, for one of the first times in print, why the American colonies must immediately separate from England. During the Revolutionary War, he published several newspaper articles, later collected as the American Crisis series, to rally American courage and patriotism against overwhelming British military forces (the first essay included the famous inspiring words, "These are the times that try men's souls").

After the war, Paine spent much of his time writing against the establishment of a national bank and in designing a pierless iron bridge. Unsuccessful in having his bridge built across the Schuylkill River, he went to France in 1787 to seek investors who would fund its construction across the River Seine. Failing that, he moved to London to find financial supporters interested in seeing it span the Thames. There, he traveled throughout the Midlands with the British statesman and philosopher Sir Edmund Burke (1729–1797), his later nemesis, in search of iron suppliers.

Two years later, just after the French Revolution erupted in Paris, Paine returned to France, convinced that the democratic forces that had emerged in America in 1776 were now on the march in Europe. He wrote Burke about the political changes taking place in Paris and, as it turned out, unwittingly helped stimulate Burke's developing animosity against the Revolution. In November 1790, Burke published his famous antirevolutionary attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France. In February of the following year, Paine answered Burke in Rights of Man (part one). Burke vigorously attacked the revolutionaries' wholesale destruction of the French social and political order, especially the monarchy and aristocracy. In response, Paine railed against Burke by attacking these same two institutions because they enslaved human beings' minds and bodies.

One year later, Paine published part two of Rights of Man, one of the most radical expressions of social reform ever to appear. Totally ignoring Burke, Paine proposed a remarkably detailed government program that would ameliorate the living conditions of less fortunate citizens, including provisions for old-age retirement income, welfare payments for the impoverished, public education, and free funerals for poor people.

In 1792, after the fall of the monarchy, Paine was elected to the French National Convention, one of only two foreigners to receive this honor. With Marie-Jean de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), and other notable figures, he served on the committee that was to draft a new republican constitution for France. At the time, Paine was allied with the moderate Girondin faction, which included the journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Madame Roland (Jeanne Manon Philipon Roland de la Platiére) and her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platiére, and Condorcet, against the radical Jacobin faction, led by Maxmilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, and Louis-Antoine de St. Just. Against the latter, Paine argued that King Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) should be exiled and not executed, but he lost that battle when the king was condemned to death. Soon, Paine was arrested and imprisoned for eleven months in the Luxembourg prison during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794).

Just before his imprisonment, Paine had completed the first part of The Age of Reason, his attack on the superstitions of all organized religion. It appeared first in French in Paris in 1793 and in English a year later. The second part, a devastating critique of the Bible, appeared in 1795.

After the fall of Robespierre, Paine was reelected to the Convention, where he participated in the drafting of the Constitution of 1795, creating the government known as the Directory. In 1796 he published an open letter attacking the U.S. president George Washington, who, he claimed, had done nothing about his imprisonment. When the letter was published in America, Paine became extremely unpopular there. Although he retired from government after his service on the Convention, he remained in France, living with his journalist friend Nicolas de Bonneville from 1797 until his eventual return to the United States in 1802. In Paris, he wrote his last great work, Agrarian Justice, calling for heavy inheritance taxes on the wealthy to support social welfare programs.

Paine spent his last years in America viciously attacking the Federalists, especially John Adams, whose presidency had ended in 1801. By the time of his death in 1809, he was a largely ignored and forgotten man.

See alsoFrench Revolution; Republicanism.