RIGHTS OF MAN:

BEING AN

ANSWER ro Mr. BURKE’s ATTACK

ON THE

FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THOMAS PAINE,

SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS TO CONGRESS IN THE
AMERICAN WAR, ano
AUTHOR OF ‘THE WORK INTITLED COMMON SENSE.

 

 

Mad Hatter Page 4

241
THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Tuomas PAINE (1737-1809). Rights of Man. London:
J. Johnson, 1791

The life of Paine, Quaker and political theorist, defaulting
excise-man and revolutionary, is a medley of contradic-
tions: Its apogee came after his return to Europe in 1787
and the publication in 1790 of Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France (239). Burke expressed in a single
work all the reactions of horror and dismay with which
the liberal-minded who had hailed its beginning now fele
for the French revolutionarics. Paine’s ‘answer to Mr
Burke’s attack’ took the argument toa higher level. With
a force and clarity unequalled even by Burke, Paine laid
down those principles of fundamental human rights
which must stand, no matter what excesses are committed
to obtain them. His own deep and bitter knowledge of
revolutionary politics (Benjamin Franklin brought him
to America in 1774, so he had experienced the entire
course of the War of Independence) enabled him to see
where Burke’s vision had been clouded both by horror
and by his own experience of the stable realitics of English
politics.

Rights of Man was an immediate success. Although
even the radical publisher Johnson took fright, Painc

found another (Jordan) to take it over. The government
tried to suppress it, but it circulated the more briskly.
Those who bought it as the work of an inflamed revolu-
tionary were surprised by its dignity and moderation:
even Pitt could say that he was quite in the right—‘ but
what am I to do? As things are, if I were to encourage
Tom Paine’s opinions we should have a bloody revolu-
tion’. Considered apart from the turmoil which attended
its first publication, however, Rights of Man can be scen
for what it is: the textbook of radical thought and the
clearest of all expositions of the basic principles of
democracy.