The Routledge Guidebook to Paine's Rights of Man

Frances Chiu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781134486243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government.

The Routledge Guidebook to Paine's Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. The Guidebook examines:

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• the history of rights, populism, representative governments, and challenges to monarchy from the 12th through 18th century;
• Paine's arguments against monarchies, mixed governments, war, and state-church establishments;
• Paine's views on constitutions;
• Paine's proposals regarding suffrage, inequality, poverty, and public welfare;
• Paine's revolution in rhetoric and style;
• the critical reception upon publication and influence through the centuries, as well as Paine's relevance today.

The Routledge Guidebook to Paine's Rights of Man is essential reading for students of eighteenth-century American and British history, politics and philosophy, and anyone approaching Paine's work for the first time.

1

Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man Part 1, Sections I–VIII

These two famous performances revived, as it were, the royal and republican parties that had divided this nation in the last century, and that had lain dormant since the Revolution in 1688. They now returned to the charge with a rage and an animosity equal to that which characterized our ancestors during the civil wars in the reign of Charles I.

—Annual Register for 1794

As the newly independent American republic began drafting a constitution while Britain debated the expansion of suffrage and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, France found herself steeped in debt to the tune of 4.5 billion livres. There were new fears of yet another imminent bankruptcy, not long after the one of 1770 even though the American revolution resulted in a victory for the French rather than a loss as in the disastrous Seven Years’ War. The fact that national accounting suffered from an absence of clear and regular periodic checks, a large number of motley accounts, and no consistent system of accountancy complicated things further.¹ Desperate to avoid another cataclysm, Louis XVI appointed and fired his finance ministers in rapid succession: the dismissal of the Swiss-born Jacques Necker in 1771 was followed by those of Charles Alexandre de Calonne in 1783 and Lomenie de Brienne in 1787, before Necker himself was ushered back into office in 1788.

At the advent of the revolution, the Third Estate (commoners) comprised nearly 98% of the population of 28 million people while the First and Second Estates (ecclesiastics and nobles, respectively) comprised another 0.5% and 1.5% respectively (approximately 470,000 people). The Third Estate included a vast range of the population from financiers and affluent attorneys at the top to the peasantry (nearly 23 million) at the base, all of whom who were variously subject to a number of taxes and payments including the taille to the state, Church tithes, and dues to their locally presiding lord. On the other hand, regardless of their income, clergy and nobles paid far fewer taxes proportionately speaking—whether they were high ranking ecclesiastics (predominantly from titled families), socially prominent nobles who congregated around the king, or considerably less well-off provincial nobles and parish clergy. The little they paid—namely in the form of the vingtième (direct tax on property) and the capitation (poll tax)—was poorly allocated and haphazardly collected.² As it grew increasingly evident that taxes could not be raised any more on the Third Estate, Calonne proposed a tax in August 1786 on land that would be more proportionately levied, with those who earned more paying higher taxes. Since the parlements—appellate courts which served to register new edicts and taxes—were largely comprised of nobles who had either purchased or inherited their offices, it was hardly surprising that they balked at this plan. Six months later, Calonne was no more successful when he attempted to circumvent the parlements by handpicking an assembly of 144 notables to approve a similar plan. The royal court’s sense of urgency was heightened when Calonne’s successor, Brienne, again unsuccessfully attempted to force the parlements to register new loans in order to avert a national default on payments. By July 16, 1787, the Parisian parlement had already proposed a meeting of the Estates-General which had not convened since 1614, claiming that it was the only body which could raise taxes legitimately. Further conflicts between Louis XVI and the parlements ensued as the former held at least two lit de justices to force a tax and loan in August and November.³ In 1788, after Louis attempted to reduce the judicial powers of the parlements by creating 47 “Grand bailiwicks,” the parlements would demand once more the return of the Estates General to which Brienne acceded shortly before his resignation on August 24, 1788. With a meeting of the Estates General scheduled for May 1, 1789, preparations began to take place, as discussions were held at the Parisian residences of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, who had just been appointed the first U.S. minister to France in 1784.

As if a looming financial crisis were not enough, the period between the conclusion of the American revolution and the dawn of the French revolution was rife with rural and urban public disorders. The poor harvest of 1788, resulting from a drought and hail, caused prices to rise—thereby triggering food riots. At the same time, the free trade treaty of 1786 with England came to cripple the French textile industry, which was not as advanced in mechanization, while the poor silk harvest of 1787 halved employment in the silk industry. The panic caused by the combination of food shortage, high prices, increased rents and unemployment soon led to a major riot in Paris after the wallpaper manufacturer, Réveillon, was alleged to have insulted workers in addition to calling for a reduction of wages in order to lower prices and stimulate the economy: a plan that was echoed by an owner of saltpetre works, Henriot. The rampant sense of discontent can be easily gleaned from the cahiers doléances: notebooks submitted by members of the First, Second, and Third Estates in response to the king’s demand for commentary on the state of the nation.⁴ In short, as Alexis de Tocqueville explained in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution some 67 years later, people demanded “the wholesale and systematic abolition” of all laws and current practices: a potential issue “of the most extensive and dangerous revolutions ever observed in the world.”⁵

In the meantime, not unlike his landing on American shores thirteen years earlier, Thomas Paine did not immediately indicate any willingness to engage in politics upon his arrival in France in May 1787. Having partly relinquished this interest since the mid-1780s, he had become absorbed in erecting a single-span iron bridge that he had worked on for a few years. As his attempts to seek financial backing in America and France stalled, Paine quickly turned to England, filing patents for his bridge design. It was during this search for sponsorship that he met and quickly befriended Edmund Burke. Having informed Burke that he’d rather “erect the largest arch in the world than be the greatest Emperor within it,” Burke himself would mention in a letter of September 3, 1788, to Sir Gilbert Elliot that “He is not without some attention to Politics” but is “much more deeply concern’d about various mechanical projects.”⁶ Nonetheless, Paine kept an eye on current events, publishing a pamphlet, Prospects on the Rubicon (1787) that was critical of William Pitt’s attempts to drum up a war with Holland. In fact, it was only a matter of time before the conflicts between Louis XVI and his parlements escalated, thereby fully capturing Paine’s attention. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson of December 16, 1788, Paine marveled at the “good things from France”; some ten months later, he would express satisfaction in the progress of the French revolution to Benjamin Rush, observing that in spite of minor inconveniences, natural consequences of “pulling down and building up,” there was relatively little trouble.⁷ His excitement was no less palpable in another letter to Burke where he exulted in the prospects of the revolution spreading to other nations (qtd. in Keane, 287). But little did either man anticipate that their writings on revolutionary France would not only resurrect the seemingly long forgotten conflicts between commoners, lords, and monarchy from the Civil War as suggested by the epigraph from The Annual Register, ⁸ but also establish the fault lines for modern conservative and liberal thought.

I. Prologue: Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

In many respects, the debate over the French revolution was anything but unpredictable given the number of shared concerns on both sides of the Channel regarding the limited state of political representation and overweighted aristocratic influence in politics. Not fortuitously, British reformers were initially elated by the election of a more egalitarian National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of feudal privileges and the disestablishment of the church; it was an enthusiasm shared by journalists as well as by dramatists and producers who staged the triumphant destruction of the Bastille numerous times. Amongst the many admirers was Richard Price, a founding member of the Society for Constitutional Information whose friends and acquaintances included such men as James Burgh, Major John Cartwright, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Although Price did not intend his Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) to be anything more than a brief celebratory sermon on the centenary of the Glorious Revolution, his text would nonetheless define some of the central issues of the French revolution debate: political inequities, religious toleration, and above all, the rights of men.

According to Price, Britain remained insufficiently enlightened—particularly in the wake of the French revolution. By overturning conventional ideas of patriotism, he lamented that people were “too apt” to view their nation as the sole repository of “wisdom and virtue” simply because people were prone to overvalue “everything related to us.”⁹ Continuing the contemporary critique of military conquest, he identified, a “thirst for grandeur and glory” and the desire to attack other countries “in order to extend dominion, or to gratify avarice”: if offensive wars were undeniably “wicked and detestable,” he also deplored the ways in which men act perversely against their own “common rights and liberties.” Exhorting Britons to love their nation “ardently,” but not “exclusively,” he urged them to regard themselves more broadly as “citizens of the world” and to pay “a just regard to the rights of other countries.” Britons were also urged to “defend their rights” and prevent situations where the “few” could oppress “the many”; it was certainly ironic that Britons were all too apt to exhibit “adulation and servility” to authority figures as were the more purportedly passive subjects of Turkey, Russia, Spain, and Germany. Here, too, it was far more often the case that men tended to be “too passive than too unruly” while “the rebellion of Kings against their people” proved far more common than the opposite. For Price, the addresses proffered to George III during his illness betrayed this dangerously demeaning tendency: many were apt to forget that a king was “no more than the first servant of the public” for his authority was actually “the majesty of the people.”

Not least, Price would reflect upon the contemporary relevance of the Glorious Revolution. Amongst the most important lessons to be drawn from the revolution were:

First, the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters.

Secondly, the right to resist power when abused. And

Thirdly, the right to chuse our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves.

Placing particular emphasis on the third, he observed that the aims of the revolution were imperfectly realized so long as the Test laws remained intact and the state of political representation woefully inadequate. Finally, Price concluded his sermon with a stern warning to tyrants, proclaiming that “the ardor for liberty” was “catching and spreading,” whereby kingly and ecclesiastical authority were respectively yielding to the “the dominion of laws” and “the dominion of reason and conscience.” No longer could the “oppressors of the world … hold the world in darkness,” struggling against “increasing light and liberality.” In short, Britain remained unenlightened and Gothic when compared to France and America.

Although numerous reformers and Dissenters shared Price’s elation, there were some who did not. Among them was Edmund Burke: a man long involved in liberal causes, who had previously sided with the American colonies and supported the Dissenters prior to launching an investigation and prosecution of Warren Hastings for abuse and misconduct as Governor-General of Bengal. To the astonishment of many—including Paine himself—Burke decried the revolution. But whatever we make of Paine’s assumption that Burke was presumed to be “a friend to mankind” from his part in the American Revolution, Burke had long harbored an intrinsic distrust of popular movements, one that only strengthened over the years, particularly after his defeat at Bristol in the election of 1780; if anything, his self-acknowledged abhorrence for what he deemed the “metaphysical” issue of rights had already been apparent in his defense of the American colonists (Speech on American Taxation, April 19, 1774). When understood in this context, his animosity towards the French revolution was anything but unpredictable; it would only be a matter of time before he publicly averred his sentiments in a parliamentary speech of January 1790. Although it is difficult to determine whether his writing of Reflections on the Revolution in France was directly prompted by popular enthusiasm, Price’s Discourse, or even Paine’s ecstatic letters, an inquiry from a young French nobleman, Charles-Jean- François Depont served as a convenient spur. Having mulled over a response to Price—a man he had long disliked—since the publication of the latter’s sermon in November 1789, Burke decided to censure him in a public letter to Depont: namely, what was soon to be his Reflections. That it was Britain rather than France itself which occupied Burke’s thought was openly admitted in his statement that it was “better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.” Claiming in a letter of February 20, 1790 that his intention was not to engage in controversy with “Dr. Price, Lord Shelburne, or any other of that set,” he nonetheless planned to expose their “wicked principles” while reinstating “the true principles of the constitution.”¹⁰ Reflections would therefore serve not only as a commentary on English politics, society, and government but also as a refutation of the liberal Whiggism embraced by reformers and Dissenters.

With little ado, Burke opens his response with cool derision aimed at Price and other members of the Revolution Society. Questioning Price’s assessment of the Glorious Revolution, Burke dismisses his construction as an “unheard-of bill of rights”: a concept that the English would “utterly disclaim,” if not wholeheartedly resist “with their lives and fortunes.”¹¹ Parliament’s choice of inviting William to reign in place of James II, moreover, did not imply change so much as a retention of custom and tradition: their chief concern was to do “as their ancestors in like cases,”—namely, “vindicate their ancient rights and liberties” (83). Far from seeking change or any newfangled solutions, Burke argued, proper reformations proceeded from a “reverence to antiquity” (81); after all, Britons now and then had been satisfied with political principles inherited “from our forefathers,” rejecting the very idea of forming a new government with “disgust and horror” (81). By stipulating that “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation” yet not without “excluding a principle of improvement” (83), Burke would also excoriate the French for relinqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man Part 1, Sections I–VIII
• 2. Rights of Man, Part 2, Preface–Chapter 3
• 3. Rights of Man Part 2, Chapter 4
• 4. Rights of Man, Part 2, Chapter 5
• Conclusion
• Index