Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (9 February 1737 – 8 June 1809) was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary who played a key role in both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution as the author of Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1791).

Biography[]

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, England on 9 February 1737, and he worked as a corset maker for years. He lived in poverty for years, holding several jobs. While living in Lewes, Sussex, Paine became a republican and anti-monarchist. In 1774, his tobacco shop failed, he sold his household possessions to pay off his debts, he got divorced, and he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the Thirteen Colonies to start over. He befriended independence advocates Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, the latter of whom suggested a title for Paine's pro-independence pamphlet: Common Sense.

Common Sense[]

In his famous pamphlet, Paine attacked the government of Great Britain, which was supposed to be a constitutional monarchy that was ruled by the House of Commons; instead, all House of Commons bills had to be approved by King George III, and Paine pointed out that the King having the final say negated the philosophy that the Parliament was wiser than the monarch. He also criticized the French bastard William the Conqueror's usurpation of the English throne and the rule of his foreign descendants through a hereditary monarchy, a form of government that he vehemently opposed. He also pointed out that there had been thirty kings and two minors to have ruled England from the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 until the time of the writing of Common Sense in 1776, and that there had been no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions, claiming that hereditary succession did not make peace, but instead destroyed the very foundation that it seemed to stand upon. Paine advocated republicanism and American independence from Britain in his work, and he was one of the first writers to openly do so. 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold in the first three months of publication, and most Continental Army troops read the pamphlet, which was also read aloud at taverns and meeting places. Only the fellow egalitarian Karl Marx would outsell him in terms of pamphlets distributed.

American Revolution[]

Paine became known throughout the American colonies and across Europe, as his pamphlet became the moral and intellectual touchstone for American independence activists. In France, his pamphlet was also published due to its anti-British message, but the passages arguing the case against monarchy were censored. Paine later joined George Washington's army as a private, serving as an aide-de-camp to Nathanael Greene; he wrotee The Crisis essays, and he famously wrote "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman," and "The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph." Paine later served as Secretary to the Continental Congress' Committee on Foreign Affairs, serving on a mission to France to procure aid for the colonies. Afterwards, he served as clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and he helped in shaping Pennsylvania's radically democratic constitution.

French Revolution[]

After the American Revolutionary War was won, Paine returned to Europe, and he travelled to France in 1787 and then to England. He sought to work on designs for the first single-span iron bridge back in England, staying away from politics, although he hoped that the revolutionary spirit would travel with him. He befriended political reformers and intellectuals such as William Blake and William Godwin, members of the Revolution Society and the London Corresponding Society. Paine travelled back and forth between England and France, and he was granted the keys to the Bastille by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1789 as a sign of France's friendship with the United States; the American-inspired French Revolution was beginning in the Kingdom of France. Paine defended the Revolution with his pamphlet The Rights of Man in March 1791 in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Paine was charged with sedition, ordered to prison, his booksellers prosecuted, and his book's sales suppressed. He barely evaded capture before escaping to France, and he was charged with high treason in absentia. Paine was elected to the National Convention immediately after landing at Calais, despite not being able to speak or read French. He became an associate of the upper-middle-class Parisian intellectuals associated with the moderate Girondins, and he was the first to advocate abolishing the monarchy, just as he had done in America. He also helped with drafting a constitution, but his allies lost control of the Convention to the radical Jacobin Club. Paine urged the representatives of the Convention to spare King Louis XVI of France's life and instead send him into exile, but this failed. Paine was imprisoned in Luxembourg Prison for his cautious conservative restraint amidst revolutionary turmoil, and he languished in a prison for ten months.

Fall from grace[]

Paine eluded the guillotine due to a jailer's oversight and Maximilien Robespierre's fall from grace during the Thermidorian Reaction, and James Monroe secured his release. He served as US ambassador to the French Republic and was even readmitted to the National Convention, but he vented his rage against old friends such as George Washington who had left him to rot in a prison. In 1794, 1795, and 1807, he published the three parts of his work The Age of Reason, providing a synopsis of the Enlightenment's humanistic beliefs. He later destroyed his good reputation with his atheistic arguments against Christianity, and he returned to America in 1802, having fallen out of favor due to his attacks against Washington and Christianity. He died in New York City, New York in 1809 at the age of 72, and his bones were dug up by the English writer William Cobbett and taken to England in 1819. His bones were later lost, and his bones were either lost at sea, reburied in a garden plot belonging to the Cobbett family, or auctioned off.