BBC - History British History in depth: Thomas Paine: Citizen of the World (2024)

Common Sense

An inveterate pamphleteer, Thomas Paine broadcast the merits of reason, republicanism and radicalism in a series of writings perhaps more innovative in their popular tone and language than in their message. His origins were humble and his education limited. Born in Thetford in 1737, he was apprenticed to his father's trade of corset-making, but 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.

In America Paine 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. 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'.

In the Whig paradigm of 'civic humanism', premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of 17th-century constitutional struggles, political primacy was accorded to independent landowners. As 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. 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.

Rights of Man

Edmund Burke, whom Paine refuted©On Paine's return to England in 1787, this democratic 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. For citizen Paine the French Revolution represented a much-needed new beginning, an age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) were no longer denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. A talented writer, Paine deployed his 'intellectual vernacular prose' to render natural rights and rational republicanism accessible, uncompromising and all-embracing, including the 'swinish multitude' disparaged by Burke.

But it was not just the style that accounted for the remarkable success of the Rights of Man which, even by the most conservative estimate, sold between 100,000 and 200,000 copies in the first three years after publication. As Part Two evinced, Paine was much more than a talented popularizer 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.

Paine found both the language and the programme to attract working people to politics, underlining its relevance to their experience of economic hardship. 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.

Members unlimited

Inspired by Paine, radicalism reached a new audience in the early 1790s, a mass expansion into 'members unlimited' which soon prompted the moderate reformers, the patrician 'Friends of the People', to draw away and apart from the democratic radicals, the plebeian 'Friends of Liberty'.

Paine was held in reverence by those new to the radical cause. This was perhaps best expressed in the song, 'God Save Great Thomas Paine', the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans:

As the second verse indicates, however, with its reference to 'Church and King' mobs in the midlands and the north-west, Paineite radicals did not carry all before them in the 1790s. Indeed, as historians now acknowledge, 'Painophobia' - the reaction against Paine - proved stronger in the short term 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 battle for the popular mind in the 1790s. 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.

Age of Reason

With the fall of the Girondins Louis XVI was executed©By cruel irony Paine's own fate strengthened the conservative case. Having fled to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792, he gained election to the National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some people's 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 organised religion. Already denigrated as spoliators - enemies of commercial civilisation who would thrust society back to poverty and primitivism - his followers in Britain were now stigmatised as infidels as well. In the crusade against godless republican levellers, loyalists deployed every media and resource, 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), to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders. While radicals struggled to gain a public hearing, 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. 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.

Paine repatriated

William Cobbett, radical writer and admirer who returned Paine's skeleton to England©Many of the new radical 'corresponding' societies of the 1790s fell victim to this conservative onslaught: those that survived judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. Henceforth radicals adapted to the national tenor, contesting the conservatives on their own territory. Presenting themselves as the true defenders and guardians of the constitution, radicals sought to legitimise their programme of democratic parliamentary reform not by natural right but through patriotic evocation of people's history, the glorious struggle against absolutism in Britain.

Admittedly in ultra-radical counter-culture there were a number of devoted and purist Paineite ideologues, but for those involved in mass agitation - in the populist 'spin' of radical politics - republicanism was seldom mentioned. While never denying the inspiration provided by 'immortal' Thomas Paine, popular radical leaders 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 citizen of the world was honoured as British patriot.

Perhaps the most symbolic act in this radical realignment was the reclamation of Paine's bones from their American grave by William Cobbett, the great radical journalist and writer of the early 19th century. The implacable opponent of 'Old Corruption', Cobbett drew inspiration from a lesser-known text by Paine, The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance (1796). Having also gained much of his political education 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 - Cobbett wished to honour his mentor.

Paine had died in miserable circ*mstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased. Ten years later Cobbett dug up the bones and brought them to England - they have since disappeared - for a national memorial which, alas, has never materialised.

Find out more

Books

Thomas Paine: social and political thought by Gregory Claeys (Unwin Hyman, 1989)

Tom Paine: a political life by John Keane (Bloomsbury, 1995)

Places to visit

Visit Tom Paine's house in Sandwich, where he wrote his first pamphlet, entitled Common Sense.

About the author

Professor John Belchem teaches at the University of Liverpool and his research interests include: Popular radicalism in 19th-century Britain; Irish migration; Celticism, the Isle of Man and the Irish Sea; and the modern history of Liverpool. Publications include: A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century World History (editor with Richard Price, Blackwell, 1994; reprinted as The Penguin Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century World History, Penguin, London, 1996); Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Macmillan, 1996); Languages of Labour (editor with Neville Kirk, 1997); Merseypride: essays in Liverpool exceptionalism (Liverpool University Press, 2000).