A Citizen of the World
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers &Writing A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD BY ROGER DRAPER IN The Old Regime and the French Revolution Tocqueville denounces "Revolutionaries of a hitherto unknown breed," who in the 1790s...
...United States...
...soon there were large editions in Britain, France and elsewhere...
...Upon returning to the United States in October 1802, he became a supporter of President Jefferson, with whom he had good relations...
...Moreover, Paine's expectations for the future were quite simply false...
...But nature, after all, can equally be seen as a vast theater of immorality, decay and violence, and there is no more evidence for a watchmaker god—let alone one watchmaker god—than for any other...
...For unpersuasive reasons, Keane ranks The Crisis "among the greatest political essays in the modern English language...
...He was now spending most of his time in Britain, and Prime Minister William Pitt's government moved to prosecute him for seditious libel...
...Paine fled to revolutionary France, where he was given citizenship in August 1792 and elected, though unable to speak French, to the National Assembly...
...Common Sense was in many ways his best work...
...It did not turn out that way...
...For example, the author repeatedly calls Paine a champion of "commoners," as though his great enemy William Pitt had not been a commoner...
...Do we want to contemplate his wisdom...
...At the Revolution's conclusion, he repeatedly (and oddly, for one who would dismiss Edmund Burke as a "pensioner") attempted without much luck to secure a new office...
...still, Paine did a very spirited job of showing why it absolutely had to do so...
...Several years of bad blood between the colonists and Britain had already inspired pamphlets savaging every aspect of the imperial connection, but no one prior to Paine had explicitly called for national sovereignty...
...Nor is this the only unappealing side of Paine's religious outlook...
...There the "citizen of the world," as Paine sometimes called himself, was a moderate...
...In the first year an astonishing 400,000 copies circulated...
...Subsequently, he says, they "made good and proliferated in all parts of the civilized world, everywhere retaining the same characteristics...
...He appeared to have no conception that a more populous country, especially if it accepted these social welfare obligations, would inevitably be a more bureaucratic and heavily taxed one...
...Though the most brilliant of his publications...
...He belonged to a generation that had witnessed the impossible twice, and reality could never again live up to his expectations...
...When his Girondist friends were proscribed in June 1793, he told the momentarily triumphant Georges Dan-ton that at last he saw the truth of the comparison between the Revolution and Saturn, the god who devoured his children...
...Writers &Writing A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD BY ROGER DRAPER IN The Old Regime and the French Revolution Tocqueville denounces "Revolutionaries of a hitherto unknown breed," who in the 1790s propounded novel doctrines in both politics and religion...
...Radicals favored a confederal, rather than federal...
...His politics were not extreme...
...In 1777, Paine took a post as secretary to the Congressional committee on foreign affairs...
...He survived by mistake...
...Democracy would soon inherit the earth, and popularly governed nations, with no reason to fight one another, would have low military expenditures and thus low taxes...
...Every evening, he later wrote, 10 to 50 prisoners were taken, "carried before a pretended tribunal in the morning, and guillotined before night...
...The biography, and the recently published volume of Paine's Collected Writings (Library of America, 906 pp., $35.00), edited by Eric Foner, offer an unusual opportunity to take his measure...
...Rights of Man is no more convincing as an account of the French Revolution than the work it rebutted: Burke underestimated the incompetence of the old regime?He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird...
...Back in 1792, Paine had written that by the coming of the new century, monarchy and aristocracy would be overthrown in all "the enlightened countries in Europe...
...Keane ignores both passages...
...the Creator made nothing in vain, so also must it be believed that he organized the structure of the universe in the most advantageous manner for the benefit of man...
...Keane's biography is interesting, but it does not reflect a firm knowledge of the late-18th-century Anglo-American world...
...TOM PAINE was a self-conscious breaker of chains—in succession, those of the motherland, monarchy and aristocracy, and revealed religion...
...The Age of Reason shocked many people because it attacked Christianity more directly than it had ever been attacked in English...
...Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Westminster, believes his subject acquired these leanings through exposure to "New-tonianism": the hope for a science of government that would sweep away the prevailing amateurishness...
...His republicanism was a modem ideology, with deism one of its central aspects...
...government, Paine wrote an open letter denouncing President Washington in 1796...
...At the end of 1790 and beginning of "91 —not in January 1790, as Keane mistakenly says—after reading Burke's Reflections, he worked on the first part of Rights of Man...
...In some respects, Paine's deism is more credulous than a traditional religion need be: "As...
...Society," he wrote, "performs foritself almost everythingwhichisascribed to government...
...Yet Paine also wrote, "I believe in one god, and no more...
...Such notions were current among the engineers and scientists the young Pain met, but Keane notwithstanding, no indication of what he absorbed then has survived...
...Paine wanted a strong national government and backed projects, such as chartered banks, that in America evoked strong radical opposition...
...Paine failed to anticipate the cruelties of the new one...
...and I hope for happiness beyond this life...
...Kings and nobilities require warfare to justify the state spending that gives them their wealth and power, he maintained...
...Poverty was not a natural phenomenon: it was the consequence of hereditary political privilege and the high taxes that sustained it...
...He died in Greenwich Village in 1809...
...Foner, a history professor at Columbia, says "there is no evidence...
...In Rights of Man Paine says "the instance of the Jews" proves "that the human species has a tendency to degenerate in any small number of persons...
...Whole is governed...
...In the case of the Library of America volume, the problem is that Foner provides too few notes for anyone not well versed in 18th-century American, English and French history...
...nobility was not a fundamental line of division in British life...
...Keane thinks Paine wrote the essay against slavery that appeared in the March '75 issue of the Pennsylvania Journal, a magazine he started to edit soon after his arrival here...
...In the late summer of '75, Paine began to draft a pamphlet calling upon the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, to declare independence...
...Optimism was the heart of his system...
...His initial serious effort was a masterpiece short enough to conceal his chief literary defect: an inability to organize...
...In 1772 and '73, Pain represented the excisemen in a failed attempt to petition Parliament for higher wages...
...Thomas Pain—his name until he crossed the Atlantic—was born in 1737 in the English town of Thetford...
...At the height of the terror, in December '93, Paine himself went to jail...
...This drew Danton's famous reply: "Revolutions cannot be made with rosewater...
...If he was not, as John Keane maintains in Tom Paine: A Political Life (Little, Brown, 644 pp., $27.95), "the greatest political figure of his generation," he was a major participant in the American and French revolutions and their preeminent literary spokesman...
...Almost overnight Paine was an international celebrity...
...Although ultimately Paine was vindicated, Deane was an influential figure and Paine was forced to resign...
...Even later, in Rights of Man, Paine did not go beyond demanding the vote for all taxpayers...
...Paine's last prominent pamphlet, The Age of Reason, is to me the least attractive, for like so much of the early rationalist literature, it is largely a retelling of the Old Testament on the premise that the Jews of antiquity "had distinguished themselves above all others, on the face of the known earth, for barbarity and wickedness...
...Feeling abandoned by the U.S...
...Toward the close of '78 he leveled a charge of peculation against Silas Deane, who had been appointed to conduct negotiations for a French alliance...
...He could easily have lived by his pen, but to give his works the lowest possible price and thus the largest possible readership, he refused to sell his copyrights or draw royalties...
...his father was a Quaker corset-maker, his mother an Anglican...
...As a young man, Pain became a collector of excise taxes, an improbable beginning for someone who was more or less a democrat...
...We see it in the unchangeable order by which the...
...During the fall of ' 74—quite suddenly, following a short unhappy marriage?he emigrated to Philadelphia, reaching it at the end of November...
...Paine was not an orthodox 19th-century liberal...
...Creation, not the Bible, was the word of God...
...Foner calls Paine's next major literary effort, Rights of Man, a book, though it is really two pamphlets...
...In 1787 a disappointed Paine sailed to Europe...
...along with The Age of Reason, which he started before his imprisonment, it made Paine notorious...
...the first was a triumph, so Paine brought out a second under the same name, a publishing strategy he subsequently repeated...
...Common Sense was published in January 1776...
...At great personal risk, he opposed the King's execution...
...The very sort of man he had in mind was Tom Paine, author of the four most widely read pamphlets of his day: Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason...
...I was struck unpleasantly by the way it threatened American Tories with the "fate of the jail and the gibbet...
...as Paine remarks...
...he praised Wealth of Nations but at the same time proposed an elaborate social security scheme and progressive taxes...
...The destruction of monarchy and aristocracy would create conditions for equal competition, he wrongly believed...
...and he had many friends, notably George Washington, among the conservative revolutionists...
...His book is no less militant than a tract by Luther, Calvin or Lenin...
Vol. 78 • May 1995 • No. 4
