He had an acute awareness of the asymmetry of power and of the arbitrariness of actual social arrangements that lay buried, like a land mine, slightly beneath the surface of daily life. His prediction did not take long to come true. While British radicals talked about reform, a fiscal crisis in France actually forced the king, Louis XVI, to convene an unprecedented assembly, followed by the first convocation of the Estates General in more than a century. Backing the American Revolution had broken the royal bank; fixing it created an opening for those who had been inveighing against the government for decades. A series of dramatic events ensued, starting with the fall of the Bastille, the formidable royal prison in the heart of Paris. The great French Revolution had begun and would continue in various permutations until Napoleon Bonaparte came to power a decade later.

With that mine actually exploding, Paine rushed back to France, where he consorted, through Jefferson’s connections, with the leaders of the Girondin party—the marquis de Lafayette, the marquis de Condorcet, and Jacques Brissot. Both Lafayette and Brissot had actually been to the United States, and Condorcet had written about it. They were even called americanistes because of their opposition to the French anglomanes who wanted to copy the British constitution. During these heady days the members of the National Assembly abolished feudal privileges and pressed the king to accept their drastic changes. Lafayette, who was then riding high as the aristocratic champion of radical reform, presented Paine with the key to the Bastille, symbol of oppression, with the request that he forward it to General Washington.

As French leaders drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” (adopted by the National Assembly 1789), their English counterparts recoiled from what they considered dangerous social engineering. Burke especially dreaded any linkage of what was going on in France with possible changes in England. He had reacted strongly to those who earlier had seized on the centenary of the Glorious Revolution to assert the right of the English nation to reform its institutions. Although Burke had supported the American cause, he was actually conservative. At least, the opening events in the French Revolution brought out a deeply conservative side in him. He discerned in rationality an acid that would burn right through the layers of respect and loyalty that he considered the glue holding society together. He hated appeals to the Newtonian nature of consistency and transparency that radicals on both sides of the Atlantic made. Having enjoyed a safe seat in Parliament since 1766, Burke also saw the beauty in Britain’s peculiar political traditions.

The thought of seemingly sane men abandoning their time-honored institutions for such chimeras as “liberty, equality, and fraternity” compelled Burke to sound the alarm with his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In a sustained attack on the theories spawned by the Enlightenment, Burke lectured his readers on true constitutional principles of kingship in Britain, the true meaning of the rights of men, and the true principle of social stability. Nothing if not supremely confident of his understanding of political realities and the history that produced them, Burke must be credited with recognizing the difficulties of replacing existing institutions with innovative ones, a reality that often escaped Paine. In his denunciation of the rash theories circulating through Europe in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke paused long enough to compose an apotheosis to the beauty of Queen Marie Antoinette. In an unprecedented invasion of the royal space, a mob had hustled her from her chambers at Versailles in the summer of 1789, a fact that Burke reported under the rubric “the outrages against the royal family, aristocracy, and the clergy.”8

Burke’s tome seemed a worse outrage to Paine, who had responded as both prophet and patron to the French people’s assertion of their rights against the absolutism of the monarchy that Louis XIV—Louis XVI’s great-great-great-grandfather—had perfected. Many took up their pens to respond to Burke, including Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Man (her Vindication of the Rights of Woman came later) was a public letter to Burke. Paine caused the greatest stir with Rights of Man. In this, his largest and most important work, he elaborated on the principles he had introduced in Common Sense. Paine was elated by exactly what horrified Burke—the possibility that the British might follow the French and discard their ancient institutions. Precedent reigned supreme with Burke; only arrangements that had stood the test of time deserved respect. Challenged by criticism of a restricted suffrage, English leaders had conjured up the idea that those who couldn’t vote had given their “tacit agreement” to the laws. It was exactly this ingenious concept that the Americans had rejected.

The lever Paine chose to upend Burke’s position was the irrationality of allowing one generation to make political arrangements in perpetuity, leaving the living tied to the compromises of their ancestors. Having challenged this assumption, Paine proceeded to detail the rights men carried with them naturally—their capacity to speak out, believe, think. And yet, it was exactly this competency that the entire edifice of conventional assumptions expressed in literature, laws, and popular entertainment had denied ordinary men and women. Paine viewed France’s repudiation of the privileges of the aristocracy and the clergy as evidence of its “regenerating itself from slavery” (p. 136).