He described the English as left with customs dating back to William the Conqueror. He could never resist the chance to correct someone’s historical facts, and Burke, as a beneficiary of the corrupt system of parliamentary representation that Paine hated, was an especially appealing target.

Rights of Man rambled through political theory, American precedents, English history, and the provisions of the new French constitution. Paine celebrated the French for their success in lifting the dead hand of the past that had been pressing upon their shoulders. He constantly urged the disenfranchised among his readers to insist upon popular sovereignty, universal suffrage, and a truly representative government. It was exactly this proposition, that the English nation had the right to create its own constitution, that so frightened Burke and other conservatives.

Building on Adam Smith’s idea of an invisible hand guiding the private acts of men and women to unintended, but beneficent, consequences, Paine in Rights of Man dwelt on the natural sociability of human beings that rendered them cooperative. Yearning for much, men and women worked together so they could better serve their needs and wants.

Paine also chided Burke for his indifference to the victims of the Ancien Régime (a term used in reference to France under the Bourbon monarchy), like the men who had been languishing in the Bastille before its fall. This attack gave him the opening for addressing Burke’s adoring remarks about the Queen. “He is not affected by the reality of distress,” Paine noted, because “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” “His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show,” he continued, “and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon” (p. 117).

Paine’s hope that Rights of Man would stir British leaders to respond positively to events in France was quickly dashed. Since Paine had failed to take the measure of the political nation, he reached out to a new audience among the disenfranchised, using his royalties to print cheap copies of Rights of Man that various radical clubs quickly distributed throughout Great Britain. The artisans, storekeepers, and white-collar workers in England were overjoyed by Paine’s assertions of their political capacity. They memorized his rhetorical zingers. They delighted in his descriptions of the shenanigans that their “superiors” engaged in to keep them from their legitimate role in the polity. The French, he told them in his “Address and Declaration of the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty” (1791), “laid the axe to the root of tyranny” and erected their new government “on the sacred hereditary rights of man.” They should do the same, Paine urged.

Events in France lured Paine back to where his friends held power. When King Louis XVI attempted to flee the country rather than preside over a constitutional monarchy, Paine and others began to call for a republic. In the midst of this turmoil Burke published a reply to Paine’s Rights of Man that drew Paine back to London to compose a second part. Not content with advocating the expansion of the suffrage and rationalizing parliamentary representation in England, Paine laid out in the second part of Rights of Man an array of radical goals like universal public education, pensions for the aged, state relief for the unemployed, and a graduated income tax.

This time the British government was ready. While various political groups, again with help from Paine’s royalties, distributed 100,000 copies of Paine’s new work throughout the country, the government charged Paine with seditious libel. With characteristic bravado, Paine wrote, “If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy, and every species of hereditary government—to lessen the oppression of taxes—to propose plans for the education of helpless infancy, and the comfortable support of the aged and distressed ... and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libelous, let me live the life of a libeller, and let the name of LIBELLER be engraved on my tomb!”9 But he returned to France.

In his summary of the case against Paine, the British attorney general played perfectly the role Paine cast for British officials when he described Paine’s audience as the ignorant, credulous, and desperate. To inoculate themselves against this affront of stirring up ordinary people, the British government distributed 2 million copies of a cheap tract from Evangelical philanthropist Hannah More urging people to honor the king and fear God.10 Meanwhile, back in the United States, the French Revolution had brought out the conservatism in many Revolutionary leaders. Under the banner of the Federalists, the men in the first Washington administration rejected any comparison of their revolution with what was going on in France. They turned against Paine. John Quincy Adams, whose father, John Adams, was George Washington’s vice president from 1789 to 1797, answered Paine’s Rights of Man in a series of anonymous essays, signed “Publicola,” in a Boston newspaper.

Just as France had its américanistes and anglomanes when they were writing their first constitution, so did politically aware Americans divide between “Anglomen” and “Gallomen” after France executed the royal family and turned itself into a republic.ll From 1793 until the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson, events conspired to embroil Americans in the most fundamental questions about government. Critics of the Washington administration bemoaned its pro-British policies, while the Federalists castigated the French and their American followers. The key issue became how important government was to the maintenance of order. Conservatives claimed that ordinary men were too unruly to handle too much freedom. After all, if they had been so tractable through the ages, why was history replete with tales of riots and rebellions, mayhem and anarchy? Paine’s answer was ingenious. People were naturally self-regulating if given a chance to cultivate their reason and independence through the exercise of free choice. It was government, with its abusive control, that was responsible for this record of discord.

The British prosecution of Paine turned him into a hero in Paris.