France was where engineering was most understood, Paine felt, and he went there hoping to find backers for the single-arch bridge he contemplated building across the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. This innocent quest brought about the third development of Paine’s meteoric career. First a failure, then an American revolutionary, Paine was destined next to emerge not as a great inventor but as an English revolutionary.

English radicalism had persisted from its first explosion with Wilkes in the 1760s, gathering momentum with the American Revolution in the 1770s and the growth of the County Association movement in the 1780s. The French Revolution brought to a head middle-class discontent with the archaic and unreformed constitution. A new and progressive order had come with such apparent ease to the French that English reformers assumed that change in English institutions would follow quickly and painlessly. A heady faith in progress and the dawning of a new era swept through English intellectual and radical circles. Paine was in France furthering his bridge-building interests in the winter of 1789. The hero of America, he was toasted in the circles of Lafayette and Jefferson, then serving as American ambassador to France. From Lafayette Paine received the key to the Bastille to bring back to Washington. He was present during the early stages of the French Revolution and was pleased by what he saw.

One Englishman much less pleased than Paine was Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in 1790 while Paine was in England ostensibly still en route to America. Burke’s was a vicious attack on the French Jacobins and their English sym-pathizers. They had no reverence for the past, no respect for institutions like the Church and the aristocracy, he insisted. They tore down the entire political and social edifice and built completely anew with no effort to repair damaged parts. Government and society, Burke wrote, were fragile and complex entities, the product of generations of slow and imperceptible growth. No reformer’s plans or blueprints could substitute for the experience of the ages. Burke’s message was clear. English radicals should not copy their French counterparts; the aristocratic and hierarchical English past and present must be defended from its enemies. The intellectual spokes-men and – women for that subversive enemy replied in legions to Burke. Godwin rose to the occasion with his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, WoUstonecraft with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman; but none would be so powerful and so popular an answer as Paine’s The Rights of Man which appeared in 1791.

Once again the uncomplicated, unscholarly and unsophisticated rhetoric of Paine brought him unprecedented popular success. Paine was an instant hero in England, not only to the intellectual radicals among whom he moved, such as Blake, Holcroft, Home Tooke, Godwin and WoUstonecraft, but to hundreds of thousands of artisans and journeymen who bought Rights of Man for sixpence or read it reprinted by their provincial radical association. Paine’s book was more than a simple defence of the French from the obloquy heaped upon them by Burke; it was also a call to the British to replace the aristocratic institutions so praised by Burke with new liberal institutions, to replace the principle of privilege and heredity with the new ideals of talent and merit. The monarchy and the aristocracy were relics of a feudal past. Republican government rested with the people and was designed to serve their interests alone. Far from the past and its institutions weighing heavy on modern man, Paine’s message was that every age and every generation acted for itself, set up its own political and social order to meet its own needs. ‘The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave’, he wrote, ‘is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.’ Paine champions the rights of the living, not the hoary rights of privileged classes from time immemorial.

Paine was no hero to George Ill’s Prime Minister, William Pitt the younger. Burke wrote to dissuade people from entering the radical camp; Reeves and his mob in the Church and King Society literally burned down the insurgents’ camps; while the role of Pitt and his agents in the repressive atmosphere of the early and middle 1790s was to arrest radicals, try them and throw them in gaol. In 1792 charges of seditious writings were lodged against Paine, and a trial was scheduled. Pitt would not allow a writer, especially one so widely read, to state freely as Paine had done in the introduction to The Rights of Man: ‘If universal peace, civilization and commerce are ever to be the happy lot of man, it cannot be accompUshed but by a revolution in the system of governments.’

The mood of England had shifted dramatically in the two years since Wordsworth felt such bliss to be alive in the reflected glory of the French Revolution. On the night of 22 November 1792 a patriotic mob burned Paine’s effigy at Chelmsford, Essex.