Thomas Paine is a very strong supporter…

March 1791 CE

Thomas Paine is a very strong supporter of the French Revolution that began in 1789; he had visited France the following year.

Many English thinkers support it, including Richard Price, who had initiated the Revolution Controversy with his sermon and pamphlet drawing favorable parallels between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution.

Conservative intellectual Edmund Burke had responded with a counter-revolutionary attack entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which strongly appeals to the landed class and has sold thirty thousand copies.

Rights of Man, a book by Thomas Paine, including thirty-one articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people.

Using these points as a base, it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack.

Rights of Man had been printed by Joseph Johnson for publication on February 21, 1791, then withdrawn for fear of prosecution.

J. S. Jordan steps in and publishes the first part of the ninety-thousand-word book on March 16, three weeks later than scheduled; the second part will be published in February 1792.

It will sell as many as one million copies.

Paine argues that the interests of the monarch and his people are united, and insists that the French Revolution should be understood as one which attacks the despotic principles of the French monarchy, not the king himself, and he takes the Bastille, the main prison in Paris, to symbolize the despotism that had been overthrown.

Human rights originate in Nature, thus, rights cannot be granted via political charter, because that implies that rights are legally revocable, hence, would be privileges.

Government's sole purpose is safeguarding the individual and his/her inherent, inalienable rights; each societal institution that does not benefit the nation is illegitimate—especially monarchy and aristocracy.

The fuller development of this position seems to have been worked out one night in France after an evening spent with Thomas Jefferson, and possibly Lafayette, discussing a pamphlet by the Philadelphia conservative James Wilson on the proposed federal constitution.

Rights of Man concludes in proposing practical reformations of English government: a written Constitution composed by a national assembly, in the American mold; the elimination of aristocratic titles, because democracy is incompatible with primogeniture, which leads to the despotism of the family; a national budget without allotted military and war expenses; lower taxes for the poor, and subsidized education for them; and a progressive income tax weighted against wealthy estates to prevent the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy.