Rights of Man

Rights of Man is Thomas Paine’s defence of the French Revolution and of the right of every generation to govern itself. Published in two parts, in 1791 and 1792, it argues that rights belong to people by nature, that governments exist only to protect them, and that a nation may change a government that fails to do so. This Atlas Media edition comes from the second volume of Paine’s collected writings, edited by Moncure Daniel Conway, which contains both parts in full with Conway’s introduction.

Paine wrote Part One in reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke had attacked the revolution and defended inherited institutions, tradition and the British constitution as the wisdom of past generations.

Paine answers that no generation can bind those that come after it. The dead have no authority over the living, and every age must be free to act for itself. He mocks Burke’s lament for Marie Antoinette, saying Burke “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird”: he grieves for royalty while ignoring the suffering of ordinary people.

Natural rights, Paine argues, come before any law or charter. People enter society not to give up their rights but to secure them. A charter that grants rights to some, he says, in fact takes them away from the rest. Hereditary government is absurd: wisdom is not inherited, so why should power be?

Part One also gives Paine’s account of events in France, from the fall of the Bastille onward, and includes the text of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with his comments.

Part Two, published in February 1792, turns from argument to proposals. Paine compares the old governments of Europe, founded on conquest and inheritance, with the new systems of representative government in America and France. He praises written constitutions made by the people, and representative democracy as the form suited to large nations.

The closing chapters set out a detailed plan of social reform for Britain. Paine proposes cutting military spending and abolishing the poor laws, and using the money for payments to poor families with children, pensions for the elderly, help for the education of children, and support for workers and newly married couples, funded in part by a progressive tax on large estates. Welfare, he insists, is a right, not charity.

The book sold in enormous numbers and alarmed the British government. Paine was charged with seditious libel and convicted in his absence in 1792, by which time he had left for France.