The Rights of Man

The Assembly of the Notables, a select group of 140 men nominated by the king, met in France in 1787 to recommend new taxes to the local parlements. Paine regards this meeting as “the first practical step toward the revolution” (54). The gathering of the Notables, led by the Marquis de Lafayette served as a precursor to the calling of the Estates-General, from which sprang the National Assembly and the constitutional reforms of 1789-1791.

The Bastille was a notorious Parisian prison that symbolized the tyrannical rule of France’s absolute monarchs. Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, an event widely regarded as the beginning of the French Revolution. Paine describes the storming of the Bastille in the first part of Rights of Man.

In the 18th century, the British constitution consisted primarily of unwritten traditions and institutional arrangements, including, for instance, a limited monarchy and a Parliament that acted as a supreme legislature, its existence independent of the monarch’s will. Eighteenth-century Britons generally regarded the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 as the event that secured the constitutional balance between monarch and Parliament. While Edmund Burke celebrates this century-old constitutional settlement as the foundation of British liberty, Paine argues that the people’s rights originate not in precedents or unwritten constitutions but in nature, so the people have the right to change their form of government whenever they choose.

The closest thing to an elected legislature in pre-Revolution France, the Estates-General met in May 1789; this was its first meeting since 1614. The Estates-General consisted of three “Estates” corresponding to three social orders: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the commoners. The First and Second Estates, the clergy and aristocrats respectively, insisted on sitting and deliberating separately, but on June 17, the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly. Less than a month later, angry Parisians stormed the Bastille prison. These events marked the beginning of the French Revolution.

In 1688, Protestant Englishmen rebelled against their Catholic king, James II. With the help of a Dutch invasion force, the rebels deposed King James II and replaced him with William of Orange, who became King William III. These events, known in British history as the “Glorious Revolution,” resulted in a strengthened Parliament and a bill of rights. Edmund Burke cites the constitutional settlement produced by the Glorious Revolution as conducive to order and good government, whereas Paine regards this constitutional settlement as rooted in mistaken principles and therefore irrelevant to the late-18th century.

The House of Brunswick, more commonly referred to as the House of Hanover, was the family of kings that ascended to the British throne in 1714 with King George I. According to Paine, the fact that Parliament went to one of the German states to find a new king proves monarchy’s silliness, while also highlighting the danger of placing a foreigner at the head of a nation’s government.  

France’s first revolutionary legislature, the National Assembly, sat from June 1789 to September 1791. Its existence coincided with the more temperate phase of the French Revolution. The first part of Paine’s Rights of Man appeared in print during the National Assembly’s brief existence.

In aristocratic systems, primogeniture is a method of inheritance by which all property, including the hereditary title, descends to the first-born son. The purpose of the system is to perpetuate dynasties by keeping the family wealth and name in the hands of a single heir. Paine regards this system as unjust, declaring that it “ought to be abolished” (182), along with aristocracy in general.