The Rights of Man

Writing in 1791-1792, Paine, like many people on both sides of the Atlantic, still viewed the American and French Revolutions as similar phenomena. This would change beginning in 1793, when France descended into a cycle of terror and bloodshed. In the meantime, however, Paine celebrated both revolutions as glorious events and hoped another would unfold in Britain.

American revolutionaries proclaimed the Enlightenment ideals of equality, natural rights, and consent as the foundation for government, changing the way many people in the 18th century thought about government and its relationship to the material well-being of its citizens. In America, Paine sees “the generality of people living in a style of plenty unknown in monarchical countries” (78). It is significant that Paine highlights the standard of living in America, for in Rights of Man he argues that hereditary government is the primary cause of poverty. In America, he writes, “the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged” (110). For Paine, the American Revolution was not merely an independence movement, it was also “a revolution in the principles and practice of governments” (104, emphasis added).

By the time Paine wrote Rights of Man, the American Revolution had succeeded, but the French Revolution was still under attack by Edmund Burke and others. Much of Paine’s book, therefore, amounts to an extended defense of the French Revolution. Paine argues that the French people rebelled not against the king personally “but against the despotic principles of the government” (13, emphasis added). Whereas Burke characterizes the French revolutionaries as a bloodthirsty mob, Paine admires the courage of those who stormed the Bastille, characterizing the “event” as a choice between “freedom or slavery” (19). Likewise, where Burke depicts the French Revolution as spontaneous and chaotic, Paine insists that it is only the “consequence of a mental revolution priorly existing in France” (50, emphasis added). Paine therefore presents the French people as rebelling with legitimate cause, while also presenting the process of Revolution as a gradual one instead of a violent and abrupt disruption to the social order.

Paine equates hereditary government with tyranny and spends parts of the book mocking it. His primary argument is that hereditary forms of government inevitably lead to tyranny and injustice, thereby suggesting that the system is inherently illegitimate regardless of who sits on the throne. 

Paine argues that hereditary government “is in its nature tyranny” (114), asserting that the key difference between representative and hereditary government constitutes the “one general principle that distinguishes freedom from slavery” (138)—in a representative republic, the sovereign will of the people is supreme, whereas in hereditary governments, power rests in the will of the monarch and his elite. Paine depicts the tyranny of hereditary government as having violent results, pointing out that hereditary claims have been the cause of civil wars in both France and England throughout history. Such competing claims are naturally connected to monarchy, he claims, since all monarchy begins as mere conquest and robbery. Paine characterizes the “brutality” of historical violent power struggles as an explanation for “the original character of monarchy [:] It was ruffian torturing ruffian” (111). Paine’s depictions of monarchical power struggles waged between “ruffians” contrasts with his vision of a world in which the spread of representative republics will lead to international peace.

Paine also argues that monarchies are absurd and maintain their power only through building an empty façade of power and glamor. He calls monarchy “the popery of government; a thing kept up to amuse the ignorant, and quiet them into taxes” (124, emphasis added). He adds that monarchies can only maintain their power and prestige by “hoodwink[ing]” the populace and keeping them “in superstitious ignorance” (160). Paine’s emphasis on the government’s “popery”—a reference to Roman Catholicism, which was often a byword in Protestant England for worldly corruption and excess—and its dependence upon keeping the population “ignorant” in order to remain in power depicts monarchy as inherently deceitful and corrupt. There are, in other words, no redeeming features to monarchy, with Paine dismissing it as “a silly, contemptible thing” (122) that should be abandoned once and for all.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) extols the virtues of the British constitution. Paine’s Rights of Man answers Burke with the argument that no such constitution exists, and that what Burke calls a “constitution” is actually an unparalleled system of official corruption.

According to its most enthusiastic 18th-century defenders, the British constitution represented a perfect balance between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, exemplified by the king (or queen) and two houses of Parliament. The British constitution, however, was unwritten, existing not as a single, contained document but as a series of precedents developed over many centuries. For this reason, Paine regards the British constitution as nonexistent and the British government as an imposition that “arose out of a conquest, and not out of society” (33, emphasis added). Since Paine believes that only the sovereign will of the people can produce a constitution, which will then produce a government, he regards the entire British system as illegitimate, calling it a “usurpation” that exercises “powers without authority” (71). Paine complains that, in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, apologists for the British government have been “preaching up the doctrine of precedents,” which he dismisses as “one of the vilest systems that can be set up” (134), for it denies the sovereignty of the people and acknowledges no actual restraint on government power.

While 18th-century British constitutionalists celebrated the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 and the limited monarchy that followed, Paine regards both the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession of 1714 as the beginning of insidious corruption. In both instances, foreigners came to occupy the British throne and embroiled the nation in endless wars. The wars expanded the size of the British government and swelled the national debt, which became an excuse for additional taxes and more government offices to be filled with sycophants, whose sole purpose was to prop up the existing regime. Paine condemns courtiers as a “band of interested men,” who are self-interested and power-hungry, finding “as many reasons for monarchy as their salaries, paid at the expense of the country, amount to” (78). Paine decries how this “barbarous system” (146) of war, debts, and taxes enriches the well-connected and impoverishes the masses. He therefore creates a stark contrast between revolutionary America, with its development and ratification of a constitution by the people, with the British system’s illusory “constitution” that props up corruption and privilege while denying the populace true liberty.