Rights of Man

Glossary

C

Child Allowance and Public Education: Paine's proposal to pay four pounds a year, out of surplus taxes and in place of the poor-rates, to every poor family for each child under fourteen — conditioned on parents sending the children to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, certified by parish ministers of every denomination. Paine argues this relieves parents' poverty (which he attributes largely to the expense of raising children) while breaking the cycle of ignorance that keeps the next generation poor.; Related: Part Two's Program, Old-Age Pensions
Civil Rights: Rights that "appertain to man in right of his being a member of society" — natural rights (like the right to judge in one's own cause) that an individual's own power is not sufficient to execute, and which are therefore deposited into the common stock of society in exchange for society's protection. Paine's formula: every civil right grows out of a natural right, or is a natural right exchanged; civil power is the aggregate of those exchanged rights, and it can never rightly be turned against the natural rights an individual retained.; Related: Natural Rights, The Social Compact
Common Sense: Paine's earlier and still more famous 1776 pamphlet, referenced throughout Rights of Man both on its title page (crediting Paine as its author) and in the book's continuity of argument — Paine explicitly connects the American Revolution's success, which he calls proof that reform "could begin" somewhere in the world after millennia of entrenched old governments, to the principles he now applies to France and England.; Related: Thomas Paine
Count de Broglio's Plot: The royalist conspiracy Paine reveals as the real precipitating cause of the Bastille's fall — a plan, headed by the King's youngest brother the Count d'Artois and commanded militarily by Count de Broglio, to surround Paris with some twenty-five to thirty thousand foreign troops, dismiss the ministry sympathetic to the Revolution, and crush the National Assembly by force. Paine argues Burke's silence about this plot is itself damning, since it recasts the citizens' violence as pre-emptive self-defense rather than unprovoked rebellion.; Related: The Storming of the Bastille, Edmund Burke

E

Edmund Burke: The British statesman whose pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France attacked the Revolution and the National Assembly with, in Paine's words, "scarcely an epithet of abuse" left unused. Paine structures all of Part One as a point-by-point rebuttal — mocking Burke's mourning for "the age of chivalry," his omission of the plot against the National Assembly that provoked the storming of the Bastille, and his claim that a Parliament of 1688 could bind all future generations forever.; Related: Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine, Hereditary Government

H

Hereditary Government: Paine's central target: government by inheritance rather than by the choice of the living, which he attacks by demolishing Burke's claim that a 1688 Act of Parliament bound "us, our heirs and our posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time." Paine's rebuttal is blunt — "Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow" — and he compares the claim to a king who once disposed of his crown by will, "like beasts of the field."; Related: The Social Compact, Edmund Burke

M

Marquis de Lafayette: The French veteran of the American Revolution to whom Paine dedicates Part Two, and whom Paine credits with defusing the October 1789 Versailles crisis by marching twenty thousand Paris militia to mediate between the enraged crowd and the King's Garde du Corps — securing Louis XVI's signature on the Declaration of the Rights of Man rather than letting the standoff turn violent. Paine's admiring portrait contrasts sharply with the French translator's preface, added later, which pointedly regrets Paine's trust in Lafayette's sincerity.; Related: The Declaration of the Rights of Man, The March on Versailles

N

Natural Rights: Rights that "appertain to man in right of his existence" — all intellectual rights, rights of the mind, and rights to act as an individual for one's own comfort so long as doing so doesn't injure others' natural rights. Paine holds that these rights, where an individual's own power is sufficient to exercise them (as with religion or thought), are retained by every person even after entering into society, and government has no authority to touch them.; Related: Civil Rights, The Social Compact

O

Old-Age Pensions: Paine's specific proposal within Part Two's program: six pounds a year for the aged poor between fifty and sixty, and ten pounds annually for life after sixty, funded from surplus taxation. Paine insists this is "not of the nature of a charity but of a right," since every English person pays roughly two pounds eight shillings a year in taxes from birth — meaning the pension amounts to little more than the legal interest on a lifetime of tax payments finally returned.; Related: Part Two's Program, Child Allowance and Education

P

Paine's Prosecution: The British government's response to Rights of Man: it prosecuted Paine for seditious libel, and Burke's own "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" suggested such writings deserved "criminal justice" rather than argued refutation. Paine's Part Two preface answers this directly, arguing it is "criminal justice indeed that should condemn a work as a substitute for not being able to refute it," and defending the right to investigate and criticize any law or constitution as a duty every citizen owes society.; Related: Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke
Part Two's Program: Paine's constructive proposal, laid out with itemized costs against the surplus produced by ending wasteful military and court spending: remission of taxes and a per-child allowance for poor families conditioned on schooling, old-age pensions from fifty (and larger ones after sixty) paid as a matter of earned right rather than charity, and public workhouses offering food, lodging, and wages to anyone regardless of circumstance. Paine presents it as a costed, practical alternative to the war spending and court patronage he attributes to hereditary monarchy.; Related: Old-Age Pensions, Child Allowance and Education, The National Debt

R

Reflections on the Revolution in France: Burke's 1790 pamphlet, the direct target of Paine's rebuttal — a nearly four-hundred-page attack on the French Revolution and its supporters, including Dr. Richard Price and the Revolution Society. Paine compares reading it to reaching "Point-no-Point" on an American shoreline: gay and flowery from a distance, but arriving nowhere when you finally get there.; Related: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine

S

Superstition, Power, and Reason: Paine's three-part taxonomy of every government's historical origin: superstition (rule by priestcraft and oracles), power (rule by conquerors like William the Conqueror, later dressed up as "Divine Right"), and reason (government arising from the common interest of society and the common rights of man). Only the third kind, Paine argues, can claim legitimate authority, since it alone arises from the social compact rather than fraud or force.; Related: The Social Compact, Hereditary Government

T

The Archimedes Lever (America as "a Place to Stand"): Paine's opening image for Part Two: quoting Archimedes — "Had we a place to stand upon, we might raise the world" — to argue that the American Revolution supplied political theory with the practical foothold it had always lacked, since "no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe" to reform government until America demonstrated it was possible. Paine treats America's example as the lever that made the French Revolution, and his own argument for England, conceivable.; Related: Common Sense, Thomas Paine
The Declaration of the Rights of Man: The French National Assembly's founding statement of principles, first brought forward in provisional form by Lafayette on July 11, 1789 — three days before the Bastille fell — explicitly so that "some trace of its principles might have the chance of surviving the wreck" if the Assembly were crushed by the plot then forming against it. Louis XVI signs the completed Declaration on the night of the Versailles crisis, October 5-6, 1789, at Lafayette's urging.; Related: Marquis de Lafayette, The Storming of the Bastille, The March on Versailles
The March on Versailles (October 5-6, 1789): The episode Paine reconstructs to correct Burke's dramatized account of "confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter" — explaining it as the Parisian crowd's response to the King's Garde du Corps tearing off and trampling the national cockade at a banquet days earlier, an act Paine calls tantamount to a declaration of war. Paine credits Lafayette's mediation with turning a potential massacre into the King's signature on the Declaration of the Rights of Man.; Related: Marquis de Lafayette, The Declaration of the Rights of Man, Edmund Burke
The National Debt and War Spending: The target Paine's whole Part Two program is set against: his claim that hereditary monarchies are inherently "military" governments whose "trade" is war, plunder, and revenue, and that redirecting the money spent on standing armies, court patronage, and interest on war debt could fund progressive taxation relief and social provision instead — the fiscal argument underlying his line that "the age of revolutions" has arrived because old governments have "wearied out the patience, and exhausted the property of the world."; Related: Part Two's Program, Hereditary Government
The Social Compact: Paine's account of legitimate government's origin — not conquest or inheritance, but a compact each living generation is free to remake, since "government is for the living, and not for the dead." He identifies three historical sources of government — superstition (priestcraft), power (conquest), and "the common interest of society and the common rights of man" (reason) — and argues only governments arising from the third source, the social compact, are legitimate.; Related: Hereditary Government, Natural Rights, Civil Rights
The Storming of the Bastille: The July 14, 1789 event Paine reconstructs in detail against Burke's near-silence about it — framing it not as spontaneous mob violence but as the citizens of Paris pre-empting a royalist plot, led by the Count d'Artois and Count de Broglio, to crush the National Assembly by military force. Paine insists the Bastille's fall must be read together with the conspiracy that provoked it, since Burke "has passed over the whole transaction" and its causes.; Related: Count de Broglio's Plot, Marquis de Lafayette, Edmund Burke
Thomas Paine: The English-born pamphleteer, veteran of both the American and French Revolutions, who wrote Rights of Man as a direct rebuttal to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution. Paine dedicates Part One to George Washington and addresses Part Two to Lafayette, and was prosecuted in England for the book's sedition — he answered by taking a seat in the French National Convention instead, having already authored Common Sense during the American Revolution.; Related: Edmund Burke, Common Sense, Paine's Prosecution