ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1790, the London Public Advertiser announced that the new iron bridge of Mr. Paine was being displayed and that it gave “infinite satisfaction.” For a single shilling, visitors could now traverse the gentle arch above Lisson Green.
Concluding that fall was not the best season to attract more visitors, Paine closed the exhibition sometime in early October. In the spring, once the weather improved, the public would again be able to view the bridge. In the meantime, Paine would shelter his creation from the elements and make any necessary adjustments to his design. Unfortunately, by the end of November, whatever plans Paine had made for the winter months had been thrown into chaos. He had become embroiled in a shattering dispute with his friend Edmund Burke.1
PAINE’S FRIENDSHIP with Burke had shown signs of strain during the Nootka crisis. Although the two generally agreed about the belligerence of the Pitt administration, they had begun to disagree about the course of revolution in France. Paine remained steadfast in his belief that the French were simply doing what their American brethren had done. In place of an old, despotic mode of government, they were devising representative institutions and a just constitution. This did not necessarily mean deposing the King or destroying the monarchy. But it did mean reforms that would establish the Third Estate as the country’s primary law-making body. As for Burke, although he had supported the Americans and had defended some of their claims against the British government, he had come to believe that events in France had little in common with revolution in the United States.
The two friends were at odds on other matters as well. One of these was the British government’s treatment of religious minorities. Charles James Fox, a onetime political ally of Burke and former secretary of state, had been championing Parliamentary action against the Test and Corporation Acts, a series of old laws intended to exclude Catholics and other religious dissenters from public office. To the shock of many, Burke broke with Fox on the issue. As the Revolution in France progressed, Burke came to see dissent from the Church of England as a threat to the nation. Proponents of French-style radicalism, he feared, could conceal their true intentions—the wholesale destruction of Britain’s governing order—behind a quest for religious liberty. Revolution in Britain would be a near certainty if such radicals were given access to government offices. To Paine, this position seemed perverse for a man with well-known Catholic sympathies, and by spring of 1790, the friendship had experienced a distinct chill.
Frustrated though he was by these disagreements, Paine had no sense of the full depth of his departure from Burke. While Paine was assembling his bridge, Burke had been fixated on events in France. Much like Paine, he had initially regarded the convening of the Estates General as the promising beginning of constitutional reform. But as events seemed to spiral out of control, and the people began to fill the streets of Paris, Burke’s assessments turned very dark. In place of reasoned constitutional reform, the French appeared bent on mindless revolution. In defiance of any received constitutional traditions, the Third Estate had declared itself the nation’s sole representative body, to the complete exclusion of the clergy and nobility, the other two estates. With the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, the nationalization of church property, the imposition of civil oaths on clergy, and the forcible removal of the King and Queen from Versailles to Paris, the consequences of this revolutionary act were plain to see: the wholesale rejection of the rule of law. The Americans had never, to Burke’s mind, shown so much disregard for their institutional inheritance.
The problem, Burke had come to believe, was that France’s revolutionaries had no sense of history’s power. In their hostility to the standing order and its historical antecedents, Burke pronounced, France’s revolutionaries were destroying the foundation of enlightened and civilized society. For what they mistook for that foundation—rights inherent in the natural order of things—were in fact human conventions, devised over time and assimilated by societies as they moved from barbarousness to civilization. In Burke’s view, what ultimately made liberty possible, what allowed human beings to live by the rule of law rather than the yoke of tyranny, was not, as the French revolutionaries appeared to think, some sort of universal natural law. What secured the rule of law were the accumulated lessons of history, exemplified in that most noble of things, the English Constitution. The latter had emerged from a heroic and ongoing human struggle against its baser impulses. And the results of that struggle were all the conventions in law and society, all the manners and morals, all the institutions and traditions that allowed human beings to arrest the march of barbarousness. In their disregard for the constitutional rights of the nobility and clergy, in their refusal to see their king and queen as anything other than an ordinary man and woman, the French revolutionaries displayed a disregard for the very habits of mind that made civilized life possible.
In their place, they instituted a grotesque Hobbesian world where, as Burke so memorably put it, “all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”2
With the publication of his antirevolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790, Burke would see his reputation soar. Within a few months of its appearance, 17,500 copies of Reflections had been printed, an extraordinary number for a costly 356-page pamphlet. The pamphlet would go through eleven editions in its first year of publication. King George III praised the work and its author: “there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you.”3
AS REFLECTIONS TRANSFORMED BURKE into the conscience of establishment Britain, it would soon transform Paine into the conscience of radical Britain. In the fall of 1789, Paine had begun writing a history of the revolution in France but he abandoned the project to complete his bridge. When Reflections appeared the following November, Paine returned to his history, but what ultimately emerged in March 1791 was the first part of Paine’s greatest political tract, Rights of Man. Far from the story of events in France, the pamphlet was a loud, fact-filled polemic. Much like Common Sense, it was a work of craft rather than high literary art, a fierce counter to Burke’s reversions to history’s mystical depths. It was also a deeply angry piece of writing.
Paine had read Burke’s Reflections as a personal attack. With its contempt for the “swinish multitude,” as Burke referred to the common masses, how could the democrat Paine have regarded it otherwise? For here was an attack on much more than the course of reform in France. Burke had directly challenged the very notion that ordinary people, people like Paine, were equipped to govern themselves, let alone anybody else. Human beings, Burke proclaimed, were not uniform in their character. As a result, they were not uniform in their capacities.
The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.4
How could a former stay-maker, turned revolutionary, now in pursuit of the world’s highest ideals as architect, not be offended by these words, especially coming from a close friend and patron? “From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend,” Paine explained, “and as our acquaintance commenced on that ground, it would have been more agreeable to me to have had cause to continue in that opinion, than to change it.” But Burke left Paine no choice. Not only would he have to abandon any pretense of friendship, he would have to stand up for the values that had motivated his fellow American revolutionaries and that now inspired the revolutionaries of France. Among the most fundamental of these was the idea that government by the people was the only truly just government:
Mr. Burke will not, I presume, deny . . . that governments arise, either out of the people, or over the people. The English government is one of those which arose out of a conquest, and not out of a society, and consequently it arose over the people; and though it has been much modified from the opportunity of circumstance . . . the country has never yet regenerated itself.5
In abolishing the seigneurial rights of the French aristocracy and the Catholic Church, and in refashioning the Third Estate into an elected and representative National Assembly, France was bringing an end to government above and beyond the governed. Indeed, what it was doing was precisely what Britain ought to do: abandon the charade of so-called mixed British-style constitutionalism. Much as he had done in Common Sense, Paine proclaimed this mixed constitution to be nothing more than “an imperfect every-thing, cementing and soldering the discordant parts together by corruption.” With no accountability and no ultimate authority, the system created a government of dysfunction:
In mixed Governments there is no responsibility: the parts cover each other till responsibility is lost; and the corruption which moves the machine, contrives at the same time its own escape. When it is laid down as a maxim, that a King can do no wrong, it places him in a state of similar security with that of idiots and persons insane, and responsibility is out of the question with respect to himself. It then descends upon the [Prime] minister, who shelters himself under a majority in Parliament, which, by places and pensions, and corruption, he can always command; and that majority justifies itself by the same authority with which it protects the Minister. In this rotatory motion, responsibility is thrown off from the parts, and from the whole.6
The only Englishmen served by England’s mixed constitution, in Paine’s view, were the King and his ministers. Meanwhile, everybody else paid to keep them in their foppery and finery.
Burke’s defense of this archaic and destructive order was all the more puzzling, given his former sympathies for the Americans. As he knew only too well, they had been governing themselves for some time without king and court. How could he now believe that France, in creating representative government, was marching headlong into the historical abyss? The answer was one Paine believed Burke knew well but refused to acknowledge:
It is easy to conceive that a band of interested men, such as Placemen, Pensioners, Lords of the bed-chamber, Lords of the kitchen, Lords of the necessary-house, and the Lord knows what besides, can find as many reasons for monarchy as their salaries, paid at the expense of the country, amount to; but if I ask the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman and down through all occupations of life, through the common labourer, what service monarchy is to him? He can give me no answer.
The reason was simply that ordinary people, whatever their country, know little of the government of ministers and kings. They know government as the protector of property rights, the mediator in civil disputes, and the agent of internal improvement. This government, even in England, was not the government of monarchs and political appointees, or placemen, but the republican branch of government. Paine referred to this kind of local, personal, and benevolent government as civil government, and in his view all civil government was republican government. This was even true in monarchical Britain. After all, “that part of the government of England which begins with the office of constable, and proceeds through the department of magistrate, quarter-session, and [courts of] general assize, including trial by jury, is republican government. Nothing of monarchy appears in any part of it.”
This government, not the King in Parliament, was what ordinary Britons knew as government. And yet, they found themselves paying for something that did very little for them. In effect, “the Nation is left to govern itself, and does govern itself by magistrates and juries, almost at its own charge, on republican principles,” while its taxes go to the monarch and his favorites.7
HAD IT NOT BEEN for Rights of Man, Burke’s pamphlet might stand as eighteenth-century Britain’s best-selling political tract. But Paine’s essay was a spectacular publishing success. By the end of May 1791, it had gone through six English-language editions, with some 50,000 copies sold. Countless cheap pirated editions also appeared, as did German, French, and Dutch translations. In some ways, the content of the pamphlet was less momentous than its popularity. Over the three years after its initial appearance, between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were printed.
For Britain’s Tory establishment, who now found new admiration for the opposition Whig Edmund Burke, the popularity of Paine’s essay validated all that Burke said. The crude ideas of France’s revolutionaries had begun to seduce the ignorant rabble of Britain and if Paine were allowed to continue his new campaign, the cancer of revolution would surely reach British shores. Thrilled by this response, Paine prepared a second part of Rights of Man, a deliberate and successful act of provocation. Part II was published in February 1792. In May the government initiated a seditious libel case against Paine, largely on the grounds that Rights of Man had not confined its appeal to the “judicious reader,” but had instead attracted those “whose minds cannot be supposed to be conversant with subjects of this sort . . . the ignorant, the credulous, the desperate.”8 Paine, it seemed, had violated a principal tenet of public discourse. He did not write for the schooled intellectual or knowing statesman. He wrote for ordinary working Britons, and his astounding popularity was frightening confirmation that few of them accepted Burke’s antirevolutionary ideas. As one correspondent of Prime Minister Pitt reported, the country is “covered with thousands of Pittmen, Keelmen, Waggonmen and other laboring men, hardy fellows strongly impressed with the new doctrine of equality, and at present composed of such combustible matter that the least spark will set them in a blaze.”9
The cause of all this clamoring democratic madness was the American Paine. The conservative press responded with fierce denunciations and caricature. “It is not surprising,” observed a letter writer in the London Public Advertiser, “in this age of novelties, to see an illiterate [excise collector], who had deserted his own country, return again to it, and enter the lists of controversy with a man of the first genius and learning of our times; nor even, to see him set up as a teacher in politics and government to this enlightened country, from which he absented himself, but to betray it.” Even some who might have been allies now denounced Paine. The Reverend Christopher Wyvill, a political reformer and supporter of the radical nonconformist minister Richard Price, whose sermons in defense of the French Revolution helped drive Burke to write Reflections, announced with alarm that “the avowed purpose of [Paine] is not to reform or amend the system of our Government, but to overturn and destroy it.”10