Thomas Paine

English-born political writer, philosopher and revolutionary (1737–1809), born in Thetford into a modest family of Quaker artisans, who, after a youth marked by successive professional failures — as a corset-maker, tax collector and merchant — and a failed marriage, emigrated to the American colonies in 1774 with a letter of recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London, thus beginning at thirty-seven the decisive phase of his life as a revolutionary propagandist. Shortly after arriving in Philadelphia he published Common Sense (1776), a political pamphlet written in direct, accessible language deliberately aimed at the popular public rather than the elites, which argued with extraordinary clarity and rhetorical force for the American colonies' full independence from Great Britain and against the monarchical institution itself, and which achieved unprecedented circulation — estimated to have sold hundreds of thousands of copies — being regarded as one of the decisive factors precipitating the Declaration of Independence. During the War of Independence he published the pamphlet series The American Crisis, whose opening line — 'these are the times that try men's souls' — became one of the revolution's most quoted mottos. Moving to Europe, Paine also actively took part in the French Revolution, where he was elected to the National Convention despite not speaking French, but his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI led to his imprisonment by the Jacobins for nearly a year, probably saving his life through a bureaucratic fluke. From prison he wrote The Rights of Man (1791–1792), a fervent defence of republican principles and natural rights in response to Edmund Burke's conservative criticisms of the French Revolution, and The Age of Reason (1794–1807), a deist attack on organised Christianity and revealed scripture that scandalised both his former American and European allies and drastically tarnished his public reputation for the rest of his life, dying in relative poverty and ostracism that contrast sharply with the central role he had played in two Atlantic revolutions.

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6 works

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