Rights of Man: Thomas Paine Melvyn Bragg's Radical Lives

When Barack Obama became President of the United States,

he quoted the 18th-century English writer, Thomas Paine,

in order to rally the American people and strengthen their

resolve to face the challenges which lay before the nation.

In the year of America's birth,

at a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt,

the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people.

"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter,

"when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and

"the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."

President Obama was recalling a moment from the darkest hour

of the American War of Independence

when, here on the banks of the Delaware River,

General Washington rallied his weary and frostbitten troops

by quoting to them the words from a pamphlet

by Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine, depicted here writing on a soldier's drum,

was one of the key figures in the Americans' fight

for independence, voicing the fears and hopes of the American people.

He even gave the country its name - The United States of America.

He was a man who, by his words and his actions,

placed himself at the centre of foundation events

for the modern world - the American Revolution,

the French Revolution and the fight for liberty in England.

Thomas Paine wrote three books

which were both bestsellers and had the greatest impact

of any books of political theory in the late 18th century

and, arguably, since -

Common Sense, The Age of Reason and Rights of Man.

His story is one of the most remarkable of literary lives.

As much as any writer in history, he used the pen as a sword.

He risked his own life and freedom to challenge the status quo,

he used the language of the common man

to refute the most eloquent philosophers of the day

and his democratic spirit lived on in the writing of fellow radicals,

such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Walt Whitman,

John Steinbeck, George Orwell and, in our own time,

Christopher Hitchens.

Thomas Paine seemed to rise from nowhere.

How could a humble corset maker

from rural Norfolk become the most influential English writer

of the 18th century?

How did he end up a friend of the leading political figures

of the age, from George Washington to the young Napoleon?

And how did he come to write

a series of incendiary works, which transformed the world

and shaped modern democracy?

For someone who would play such a crucial role in the creation of

modern, democratic societies, Thomas Paine's origins were inauspicious.

He was born in 1737 in the small Norfolk town of Thetford.

Paine's father was a Quaker, his mother, an Anglican.

Later, Paine would renounce all organised religion

in favour of a universal creed.

As he famously said,

"My country is the world, my religion is to do good."

Though he came from the artisan class,

Paine's family found the money to send him

to Thetford Grammar School when he was seven years old.

Here, in this classroom, he learned to love

the writing of Milton, Bunyan and Shakespeare

and developed an ear for the rhythms of the English language.

The school taught Latin, but he didn't learn it here.

His father, a Quaker, forbade him to learn it, because he thought

that Latin kept hidden from ordinary people the word of God.

Perhaps that was a benefit to Paine in his fierce, direct English prose.

He wasn't burdened by the long cadences of a droning Latin.

He went straight for the point, you could say,

like John Ball before him,

and like, so magnificently, William Tyndale before him.

He aimed his prose at the common people.

The boy had an insatiable appetite for learning,

but, at the age of 12, his formal education

came to an end, probably due to lack of funds,

and he was apprenticed to his father as a corset maker.

Growing up and working in 18th-century Thetford,

Paine would have experienced the rigidity and injustices

of the British class system.

Thetford was one of England's so-called Rotten Boroughs,

where, out of the town's 2,000 citizens,

only 31 were eligible to vote.

Most of these would have been under the influence,

and in the pocket, of the town's ruling aristocratic family,

the Graftons, who lived at Euston Hall.

The Graftons had a God-like omnipotence

over the world around them.

The second Duke of Grafton, for example,

redirected the course of the River Ouse

and had nearby Euston Village removed

because it spoiled the view from his bedroom.

From about 1733, the Graftons had it all sewn up.

As a young man with ideals,

what would have upset him and annoyed him?

Well, I think, obviously, the injustices of the electoral system

is something which he must have taken notice of.

I think his maternal grandfather was in the patronage of the Graftons

and would have gotten a position as Town Clerk because of that.

But also, obviously, the assizes that were held in the town,

the Lent assizes that were held in Thetford every year -

so the judges would take people and send them off to the gallows -

they walked past his house to go to the gallows.

Thomas Paine was brought up in this part of Thetford, which was

then known as the Wilderness, in a cottage just behind me,

just below the site of a place called Gallows Hill.

And he would have seen

many men led to their execution and perhaps witnessed them,

often for the most trivial offences.

It was a time when the poor were destitute,

often dying of hunger, a time of land enclosures

and he would have been face to face with that condition.

This early experience shaped Paine's lifelong opposition

to the death penalty and his strong sense of injustice.

Paine later said that life should be "a daring adventure or nothing."

So, in 1756, at the age of 19,

Paine left this suffocating backwater for a taste of adventure

on the high seas.

He enlisted in London on a privateer

and set sail to raid French enemy ships and steal their cargo.

When the ship returned,

Paine's share of the booty amounted to around £5,000 in today's money.

Rather than spend the money on women and drink,

as many sailors would, Paine chose to invest it

in self-improvement.

London, at that time, fizzled with intellectual activity.

Paine was largely self-taught and London was an autodidact's paradise.

He had a metropolitan education in coffee houses, lecture halls,

bookshops, shops of all kinds.

The conversation at that time was driven by scientific enquiry,

about a new ordering of the universe and man's place in it.

Paine's mind was moulded by Newtonian science

and Enlightenment philosophy.

And radical science went hand in hand with radical politics,

articulated in radical coffee houses and taverns, like this one.

There is no university in London

for another 70 years

and what university established itself in London?

I mean, there's a huge amount of education going on,

but it's a more informal world

of coffee houses, public houses, lecture rooms

and the world of print, which is burgeoning at that point in time.

There's an intellectual democracy, if you like,

of sharing information.

One thing we know about that century is that because dissenters,

people who are not in the Church of England,

were not allowed to go to university,

they, in effect, set up their own universities.

This is a world where dissent,

disavowing the traditional discipline of a church,

but also questioning the traditional discipline of court, government

and so on, would have been part of the milieu into which he's entering.

Paine's privateering profits couldn't last for ever and, in 1759,

he returned to work as a corset maker

in the Kent town of Sandwich.

Here, he married a local girl, Mary Lambert,

but both Mary and their baby died in childbirth,

less than a year after the wedding.

Paine was 23.

After this devastating blow, his life took a new direction

and he gave up corset making

in favour of the profession of Mary's father,

a government Excise officer.

But Paine would for ever be caricatured by his enemies

as a maker of ladies' corsets.

In 1768, Paine took up a job in the Sussex county town of Lewes.

Excise Officers were inspectors of coffee, tea, tobacco,

chocolate and alcohol, who collected what Dr Johnson called

"a hateful tax, levied upon commodities".

Paine was an outrider. It was a dangerous job.

He moved round the county and confronted smugglers -

the mafia of their day.

Paine lived here in Bull House,

first as a lodger above the grocer's and tobacconist shop.

He later married the owner's daughter,

Elizabeth Olive, and took over the running of the shop.

Lewes, unlike Thetford, had a history of dissenting politics

stretching back to the English Civil War.

It had a large non-conformist population

and an active political culture.

Here, at the White Hart Inn, there was a regular debating society

known as the White Hart Evening Club,

or the Headstrong Club, and Paine became a skilled debater,

with a reputation for being argumentative and outspoken.

The Headstrong Club still meets today.

..in this whole business of anti-terrorism,

because, basically, it makes an excuse to impose

the state in whatever form it wishes to impose itself on your privacy.

Tom Paine would have been appalled.

Many governments throughout history

have branded their opponents as terrorists.

Imagine how many e-mails and texts are generated every day.

Paul Myles has been researching Paine's time in Lewes

and has found evidence that he started to write for

the local paper under pseudonyms.

The important thing here is that he embeds into society

and meets the owner and editor

of the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, William Lee.

I think this is the defining moment for Paine.

We know that he writes two letters under Humanus

early on in his stay in Lewes...

That's him under a pseudonym, yeah.

..criticising the Poor Law, the iniquities of the Poor Law.

He observes someone dying at the bottom of Kier Street

and writes about it in beautiful prose.

"In such a state of torment had this poor miserable creature lain

"36 days, good God!

"How could he survive it?"

Paine's outspokenness and acute sense of injustice

and his emerging skills as a writer led him

to be chosen by his fellow Excise men in 1772 to draft

a petition to Parliament requesting improved wages.

This petition, entitled The Case for the Officers of Excise,

was not just a plea for money.

Paine was speaking with one voice for 2,700 officers,

so the petition represented an organising of labour -

in effect, an early form of a trade union.

This pamphlet argued that bribery and corruption among tax collectors

was due to the fact that they were paid low wages.

Their wages had been frozen for 100 years.

Paine argued that if you paid them proper wages,

there would be no bribery and corruption.

If a man can't feed his family, then you would expect him to steal.

If he has enough money to feed his family,

he deserves the gibbet.

He says that.

And he says the officers of Excise

observe the rise in money in the country -

this was a period of high inflation -

like a map of Peru.

So he shows his writing abilities beautifully in this pamphlet.

The petition had no effect.

It never made it into Parliament.

Those in authority took no notice of it whatsoever.

Paine was dismissed from the service.

But he'd set out his stall, he'd set out the path he would take

and cultivate for the rest of his life.

In 1774, Paine separated from his wife Elizabeth,

after three years of an apparently unconsummated marriage.

The contents of the shop were sold

and Elizabeth gave him £35 as a final settlement.

With a failed second marriage, a closed business and no job,

Paine's options had now dried up.

Both his professional and private life had hit the skids. He was 37.

Through the Lewes newspaper owner, William Lee,

a meeting was arranged for Paine with Benjamin Franklin,

the American scientist, author, printer and inventor,

who was living in London as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

Franklin clearly took to Paine

and wrote him a letter of introduction

in which he described him as "an ingenious, worthy young man".

Later, he was to call him "my adopted political son".

This letter was an introduction

to a world-changing adventure for Paine.

It was the vital lucky break that changed his life.

In September 1774, Paine set sail for America.

Crossing the Atlantic was a long and perilous journey.

It took about nine weeks to get to America,

and when Paine arrived here in Philadelphia,

he was half dead with typhus contracted on board.

In fact, he was carried off the ship on a stretcher.

Philadelphia at this time

was the wealthiest and largest city in America,

with a population of 30,000,

and it was the intellectual capital of the colonies.

Once Paine had recovered from his fever, his letter

of introduction from Benjamin Franklin gave him an entry into

Philadelphia society and its lively literary and political scene.

He was quite a witty, charming, charismatic fellow.

He'd learned how to turn a phrase at taverns and coffee shops

and you see this reflected in both his friendships - he knew everyone

worth knowing - and in his writing, which reads like someone talking

to you, a very clever and very charming man whispering in your ear.

At a time when he'd accomplished nothing at all,

he'd go and see the top person,

and have the nerve to go and try to convince them of his case.

Well, if you take his history in England,

he fails at being a tax man,

he fails at being a ladies' undergarment manufacturer,

he fails at many things.

His first wife dies, his only child dies,

the second wife ends in separation.

He literally has this horrible litany of failure.

So he starts as some kind of Dickensian character

of woe and tragedy

and he works his way right up

into the very heart of the American Revolution.

As in London, Paine was drawn to the city's intellectuals

and public speakers.

Paine loved drinking and debating late into the night.

He attended lectures hosted by the American Philosophical Society,

here at Carpenters' Hall.

Of course, there would have been a lot of discussion in this

magnificent hall about the strained relations between Britain

and America, but as far as we know, at this point, there was

no talk of independence.

Paine wrote, "I supposed the parties would find a way either to

"decide or settle it.

"I had no thoughts of independence or arms.

"The world could not have persuaded me

"that I should either be a soldier or an author.

"If I had any time for either, they were buried in me."

This all changed

when Paine struck up a friendship with a Scotsman, Robert Aitken,

who ran a print shop and bookstore next to Paine's rooming house.

He goes to a little print shop, and the print shop at this time

was the 18th-century version of the internet.

You got letters there, you sent letters there,

you bought books and magazines and pamphlets there

and you published books and magazines and pamphlets there.

And so, he was at one of these print shops and he falls into idle

conversation with a fellow, and this fellow turns out to own something

called Pennsylvania Magazine and the fellow, Robert Aitken,

gives him the editorship of Pennsylvania Magazine

just from their conversation.

He makes it a huge success and his career is launched.

And here it is - the first issue, 52 pages long,

published on January the 24th, 1775.

The contents include an article on North American beavers,

an article on Voltaire,

commodity prices, weather reports

and poems and book reviews.

The first issue sold 600 copies, but within months,

under Paine's stewardship, the circulation rose to 1,500,

making it the biggest-selling periodical in America.

More importantly,

Paine used the force of his words to steer the magazine in a more

political direction, in particular to address the growing

arguments about the position of the colonies within the British Empire.

Writing under the pseudonyms Atlanticus, Vox Populi,

Esop, Justice

and A Lover of Peace, Paine became a prolific writer.

These pseudonyms were a way of disguising the fact that

almost all the articles were by the same author,

but they also gave him protection when he expressed radical ideas.

Thomas Paine had finally found his calling at the age of 37.

One of the issues which offended Paine's humanitarian instincts

was America's slavery.

From his rented room

at the southeast corner of Market and Front Streets,

Paine could clearly see the Philadelphia slave market.

He wrote,

"Our traders in men must know the wickedness of the slave trade,

"if they attend to reasoning

"or the dictates of their own hearts. Is the barbarous

"enslaving of inoffensive neighbours and treating them like wild beasts

"subdued by force, reconcilable with the Divine precepts?

"Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us?"

Just five weeks after the article appeared, Philadelphians formed

the Pennsylvania Society for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

It was the first abolitionist organisation

in the Western Hemisphere.

But what he does, when he gets that magazine,

he goes straight for the jugular almost immediately, doesn't he?

With that article on slavery.

Way ahead of his time, and it's a wonderful piece.

Well, I think actually, Paine was slightly ahead of his time.

It was considered intemperate to publish these things,

but I think what he was publishing

were the conversations that he was having

with the other members of the Philadelphia elite

that he was meeting.

And he was taking what they said and writing about them in a plain

style that anyone could understand, and that was his revolutionary act -

where he's exhorting people to change, he's telling them why,

and he's using this very plain language

and these very clever turns of phrases to enlighten people

and to turn them towards being good citizens.

But over and above the issue of slavery,

another political storm was brewing.

Tensions had been rising in the American colonies

since the Boston Tea Party rebellion in December 1773.

The following year, the first continental congress

met in Philadelphia's Carpenters' Hall

to discuss the colonies' grievances about taxation

and lack of representation.

But separation with Britain was not on the agenda.

It was the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775

which upped the stakes.

The blood of 95 Americans was spilled.

These were the first battles in what later became known

as the American War of Independence.

But, even at this stage, independence was not a clear goal.

Paine was to help change that.

He wrote about the situation here in the Pennsylvania Packet.

"When the country into which I had just set my foot was

"set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir.

"It was time for every man to stir."

Fired up by developments in Lexington and Concord,

Paine decided to devote his energies to a major essay on

the history of the American colonies and their position in the empire.

This essay, called Common Sense,

would make Paine's name in America and change the course of history.

In Common Sense, Paine used Enlightenment logic and his own

ferocious clarity to deride the notion of hereditary monarchy.

He wrote "One of the strongest natural proofs

"of the folly of hereditary right in kings

"is that nature disapproves it,

"otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule

"by giving mankind an ass for a lion."

The book was uncompromising in its argument.

In vigorous, plain English, it attacked the empty pomp

and the tyranny of monarchy.

He pointed out that the British king, George III,

was a descendant of William the Conqueror, whom Paine described

as "a French bastard landing with an armed banditti

"and establishing himself as King of England,

"against the consent of the natives."

Having dared denounce the British monarchy,

Paine went on to say what had hitherto been unsaid.

He called for America to make a clean break with England,

to set up an independent state with a new constitution.

He wrote, in what became famous and often-quoted passage,

"We have every opportunity to form the noblest, purest constitution

"on the face of the earth.

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

By "we", he meant America and the Americans

among whom he counted himself one.

The enemy was now the country of his birth, England.

Common Sense was the most important political document

of the early stages of the revolution.

It convinced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson

of the case for independence, but it also spoke to the common man.

It was structured like a sermon,

as if it were designed to be read aloud

to people unfamiliar with books.

Paine described his style in this way -

"I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination,

"I bring reason to your ears,

"and, in language as plain as A, B, C,

"hold up truth to your eyes."

It was explosive.

It immediately sold almost a quarter of a million copies

in a nation of three million.

So today, that would be equivalent of selling 35 million copies

in a couple of months.

It was just titanic and it travelled all over the world.

Measured against the size of the population,

Common Sense is America's best-selling book of all time.

Paine forswore royalties from the publication,

and donated his profits to George Washington's army.

Paine described his philanthropy in this way -

"I am a farmer of thoughts, and all the crops I raise, I give away."

In Common Sense, Paine changed the political agenda.

He gave shape to his readers' unformed ideas,

he said what others wouldn't

and urged his readers to speak out and to act.

He encouraged Anglo-Americans to think of themselves

not as traitors, but as pioneers, building for a better future.

And in doing that, he lit the fuse for American independence.

Independence was declared here, on the 4th of July, 1776,

in Philadelphia's Independence Hall,

with the great proclamation that "All men are created equal,

"endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,

"among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Nevertheless, at that time, the war against Britain was far from won.

Writing a rallying cry for revolution

was not enough for Paine - he wanted to see action.

He offered his services as a secretary to an American general

and became a field correspondent for the Philadelphia Press.

At the front, he met and was befriended by George Washington.

Paine believed that political writing could help shape

soldiers' conduct in the field by lifting the spirits.

His next major work would put that idea to the test.

On December the 13th, 1776, General Washington

and about 500 troops retreated here to the banks of the Delaware River.

Across the river were German mercenaries,

hired by the British for about £500,000.

Seeing the apprehension and fear

among the battered American soldiers, Thomas Paine acted.

He walked to Philadelphia, 35 miles away, wrote an essay,

had 18,000 copies of it printed

and came back just before the battle commenced.

The pamphlet was called The American Crisis,

one of the greatest political essays in the English language.

On Christmas Day,

George Washington read from it to the assembled troops, here.

"These are the times that try men's souls", Paine wrote.

"The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot

"will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.

"But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks

"of man and woman.

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.

"Yet we have this consolation with us -

"that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter,

"when nothing but hope and virtue could survive,

"that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger,

"came forth to meet it."

It took nine hours to ferry 4,000 men across the icy Delaware River.

The German troops, camped outside the town of Trenton,

were exhausted and the worse for wear

after over-celebrating Christmas.

They were caught off guard.

American soldiers rushed into battle,

shouting, "These are the times that try men's souls,"

and Paine's words gave them courage to win the day.

And that phrase has resounded down through the ages.

This blood-stained copy of the American Crisis is a reminder,

not only of Paine's contribution to the freedoms

gained by the American Revolution, but how hard that victory was won.

The victory at Trenton showed the Americans

that the British could be defeated.

In many ways, this was the high point

of Paine's involvement in the war.

As war turned into the need to shape a representative government

and a new constitution,

Paine's outspokenness started to become a liability.

Truth speaking wasn't always the best policy in the political arena.

Paine began to criticise the new American power elite

when he saw them misusing their position.

In the most damaging scandal of the American revolution,

Paine demanded a public inquiry

into the activities of colonial agent Silas Deane,

who, in 1779, was accused of being a war profiteer.

The accusation split the government

and Paine fell out of favour with many supporters of Deane.

Animosity towards Paine was so strong during this time

that he was beaten in the streets.

Both his language and his attitude were much too democratic for them.

For many of the elites who were leading the revolution,

they wanted the people to feel like they were represented

in the political process,

but they wanted the freedom to do what they thought was best.

And for someone like Paine, if you look at Common Sense,

he advocates direct elections,

he advocates annual elections in the House of Representatives,

he wanted the people to control their representatives.

Once he publishes Common Sense and he adopts this style

that is not only more democratic, but is also very much personal,

Paine constantly personalises battles,

as he would do throughout the rest of his career,

and they found that deeply disturbing.

It's a much less gentlemanly form of political dialogue.

So it was a strength in terms of its directness

and its appeal to a lot of people.

It was a weakness for Paine in terms of the influence he had

on that elite in America, who wanted democracy but not much democracy.

And they wanted a republic,

but not a republic that didn't let them lead it.

Yeah, I think that's a really good way to put it

and it exposed him to personal attacks from them.

I think that that's the side of it that Paine didn't see.

When he made it personal, he made himself fair game.

Well, he had an awful lot of enemies,

and I think he could have watched his mouth sometimes, you know.

There are certain moments where he makes an enemy out of someone

and that was an awfully bad idea.

Paine became increasingly disappointed,

understandably I think, by the lack of support

he was given for his services to the revolution.

He had given his not inconsiderable royalties to the cause,

he petitioned Congress, but there was no reply.

He was virtually jobless.

Being Paine, he went directly to the top

and he wrote to George Washington.

"There is something peculiarly hard

"that the country, which ought to have been to me a home,

"has scarcely afforded me asylum."

He had been essential to the articulation

and the development of the independence of this country

and it dumped him.

It wouldn't be until 1785

that Congress finally agreed to give Paine

an honorarium of 3,000 -

250,000 in today's money.

Pennsylvania donated 500

and New York gave 277 acres

and a farmhouse outside the town of New Rochelle.

In April 1783, the British gave formal assent

to American independence

and Paine wrote, "The times that tried men's souls are over,

"and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew,

"gloriously and happily accomplished.

"I, therefore, take my leave of the subject."

With the revolution over,

Paine turned his attention to a completely new interest -

designing bridges.

Many Enlightenment figures were both men of letters and men of science.

Paine became obsessed with the design

for a new kind of single-span iron bridge.

No-one in Philadelphia would build his bridge, so Benjamin Franklin

suggested he present it to the French Academy of Sciences.

Paine set sail for France in 1787, aged 50.

He presented his idea in Paris, where he was celebrated

as the revolutionary author of Common Sense.

When the French failed to offer money for his design,

he took his bridge model to the Royal Society in London -

again to no avail.

Back in England, Paine made friends

with the political theorist Edmund Burke.

They shared lodgings for a while.

Like Paine, Burke had supported the American Revolution.

Like Paine, Burke believed in representative government

and had a contempt for unchecked power.

But within a couple of years,

these two men were to be bitter, even vicious, enemies.

The disagreement between these two writers

was to lead to the most brilliant literary political debate

in British history.

Both Paine and Burke had paid close attention

to the unfolding of the revolution in France in 1789.

Indeed, Paine had been given the key to the stormed Bastille

by General La Fayette

to pass on to George Washington as a gift to the American people.

But the reactions of Paine and Burke to the revolution

were diametrically opposed.

On November the 1st, 1790, Edmund Burke published this book,

Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Replying to Rousseau's idea of society as a contract

between the government and the governed,

Burke wrote "Society is indeed a contract,

"but it becomes a partnership,

"not only between those who are living,

"but between those who are living, those who are dead

"and those who are to be born."

He was saying, in effect,

that the centuries-old British constitution was perfect

and should never be tampered with again.

Tradition and inherited values kept society together.

Burke saw the destructive forces in France as a contagion.

Burke's fear of mob rule had been realised ten years earlier

when the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots had unleashed violence and anarchy

on the streets of London.

Burke's attitude towards the mob

is revealed in his description of English working men

as "a swinish multitude".

Paine attacked Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France

by writing a book of his own.

It was a book that would rock

and threaten to roll over the British establishment.

It was in here, in his digs in New Cavendish Street in London.

It was called Rights of Man.

In it, Paine rejected Burke's view

that society had to abide by tradition.

He wrote, "Government is for the living,

"and not for the dead.

"Only the living can exercise the rights of man."

Dedicated to George Washington,

the book called for an American-style transformation

of the British government with a written constitution,

an elected head of state, universal male suffrage

and an end to feudal privileges for aristocrats and clergy.

Rights of Man was published in February 1791.

It sold like no other book in British history.

Paine, on the streets of London, is a tremendously popular figure

because he has so accurately

put into writing what

so many people feel about the corrupt autocracy of the king

and the court and the government.

Rights of Man shook the establishment.

Burke claimed that Paine was aiming to "destroy in six or seven days

"what all the boasted wisdom of our ancestors

"has laboured to bring to perfection for six or seven centuries."

Government lawyers analysed the book,

looking for ways to bring charges against Paine at London's Guildhall.

The first minister, William Pitt,

was not going to let Britain go the way of France.

This grandiose memorial to Prime Minister William Pitt

expresses his mission "to check the contagion of opinions

"which tended to dissolve the frame of civil society."

That word "contagion" -

Burke's word, a contagion spread by Thomas Paine.

Pitt's government used a succession of dirty tricks, black propaganda,

to combat the "threat", as they saw it,

which came from the Rights of Man.

They employed a Scottish lawyer, George Chalmers,

to write this scurrilous biography.

In it, he accused Paine of being a debtor, a bad son,

a bad husband, an adulterer, a mangler of the English language.

And, in other accounts,

he's accused of committing carnal acts with his cat.

By this point, Paine was an active participant

in the French Revolution,

travelling backwards and forwards across the Channel.

"A share in two revolutions is living indeed,"

he wrote to George Washington.

Paine had been made an honorary French citizen in 1790,

and he fully believed that the revolution would soon spread

to Britain, and he worked to that end.

In March 1792, Paine raised the stakes.

He published Rights of Man, Part the Second,

and he dedicated it to the French General La Fayette

and he was even more outspoken here.

He constructed a very fiercely reasoned attack

on the upper classes and the aristocracy

for setting themselves totally apart from the mass of people

in this country with dire consequences

and concluded, "The aristocracy are not the farmers who work

"the land and raise the produce,

"but are the mere consumers of the rent

"and, when compared with the active world, are the drones,

"a seraglio of males who neither collect the honey

"nor form the hive

"but only exist for lazy enjoyment."

He exposed the financial corruption of the Crown

and he predicted that within seven years,

in enlightened countries in Europe,

the aristocracy and the crown would have fallen.

Paine also came to the defence of the mass of humanity,

which Burke had disparagingly referred to

as the "swinish multitude".

He wrote, "There is in all European countries

"a large class of people of that description,

"which in England is called the mob.

"It is by distortedly exalting some men

"that others are distortedly debased,

"until the whole is out of nature.

"The vast mass of mankind

"are degradedly thrown into the background of the human picture

"to bring forward, with greater glare,

"the puppet show of state and aristocracy."

Rights of Man Part Two even envisaged a welfare state.

"When it shall be said in any country in the world,

"'my poor are happy, neither ignorance or distress

"'is to be found among them,

"'my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars,

"'the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive' -

"when these things can be said,

"then may that country boast its constitution and its government."

Rights of Man became the biggest seller ever, after the Bible.

Paine was now the most celebrated man of letters,

not only in America, but in the whole of Europe.

Rights of Man became a key foundation text

in the long haul to democracy in the 19th century.

It was adopted by reform groups,

by friendly associations of working men,

by Chartists, by trade unionists,

and Mary Wollstonecraft used it as the template

for her early feminist book,

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Rights of Man continued to inspire writers

and campaigners for human rights and freedoms

throughout the 20th century, and it still does so today.

By now, Paine was a serious thorn in the side of Pitt's government

and its response was to try to get Paine out of the way for good.

In June 1792, Paine was arrested of charges of sedition

and brought to court here, at the Guildhall in London.

But the government feared that his trial might cause civil unrest

and make him a martyr, therefore they delayed it.

Paine, depicted here being tormented by judges in his dreams,

wrote an unapologetic letter of defence.

"If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy

"and every species of hereditary government,

"to lessen the oppression of taxes,

"to propose plans for the education of helpless infancy

"and the comfortable support of the aged and distressed,

"to extirpate the horrid practice of war,

"to promote universal peace, civilisation and commerce,

"and to break the chains of political superstition

"and raise degraded man to proper rank,

"if these be libellous, let me live the life of a libeller

"and let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb."

The campaign to silence Paine was intensified.

Book sellers were persecuted for selling the book,

the government distributed anti-Paine literature

and incited demonstrations and mass riots.

Effigies of Paine were burned in cities across the country,

aristocrats wore shoe nails inscribed with his initials

so that they could trample on him with every step.

One unfortunate man was sentenced to 14 years' transportation

for simply suggesting that others might want to read Rights of Man.

They even struck commemorative medals for Paine -

well, for and against.

For, the pig, trampling down the crown,

against, Paine on the gibbet.

Paine was watched - there was a complete network of surveillance

run by government agents who were penetrating the pub meeting rooms.

Almost nothing went on in reforming London

that didn't get to the attention of the Home Secretary

and the Bow Street Police Office.

Surveillance was extraordinarily rife in the 1790s.

The pressure was on to push Paine out of the country.

In May 1792, the London Times wrote, "It is earnestly recommended

"to Mad Tom that he should embark for France

"and there be naturalised into the regular confusion of democracy."

That year, Paine received an invitation to represent

a French department in the French National Convention.

But he said he preferred to stay here in England and foster dissent.

However, in September, he was approached

by the poet and visionary William Blake, who said,

"Don't go home or you're a dead man."

So, on September the 14th, Paine set sail for France

and he'd never see England again.

But he would leave behind, through his books,

an enduring radical legacy.

Paine arrived in Paris and received a hero's welcome.

He took his seat in the National Convention

as the representative for Calais.

He was cheered by fellow delegates, "Vive Thomas Paine, Vive La Nation."

The question of what to do with the monarchy in the new France

was still being ferociously debated.

As Paine rode through these gardens to the National Convention,

he would pass a palace which was once there in which,

in virtual imprisonment, were the king and Marie Antoinette,

waiting to see what would be their fate.

On September the 21st 1792,

the first year of liberty was announced by the legislature.

"Royalty, from this day, is abolished in France."

Paine, the anti-monarchist,

suddenly found himself defending the royal family against execution.

He argued that the new republic should set a noble example

and not resort to revenge.

Paine knew about the gallows from his childhood in Thetford,

and thought capital punishment abhorrent.

And he stuck to his guns, despite the risk.

His ideas were picked up in the constitutional debates.

He even had the courage to remind Robespierre

that earlier in the revolution,

Robespierre had also objected

to capital punishment and thought it should be outlawed.

The response to that was Robespierre and his colleagues

pointing out to Paine that this was no ordinary man.

This was not just another condemned criminal,

this was actually a king who must, in their view, either reign or die.

This was an enemy of the revolution, and the way they put it

was the king must die so the revolution can live.

On January 16th 1793,

the National Convention voted for the king's death.

The following day, Paine addressed the delegates he said,

"The decision in favour of death has filled me with genuine sorrow."

From the time he set himself

against the execution of the king and Marie Antoinette,

he was regarded, not only as a foreigner,

but an enemy of the republic.

Again and again, Thomas Paine would speak out of his feelings,

his logic and his convictions, all intertwined,

that the truth had to come out, whatever the consequences,

whatever the price to be paid,

and very often, he was the one who paid the price.

On January 21st 1793,

in the Place de la Revolution, King Louis XVI was executed.

Paine had earlier said,

"If the French kill their king,

"it will be a signal for my departure,

"for I will not abide among such sanguinary men."

But it wasn't easy for Paine to leave.

Back in London, he'd been tried in his absence in the Guildhall

for sedition and found guilty and sentenced to death.

To make matters worse, war had broken out

between Britain and France,

so if he'd tried to escape from France in a French ship,

he could have been intercepted by a British warship.

Surely there would be hope from America?

But things were going to get much worse.

With the death of the king,

the French Revolution quickly descended into factionalism,

paranoia, violence and personal vendettas.

Enemies of the revolution were seen everywhere.

This period became known as the Terror.

Its symbol and its control mechanism was the guillotine.

Paine's position was now even more precarious.

The journalist Jean-Paul Marat said,

"Frenchmen are mad to allow foreigners to live among them.

"They should cut off their ears, let them bleed for a few days

"then cut off their heads."

The blood lust rose,

and was whipped up to cries of "Purgez la Convention!"

"Tirez le mauvais sang!"

"Purge the Convention, spill out the bad blood."

Paine wrote, "My friends were falling

"as fast as the guillotine could cut off their heads."

Anybody suspected -

not necessarily proven, but suspected -

of being an enemy of the revolution

could be brought before the revolutionary tribunal

and condemned for their thoughts, effectively.

The Jacobin faction were taking over and it became increasingly clear

that Paine's life was going to be threatened

along with those of his closest allies.

Unable to leave the country,

Paine's response was to bury himself in writing another book,

this time attacking another institution - the Church.

The Jacobins made de-Christianisation

part of state policy.

They closed down churches all over the place, including the magnificent

Notre Dame behind me, which they renamed the Temple of Reason.

Paine believed that all organised religions were despotic

but he did believe in a God.

He thought without that belief,

people would lose their moral compass,

and France was charging towards atheism.

The Age of Reason was an attack on organised religion,

but a defence of deism - the belief in one, unknowable God.

He wrote, "I do not believe in the creed professed

"by the Jewish Churches, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church,

"by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church.

"I believe in one God and no more.

"I believe in the equality of man,

"and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice,

"loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

"I do not believe in the creed of any church I know of.

"My own mind is my own church."

Paine had barely finished the manuscript when,

on the morning of December the 28th 1793,

he was arrested in his lodgings and brought to the revolutionary prison,

here at the Palace of Luxembourg.

Questions were raised by the American Embassy

about the reasons for which he'd been arrested,

but Paine was in an unfortunate position -

he was an honorary American citizen and an honorary French citizen,

but when it suited the authorities, he was a foreigner.

He was effectively abandoned to the Terror.

Paine's chances of survival were slim.

By June 1794, 80,000 French citizens had been incarcerated.

Disease in the prisons was rife, and Paine contracted typhus.

How close did he come to being executed?

This close.

He was on a list for execution the next morning,

and they came round to mark the doors

and because Paine had been so ill and it was very hot,

the door to his cell, there was permission for it to be open,

and they marked on the inside of the door.

And the temperature fell overnight

and they closed the door the next morning

and they went past without calling for Paine.

Paine spent eight months in the prison.

He was eventually released when the Terror was brought to an end

and Robespierre himself was guillotined.

He returned to work at the French National Convention.

Paine's bitter disappointment at the outcome

of the French Revolution was compounded by his sense

of abandonment by the American government while in prison.

They'd made no attempt to get him out.

In particular, he felt betrayed by his old friend, George Washington.

His response was to fire off an angry, personal attack

on his famous former ally,

calculated to be published in Philadelphia in 1796 at the time

of the presidential elections to cause the maximum possible damage.

Of Washington, he says, "Had it not been for the aid

"received from France, in men, money and ships, your cold

"and unmilitary conduct would in all probability have lost America.

"You slept away your time in the field

"until the finances of the country were completely exhausted

"and you have but little share in the glory of the final event."

Such a scathing, personal attack on Washington

damaged Paine's reputation in America irredeemably.

For the next five years, Paine lived in the home of his French publisher,

Nicolas de Bonneville.

During this time, the Age of Reason

became a best seller in France, Britain and America.

And, as usual, Paine's writing rattled the establishment.

By the end of 1796,

the British government had declared the Age of Reason to be blasphemous

and confiscated every copy that the book police could find.

Meanwhile, in America, Paine's reputation was being tarnished.

He was accused of infidelity - that is, atheism.

He attacked Christianity and, just as dangerously,

he attacked the good name of George Washington.

In talking and writing about the big political picture,

Paine was masterful.

In fact, he helped to make the big political picture.

In the politics of his own career and advancement, he was a disaster.

More belligerence followed. Between 1797 and 1798,

Paine wrote a series of articles for Bonneville's newspaper

in which he discussed strategies for a French invasion of England.

This was no less than treason, and France's new autocrat,

Napoleon Bonaparte, took note

and visited Paine in Bonneville's home in Spring 1800.

He told Paine that, every night,

he slept with a copy of Rights of Man under his pillow,

and that a statue of gold should be erected to him

in every city in the universe.

Later, Paine would describe Napoleon

as the "completest charlatan that ever existed",

but for a while, he was taken in by the Corsican dictator.

On March 27th 1802, the Anglo-French war came to an end.

Peace meant that it was finally safe for Paine to cross the Atlantic

and return to America.

At the invitation of Thomas Jefferson, he set sail.

He was now 65.

America was undergoing a religious revival,

known as the Second Great Awakening,

and Paine seemed increasingly at odds with the spirit of the age.

He was immediately attacked for what they thought of as his atheism.

The General Advertiser described him as,

"that living opprobrium of humanity.

"The infamous scavenger of all the filth trodden by all

"the revilers of Christianity."

The Baltimore Republican referred to him as "this loathsome reptile."

What a change from the first time he came to America,

and, besides the hate campaign in the press,

he was snubbed in society and sometimes attacked in the streets.

Paine spent time in the new capital city of Washington

in the company of his friend Thomas Jefferson,

who was now President of the United States.

But Paine was a political liability to Jefferson

and his attempt to acquire a position in government,

even suggesting a post as special envoy to Napoleon,

came to nothing.

He came back and he was disappointed

at what had happened in the United States,

and thought he could turn things around and re-inspire people

and he was just out of his time.

He was broken-hearted at the end -

he thought that he'd done so much and they'd done so well

and there was he, abandoned really.

Well, all of the Founding Fathers felt that way, actually.

Both Adams and Jefferson at the end of their lives

wrote about how they had failed,

about how they had not succeeded because look at what

America was like now, and people were not following civic virtue

and they only wanted to make money and get drunk and it was terrible.

So, he actually felt the mainstream sense of loss and disappointment

that all of them had.

Paine spent his last years here at New Rochelle.

They were years lived in sadness and, some people said, in squalor,

those who visited him.

He'd let his nails grow, he smelled, he wore old clothes,

he looked terrible.

He wasn't short of money, but he looked neglected

because he was neglected.

Those whom he'd empowered had deserted him.

His great friends and grandees had gone their way,

often emboldened by Paine's words, but they left him out of it.

When the winters got cold,

Paine would spend time with the few friends he had left

in New York City.

In his final decline, he lay bedridden here,

at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village.

Thomas Paine died on June the 8th 1809. He was 74.

New York City's Quakers wouldn't allow him

to be buried in their graveyard, which had been his wish.

So he was buried in the grounds of his New Rochelle home.

There were only six people at his funeral.

Paine may have been rejected by America in his final years,

but his writing remained a touchstone for other writers

in the 19th century when they wanted to rediscover the democratic spirits

of the nation's birth, among them, two of America's defining writers -

the novelist Herman Melville and the poet Walt Whitman.

Whitman was really deeply concerned that Paine was being erased,

was being forgotten -

Whitman, who's trying to write this democratic poetry,

this poetry that captures the spirit of America.

For him, Paine was part of that strong spirit, American spirit,

that idea of someone who speaks on behalf of the people.

He was forgotten and erased,

as people are for centuries, sometimes,

it's quite curious.

But Herman Melville took him up.

So, Melville was very interested in the way that American society

was becoming fractured

and the way that the legacy of the revolution was becoming lost

in the middle of the 19th century.

And he saw Paine as a heroic figure

and in his last great work, Billy Budd,

the ship that the sailor Billy Budd, the hero of the novella

is taken off of is called the Rights of Man.

And the novella really thinks very carefully

about the question of rights, of liberty and freedom.

A new generation is taking up Thomas Paine today.

Is there more interest in him now than before?

Paine is taken up in the United States over and over again,

by people, by champions, especially when you look at people interested

in the disenfranchised in America.

So Steinbeck has this wonderful moment in Grapes of Wrath

where he puts Paine alongside Jefferson and Lenin and Marx

as this advocate for the people

which is what, you know, Steinbeck is about,

and I think we're in a period now in the last 20 years

where we see this real excitement and interest

in recovering Paine again,

and thinking about the ways in which he helps us articulate a critique

of some of the disenchantment we see in the United States today.

Paine's attacks on injustice and his loyalty to the truth

at any cost have also been echoed in the writing of George Orwell,

and, more recently, Christopher Hitchens,

to whom Paine was a hero.

Here in America, whenever the founding spirit of the republic

is invoked, it's most often Paine's words that are reached out for -

Barack Obama, Franklin Roosevelt

and Ronald Reagan when he quoted Paine,

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

Thomas Paine believed that.

And that was the belief he lived by, even if it did cost him

his own personal happiness.

There are those lines of WB Yeats,

"The intellect of man is forced to choose

"Perfection of the life, or of the work"

Paine chose work.

His life was rumbustious, brawling, rascally, unexpected, went to sea,

bust businesses, marriages failed, all over the place until he was 37.

Who would have thought that, at 37, this man who turned up

on the doorstep of America was going to be one of the great

public intellectuals of one of the greatest

ages of thought in history, the Enlightenment,

and that his influence would continue for centuries,

who would have thought it?

Probably only Paine. It was buried in him.

And out it came in works which are imperishable

and which help to change and shape, for the better,

the world we all live in.