Thomas Paine and the French Revolution

323 Pages·2018·3.199 MB·English

by  Carine Lounissi

T H O M A S
P A I N E
A N D T H E

F R E N C H
R E V O L U T I O N
C A R I N E L O U N I S S I
Thomas Paine and the French Revolution
Carine Lounissi
Thomas Paine and the
French Revolution
Carine Lounissi
University of Rouen
Rouen, France
ISBN 978-3-319-75288-4 ISBN 978-3-319-75289-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75289-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937861
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Cover illustration: Balthasar Anton Dunker, (1746–1807). Prise de la Bastille à Paris, 1789.
Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France
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To A. and G.
C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
1 Deconstructing and Reconstructing Paine 2
2 Paine’s First Republican Theory (1776–1787) 6
3 Paine’s Republican Theory and Practice of Language 9
4 Paine’s Second European Life Before Rights of Man
(1787–1791) 11
5 Rights of Man 13
6 Paine’s Contribution to the French Revolution 17
7 Sources and Materials 21
8 List of Paine’s Writings Published or Written During
His French Decade (Excluding Letters) 21
Part I The Revolution of 1789 in Rights of Man:
Republican or Democratic Revolution?
2 Debating the Legitimacy of the French Revolution 35
1 The Origins of the Revolution of 1789 and the Ancien
Regime 36
1.1 The Crisis of the Hereditary Political and Social
System 36
1.2 Paine’s Narrative of the Circulation of Ideas
in Ancien Regime France 40
vii
viii CoNTENTS
2 The Revolution of 1789 44
2.1 The Monarch and Aristocrats in 1789: An
Open-Minded Political Elite vs Promoters
of Despotism? 44
2.2 The Constitution of 1791: Paine as a One-Time
Monarchist? 50
3 Narrating the French Revolution 65
1 The Story of the ‘Republican’ Revolution at Elite Level 69
2 The People’s Revolution: The Storming of the Bastille
and the October Days 73
3 Conclusion 81
Part II Paine and the Creation of the French Republic
(May 1791–December 1793)
4 Paine and the Abolition of the French Monarchy 99
1 Varennes and Le Républicain 99
2 From Republican Writer to Representative 114
5 Paine in the Convention 133
1 Louis XVI’s Trial: Representation vs Sovereignty 133
2 Paine and the First Constitutional Committee 148
6 Paine’s First ‘Girondin’ Moment? 169
1 The Historiographic Construction of ‘Girondism’
and of a ‘Girondin’ Paine 169
2 Paine’s Collaborations and Connections with ‘Girondins’ 178
3 Paine in the Partisan Context of 1792–1793 186
4 Conclusion 198
Part III Paine, Critic or Propagandist of the French
Republic? (January 1794–September 1802)
7 Paine in the Aftermath of Thermidor (November
1794–August 1795) 221
CoNTENTS ix
1 Turning Over the Leaf of the Terror: Paine’s Second
Girondin Moment? 221
2 The Debate on the Post-Thermidorian Constitution 228
8 Paine in the Republic of the Year III (September
1795–November 1799) 253
1 The Domestic Policy of the Directoire 254
1.1 Agrarian Justice and the 18 Fructidor coup:
Completing or Saving the French Revolution? 254
1.2 Order vs Equality: The Constitutional Circle
or Paine’s Third Girondin Moment? 265
2 The Directoire’s Foreign Policy and Paine’s Diplomacy 269
2.1 England and Ireland as Potential Sister Republics 270
2.2 The United States as an Ungrateful Sister Republic 274
9 Bonaparte’s France and the End of the Revolution 293
1 Conclusion 304
Part IV Conclusion
10 Conclusion 311
Index 317
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Thomas Paine is the most emblematic transatlantic revolutionary of
the end of the eighteenth century and yet his life as a revolutionary
activist or agent is exceptional if only because he is perhaps the only
Anglo-American who took an active part in the two great Revolutions of
his time. Born in England in 1737, where he had been an obscure low-
er-class artisan, teacher and officer of excise, he achieved fame with the
publication of a groundbreaking pamphlet in the American colonies in
1776, which is his political date of birth. He then supported the morale
of the Continental Army of citizen-soldiers and of the American people
with his American Crisis series. He took part in the political and eco-
nomic debates that emerged during the Constitution-making process,
especially in Pennsylvania. By the time he left the United States in 1787,
he had become a republican writer and an agent of a new kind of politi-
cal revolution that he helped shape. He arrived in Europe on the eve of
the French Revolution and soon saw 1789 as the second stage in a world
revolution that was to sweep European monarchies away, as he optimis-
tically said in Rights of Man. He was elected to the French Convention
in 1792, in whose major debates (the trial of Louis XVI and the writing
of a new Constitution) he was active before being jailed at Robespierre’s
request. After his release he went on publicly discussing French repub-
lican institutions and supported the Directoire’s policy until the 18
Brumaire coup in 1799, after which he looked for a way to go back to
the United States. Paine’s writings during his French decade did not
reach the same scale in terms of diffusion among a popular readership as
© The Author(s) 2018 1
C. Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75289-1_1
2 C. LoUnIssI
did Common Sense or Rights of Man, but his network of contacts among
French revolutionaries and intellectuals ensured publicity for his views.
When Paine travelled back to Jefferson’s United States, the political
cards had been thoroughly reshuffled since 1787, and he felt that the
American Revolution was threatened at State level. He assumed again
his Common Sense role to remind Federalists of what he thought was the
genuine character of 1776. The standard narrative is then that Paine had
an inglorious end and died in 1809, alone and forgotten by the country
to which he had contributed some of its sense of national unity.
Therefore, Paine had at least four lives, in addition to his numerous
after-lives, since there are the first English Paine (1737–1774), the first
American Paine (1774–1787), the European Paine (1787–1802), or
the second English Paine and the French Paine, and eventually the sec-
ond American Paine (1802–1809). What has been studied until now is
mainly the first American Paine and the second English Paine. Not much
is known of the first English Paine and the French Paine needs to be pic-
tured in a full-length portrait. In addition to defending the Revolution
of 1789 in the first part of Rights of Man, the events in France between
the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of the Consulat forced
him to raise issues that are at the core of a republican regime and which
go far beyond the usual observation according to which the second part
of Rights of Man supposedly contradicts what Paine had until then writ-
ten on the minimal role of a good government. This also implies that
one should avoid either merely fitting the French Paine into the already
existing Paine narratives constructed by historiography, or exaggerating
his role in the French Revolution.
1 DeConstrUCtIng anD reConstrUCtIng PaIne
The image of Paine, who has been until recently mainly reduced to a
polemicist and an agitator, has changed. Since Gregory Claeys’s land-
mark study in the 1980s, books on the theoretical aspects of his works
have been published which have demonstrated that Paine was more than
a pamphleteer and that he was also a political thinker who developed his
own system of thought.1 In this regard Paine’s writings can be seen as
‘texts of political intervention’ in which political philosophy is applied to
the ‘uses of the forum’.2 Paine did not write merely for uneducated and
lower-class readers. If, at a surface level, most of Paine’s contentions are
easy to understand or made as easy as possible to follow for a popular