England proved fertile, if uneven, soil for the seeds of the French Revolution. There, some decades earlier, the Industrial Revolution had started, destined to transform the country into the 'workshop of the world'. The process of industrialization inevitably strengthened the middle class in numbers, giving rise at the same time to an industrial proletariat.
The ideas of the French Revolution had already been familiar there for a hundred and fifty years. In the middle of the seventeenth century England had risen against, and destroyed, the idea of the Divine Right of Kings. For ten years, from 1649 to 1659, under the Commonwealth of Cromwell, England had been a republic. In that period, Milton had produced his brilliant defence of free thought and a free press.[1] By the turn of the century, the philosopher John Locke, in his treatise On Civil Government, had already deduced the existence of individual and civic rights from the prevailing theories of natural law. These ideas provided America with moral justification for her break with England, and inspired the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which was the prototype of the Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed by the French National Assembly in 1789.
Locke's ideas formed part of the intellectual climate shared by educated, liberal-minded men in England and Scotland. Such men greeted the French Revolution as a triumph of these ideas. Significant of the mood of the times was the enthusiastic reception given to a sermon by the highly respected scholar Dr Richard Price, in London, on 4 November 1789, six months after the revolution.
I deem myself happy [he said] to be able to witness such great times … when the Rights of Man are better understood than ever before, when nations thirst for freedom … when freedom's flames spread everywhere and the rule of kings gives place to the rule of law. … See the lands which, taught by you, have woken from their slumbers, broken their chains and now demand justice from their oppressors! See the light you have kindled; it has freed America, its light has spread to France where it has kindled new flames, reducing despotism to ashes while it warms and illuminates Europe.[2]
The speech was received by the meeting with wild applause. The Society of the Revolution (of 1688) decided to send a message of greetings to the French National Assembly; it celebrated 14 July 1790, and set up contact with clubs in France. Price's sermon was so warmly received throughout the whole country that in a very short time twelve editions were printed. Burke's book, Reflections on the French Revolution, was an attempt to refute Dr Price. In its turn it provoked Thomas Paine into writing what came to be a classic of English working-class literature, The Rights of Man.[3]
Edmund Burke, a Member of Parliament with great gifts as a writer and speaker, began as a radical exponent of Locke's theory of natural law. In his essay, A Vindication of Natural Society, he developed from the theory of natural law a charming, socialistic critique of the existing social order. Consistently with the idea he warmly defended the legal rights of the American colonists against the home country. But as he grew older he became reactionary.
In his attack on Dr Price, Burke no longer spoke of the 'inalienable rights of man' based on natural law. European civilization, he declared, derived its strength from tradition, whose guardians were the aristocracy and the Church. He argued that it was the aristocracy and the Church which held society together. Without them it would dissolve into anarchy. A stable society, he maintained, could not be built on an inadequate, fallible human judgment based on abstract philosophical theories. It must develop organically out of custom and tradition, passed down from one generation to another. The French Revolution, in overthrowing the aristocracy, abolishing the power of the Church and destroying the heritage of tradition, had erected in their place the power of human judgment. In doing so, it had opened the gates to chaos. Burke expounded these ideas in powerful prose. His book was without doubt the most outstanding piece of anti-revolutionary propaganda of its day. It was translated into German by Friedrich Gentz, adviser to Metternich, as 'the most impressive refutation of the revolutionary idea'. It became, and has remained, the gospel of counterrevolution. The year 1700, the year in which Burke's book appeared, also saw the arrival in England, via France, of Thomas Paine, already a citizen of three countries.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809) proved to be one of the great figures of the English working-class movement, its revered teacher for half a century and remembered down to our own time as a pioneer. He was born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a poor stay-maker and smallholder. Paine first learned his father's trade. Then, studying on his own, he gained a considerable knowledge of philosophy, politics, political economy and even mathematics. Through the writings of Locke and the works on rationalism and natural law published by his English radical contemporaries, he became a fervent revolutionary. His ideas were to develop a good deal further in America.
Paine arrived in America in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London. From the outset he had every intention of helping the settlers in their struggle for freedom. He arrived in Philadelphia and at once threw himself, as a journalist, behind the colonists' demand for some control over their own taxation, in essence a fight of republicanism against monarchy and of democracy against oligarchy.
When the settlers finally rose against the mother country, Paine wrote early in 1776 an inspiring pamphlet, Common Sense. It was circulated on a huge scale and fanned the spark of revolution, which was already flickering, into a gigantic flame. When the pamphlet appeared, Americans were still wavering. Paine supplied them with arguments for the Declaration of Independence, which was duly proclaimed five months after the appearance of his pamphlet.[4]
The style of Paine's work—its fire, pathos and revolutionary spirit—made him famous at once throughout America. Meanwhile, he enlisted as a private in Washington's army. He soon became Adjutant to General Green, then Foreign Minister to the American Congress and finally Secretary of the National Assembly in Pennsylvania. In 1781 he was sent by the American government on a diplomatic mission to Paris, where he befriended such men as Lafayette, Brissot, Condorcet and others who were later to be leaders in the Revolution. When he returned to England in 1790 he was already a figure of European renown. Burke's attack on the French Revolution has already been mentioned. Paine at once undertook its defence in his work, The Rights of Man.
In this book Paine did not develop any original ideas. To Burke's view of the state and society Paine counterposed the ideas of the natural law and rationalist school of thought. But these had previously been written in academic language. Paine wrote in a simple, clear style which could be understood by any working man. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had expressed their ideas in terms of cold logic. In Paine's writing they glowed with a revolutionary fire and passion.
Burke had denied the right of the people to make a revolution on the grounds that each generation was bound by the traditions of its predecessors. Paine denied the right of any generation to govern beyond the grave. 'Every age and generation,' he declared, 'must be free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. … Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living,' he insisted, 'and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.'[5] To justify authority on the grounds of inherited right was 'a fraud against humanity'. The people as a whole were the source of all power in state and society. There could be neither freedom nor social justice in the world until the people changed their constitution for one based on the principles of the rights of man, as had happened in France and America. Only when royal absolutism—the enemy of mankind and the source of all misery—had been abolished, and the 'natural sovereignty of the people' reinstated, would an age of perpetual peace begin.
Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man was the first political work in England to state the case of working people in their own terms and with concepts drawn from their own world of experience. It was also the first to express a programme of social reform which had wide popular appeal.
The first volume of Paine's book appeared in 1791, the second a year later. It had a tremendous effect. In the course of a few months, edition after edition appeared. Before the government suppressed it was subversive, it had sold 200,000 copies and earned its author £1,000. He gave the money to the Corresponding Society, a working-class organization. Even after its prohibition, however, it continued to be produced and sold, though to do so involved the risk of a heavy prison sentence and transportation to the Australian penal settlement of Botany Bay.
A warrant was issued for Paine's arrest. Warned in time by the poet William Blake, he fled to France, where he had meanwhile been elected to the National Assembly as representative of the people of Calais. He was convicted in his absence of high treason, declared an outlaw and his book burned by the hangman. The Tories, whom Paine had escaped, found consolation in the general genial device of 'TP nails' fixed in the heels of their boots to witness how they trampled on his base principles and the hated name.
But neither the hangman, nor the abuse which the aristocrats, bishops and respectable citizens showered on Paine, could lessen the popularity of his book. It served two generations of English and Scottish workers as their Bible. In it they found, as can be seen from their manifestoes right up to the end of Chartism in the 1850s, the justification in natural law of their demands for political equality and social justice. The book does not belong to the history of Socialist thought. But it belongs to the history of the International, because it implanted the idea of international solidarity for the oppressed deep in the minds and hearts of English workers. This can be seen in the Chartist paper, the Northern Star, in the speeches and writings of the Chartist leaders, Julian Harney and Ernest Jones, and in the programme of the Society of Fraternal Democrats, founded in 1845, the real prototype of the International.
1. John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644)
2. Max Beer, Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (Stuttgart, 1913), pp. 51–2.
3. A character-sketch of Paine and an assessment of his ideas can be found in H. N. Brailsford's brilliant work, Shelley, Godwin and their Circle (London, 1913).
4. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1927–30), vol. I, pp. 327–41.
5. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Part I, p. 4.