From hack to hero

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books £9.99
Thomas Paine was a lowly journalist who left behind a failed marriage, broken friendships and a pathetic gathering of only six mourners.
Yet he articulated the philosophies of two revolutions, introduced grand concepts we now take for granted, and put forward arguments that today even conservatives cite.
No wonder he is a hero to hacks everywhere.
It could have been so different. Born in Norfolk in 1737, Paine tried to live out the ultimate 18thcentury cliché of running away to sea, on a ship called, of all things, The Terrible, and skippered by a Captain Death. His father stopped him and for the next 20 years Paine junior did nothing to suggest greatness, variously finding employment as a servant, schoolteacher and excise officer.
But in 1774 Paine met Benjamin Franklin, who was lobbying in London for the American colonies. Franklin advised Paine to head to the New World with "a rather tepid recommendation" to his son William, governor of New Jersey. Having written some minor pamphlets in Lewes, Paine now found a pre-revolutionary society enjoying a propaganda boom. Common Sense sold
half a million copies and, as well as advocating independence for the first time, he also, Hitchens believes, coined the term United States of America.
Paine had a remarkable talent for plain English and this may have been helped by his Quaker father's refusal to let him learn the language of "the Popish altar" at school (he may have regretted this when, years later, he became a member of the French National Assembly and had to face down demagogues with the aide of a translator). But while his first pamphlet, with its biblically based arguments for small government, has since become a Republican Party holy hook, his next work, Rights of Man, was an even more radical call for universal human rights, the end of chivalry, and the creation of a welfare state.
By 1791 Paine was in France, and already the
violence of this new revolution had alarmed its natural supporters, greatest among these being Edmund Burke, whose pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, became the philosophical centrepiece of English Toryism – not bad, for an Irish Whig. The Rights Of Man was a retort to Burke's work and its radical counterpart, arguing that there was no such thing as a natural order which, at the. time, had been used as a justification for England's post-1688 settlement.
Hitchens is not uncritical of Paine, arguing that his vitriolic attack on religion in his last great work, The Age of Reason, is grossly hypocritical for the man who once used the Bible as his prop; and the author is far from partisan on the Burke-Paine split, although the former's overly flowery tribute to Marie Antoinette, which, today, would land him a place in Private Eye's Order of the Brown Nose, is quoted at length.
The only question remaining is why Paine, who saw the worst excesses of France's rights of man, never reflected that the Revolution was a tragedy for France, and that England's slower progress gave its people more freedom.
Still, perhaps one out of two revolutions is better than nothing for a life's work.
Ed West