Thomas Paine’s idea of revolution: Between the New and the Old World

The political thought of Thomas Paine offers an interesting case study to investigate the idea of revolution in the eighteenth century. As it is known, Paine played an active role both in the American and in the French revolution. Never becoming the prototype of the professional revolutionary of the twentieth century, he thought, on the contrary, that the revolution as an event was intrinsically connected with the building of a constitutional order, centred on the rights of man. In his opinion a revolution was not a violent putsch but a manifestation of a more refined stage of civilization. He distinguished between passive and active revolutions. The first ones were constructive while active ones were often distorted by resentment. After the American Revolution he started to believe that the course of European civilisation could be fostered by new revolutions. To understand this approach we must consider his intellectual outlook and his biography. Paine’s views were deeply imbued of the values of the Enlightenment. In his opinion it was possible to improve the world under many respects: government, religion could be radically reformed.

Moreover, he was not American by birth, but was born in England where he lived until the age of 37. So, contrary to other American founding fathers, he did not have a colonial background but had an Atlantic understanding of current affairs. In his opinion the American Revolution would be legitimate only if it gave birth to a new and more just and equal system of government, different from the corrupt English one. His European background helps explain, too, why he was interested to transplant, in the Old Continent, the representative government already successfully tested in America. In his opinion it was sufficient to start in a single country a coherent revolution to ensure an irresistible contagion to the rest of Europe.

His relationship with the French Revolution was traumatic. He was elected to the 1792 French convention and strongly helped Condorcet to draft the so called ‘girondine constitution’. He opposed the execution of the king and lived as a nightmare the triumph of the Jacobin faction and the Terror. For Paine the French Revolution was a failure because it betrayed the ideals of freedom, justice and humanity which were at the core of the revolutionary movement itself. The aim of this paper is to try to understand Paine’s views about Europe in the light of his interpretation and comparison between the French and the American revolutions.