Yet Paine’s deeds counted for little compared with his words Today they

Yet Paine’s deeds counted for little compared with his words Today they are treated as a holy text. In 1802 Paine returned to America to spend his last seven years in growing ill health and squalor, denouncing unreason to the last.What did he leave? A vibrant energy pervades this book, and this record of the life of Tom Paine – smelly, cantankerous, privately selfish – characterises a particularly uplifting kind of public virtue. George Washington was the subject of special calumny, for allegedly conniving at his imprisonment, and for having “acted towards me the part of a cold-blooded traitor”. Having escaped lynching at the hands of the mob, he was thrown into gaol by a paranoid government and, hourly fearing his own death, watched fellow prisoners dragged off to the guillotine. Despite this trauma, Paine stayed in his latest adopted country, his pen continuously active against enemies on both sides of the ocean.

“My hatred and abhorrence of monarchy are sufficiently known … but my compassion for the unfortunate, whether friend or enemy, is equally lively and sincere.”) As the Terror mounted, Paine took to his desk, and savaged organised Christianity in another great and lasting work, The Age of Reason.Once again, desperate events overtook him, this time almost fatally. Arriving in Calais in 1792, he was immediately offered French citizenship, and elected as the town’s representative to the exploding National Convention.”Vive la Nation! Vive Thomas Paine!”, cried his constituents It was to be a poisoned chalice. Forgetting England, almost forgetting America, Paine – the new citizen – was sucked into the vortex, involving himself utterly in the turmoil of a culture he barely understood. Yet, as Keane movingly reminds us, he retained his sense of proportion, and his humanity. Though he voted to condemn Louis XVI, he fought to save him from execution. (“Citizen President,” he courageously declared, against the ominous tide.

Paine was quickly forced into exile, once again getting the moment just right Seldom has an Anglo-Saxon been so welcomed in France. In Britain, The Rights of Man caused uproar: the authorities had good reason to be worried about a man whose work had already helped to lose them half an empire. Keane suggests that the fight for extending the rights of citizenship required a fresh political syntax: it is also true that Paine, unlike later writers chasing popular truths, showed that basic social and political realities are painfully simple, and can be simply expressed.The best test of a book’s power is the fury it arouses among those it attacks. “As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand,” wrote Paine, “I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.” He described despotic governments as a fungus growing out of a corrupt civil society, and vigorously demanded a welfare state (an aspect of Paine’s writings Lady Thatcher neglects to mention when she quotes him in her speeches). In 1787, he returned to England to visit his parents in Thetford, and also to follow up a madcap scheme for a single-span wrought iron bridge over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia.

The plan failed: instead, Paine wrote The Rights of Man, the finest manifesto Islington has yet given birth to.It was also the best-selling book in the history of publishing, ricocheting around the whole of the Eurocentric world, and speaking, not just to, but with and on behalf of, the common man. There was a heavy irony here, not lost on contemporaries, for Paine seemed almost a caricature of the villainous agitator. His interpreter recalled his “brimstone odour”, and that he was “coarse and uncouth in his manners, loathsome in his appearance, and a disgusting egoist; rejoicing most in talking of himself, and reading the effusions of his own mind”.Back in Philadelphia, Paine found himself frustratingly marginalised. For a time, he was part industrious clerk, drafting official letters, but also part celebrity – feted for his writings, which were directed against the French monarchy’s enemy, monarchical Britain. He was forced to resign, and embarked on the next phase of his life, in Europe.”I am a farmer of thoughts,” wrote Paine, “and all the crops I raise I give away.” Arriving at the Court of Louis XVI as a member of an American diplomatic mission (though he spoke no French), his fame had preceded him.

Briefly, he served as Secretary of the new American Committee of Foreign Affairs. His enthusiasm and insight, however, were not matched by the political judgement needed in such volatile times. “Nothing else is now talked of, and I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.” If not a cause, then Paine’s book was a catalyst: urgent, modernist, irreverent, outrageous, blaspheming against the verities of religion and Monarchy. Paine took George III’s madness as the symbol of an insane political system, and dismissed him as a ruler whose tenuous legitimacy came from William the Conqueror, “a French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives”.The adventure now began in earnest.