Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), radical political writer, was best known for his political treatise, The Rights of Man, which appeared in two parts (1791, 1792). The work referred to here is his Age of Reason, of which Part 1 appeared in 1794 and Part 2 in 1795. Both works produced numerous responses, the first placing Paine at odds with those opposed to the French Revolution and supportive of the Pitt administration’s domestic and foreign policies, especially policies involving taxation, opposition to parliamentary reform, and the proliferation of the war with France; the second put Paine at odds with a large and increasingly vocal constituency of evangelical Christians, both within the Established Church and across all the Nonconformist sects. Thus, by 1796 Paine was the poster boy not only for French Jacobinism but also for French Infidelity, a catchphrase popularized in such works as William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of Christianity (1797) and Robert Hall’s On Modern Infidelity (1800).