Thomas Paine

The Rights of Man Thomas Paine

Rights of Man is a two-part book with 31 articles which argues that it is within the natural rights of man to overthrow the government in a popular revolution. Part one deals mostly with Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution in his work, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Because of the severity of the French Revolution, and given our fledging nation's relationship with France, the work became very popular. In the first portion of the work, Paine argues that human rights are unalienable since they originate from nature itself, which is to say that all human rights are given by existence itself, so any human has them. Therefore, when the French government failed to uphold the various interests of the French people, Paine believes they were within their God-given rights as citizens to attempt to overthrow the despotic government. Paine draws a distinction between killing the king (that is, the man) and killing the office of the king, which is what he argues the French Revolution actually accomplished. He takes the Bastille as an instance of the tyranny overthrown (because the jail represents the nation's primary force of government among its own citizenry).