(Atlantic Books, £9.99)
The life of Thomas Paine was mostly pretty wretched. He was born in Norfolk in 1737, to a father who combined the strait-laced trade of a corset maker with the rigorous creed of a Quaker. His education was curtailed because his father objected to his learning Latin, the language of Popery. After a desultory apprenticeship to his father's trade he gave up carving corsets and became, as he put it, "the carver of my own fortune." The enterprise was not a big success. After failing as a seaman for a couple of years, Paine returned to corset making, and failed again. Realising that he had an aptitude for figures, he managed to get regular work collecting excise-duties, only to lose it for falsifying his reports; and after winning his job back, he lost it a second time, as punishment for agitating for better pay. In the meantime he experimented with the life of a tobacconist and a servant, as well as seeking (it is said) ordination in the Church of England. In 1774, having gone through innumerable jobs, two difficult marriages, many gallons of alcohol, and far more money than he possessed, he turned his back on England to make a new beginning in America.
At that point Paine was more interested in escaping his creditors than building a brave new world. But as soon as he arrived in Pennsylvania, with a serendipitous recommendation from Benjamin Franklin in his pocket, he found work with a printer and belatedly discovered his vocation. Soon he was editing the monthly Pennsylvania Magazine and using it as a platform for denouncing slavery. His journalism proved so popular that he turned his hand to an independent publication. Common Sense, addressed to the inhabitants of America, by "an Englishman," was published in Philadelphia in January 1776, and Paine was scarcely exaggerating when he claimed that it met with a success "beyond anything since the invention of printing." Paine's summons to rebellion against British rule was perfectly timed, and about half a million copies would be printed in the next few years. He may have been a middle-aged lush and a journalistic novice but he had suddenly become the literary mentor of the American revolution.
It took five years for the success of the revolution to be secured, so instead of revelling in his new-found fame and prosperity, Paine was dragged into a world of military uncertainty, constitutional wrangling, and secret diplomacy, for which he was peculiarly unsuited. In 1781 he visited Paris as part of an American delegation seeking the support of Louis XVI for the fledgling United States of America. Later that year, when the British army was defeated at Yorktown with the help of the French and the glamorous young Marquis de Lafayette, Paine's residual usefulness was finished, and he reverted to the bibulous disarray of his former life. In 1787 he pulled himself together enough to return to Paris, where the American cause was universally acclaimed and he could relax in the company of Lafayette and the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson. Briefly returning to England he won the friendship of a forthright supporter of America, religious freedom, and the emancipation of slaves: the writer and MP Edmund Burke.
But then things went wrong all over again. In 1789 Paine returned to Paris, on the invitation of Lafayette, to witness a new revolution that would be modelled, as they thought, on the great American example. Paine was delighted by the exuberance of the Parisian crowds, even if he was nearly lynched for forgetting to sport a revolutionary cockade. But a year later, still in Paris, he read a florid pamphlet by Edmund Burke which seemed designed to massacre his fondest political hopes. That Burke's prose in Reflections on the Revolution in France owed something to his own inflammatory style can only have intensified Paine's fury, and he dashed off an incandescent "answer to Mr Burke's attack" under the simple but elegant title Rights of Man. (The habit of adding a definite article, as if Paine supposed himself to be in possession of a definitive list of rights, did not begin until long after his death.)
Christopher Hitchens's crisp little book offers an attractive introduction to Paine's life and work as whole, but at its heart is a warm presentation of the arguments of Rights of Man, balanced by a remarkably sympathetic account of the book that provoked them. For Hitchens, there is far more to Reflections than "snobbery and condescension": indeed Burke is commended as "an anti-capitalist avant la lettre," and his premonitions of revolutionary decay are compared to those of Rosa Luxemburg. But his nostalgia could never survive Paine's hilarity about the idiocies of monarchy, aristocracy and the hereditary principle. Hitchens relishes Paine's ability to make fun of Burke—for example his suggestion that he had "discovered a world of windmills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to attack them"—but he is also alert to the quixotry in Paine himself, whose own idea of rights was based on a flimsy notion of a lost golden age that was as open to ridicule as anything in Burke.
Paine came back to England to supervise the printing of Rights of Man, and early in 1792 he added a second volume, with a dedication to Lafayette urging him to invade Germany to ignite the torch of revolution there. To the British government this was an intolerable provocation, and Paine was condemned for his "wicked and seditious writings." For a while, as Hitchens relates, Paine took pleasure in his notoriety and the clumsy attentions of police spies; but in September he had the sense to leave England for good. When the fugitive arrived in Calais he was greeted by jubilant crowds and installed as the town's delegate to the national convention. But as usual Paine's moment of triumph was brief. For one thing his French was so poor that he had to rely on an interpreter; for another, his efforts to convince the convention of the need for judicial independence and a federal system of government were treated with contempt. And when a motion came forward for the execution of the king, without a trial, he bravely fought it with all the means at his disposal.
Robespierre's response was predictable. "Those who talk of fair trials and the rule of law are unprincipled," he wrote. Paine was as hostile to the institution of monarchy as anyone else in the convention, but for him Louis XVI was also "the man who helped America, the land of my love." In spite of Paine's eloquence, the life of the king was not spared: he was executed in January 1793, and at the end of the year, Paine himself was jailed as an enemy of the revolution. It was only because of a mix-up by one of his jailers that he escaped the guillotine in 1794. When he was released, following the execution of Robespierre, his health was damaged beyond repair. For some reason he stayed on in France to witness the final demolition of his hopes with the crowning of Napoleon, "the greatest charlatan that ever existed." It was not until 1802 that he slipped back to the US, to die in obscurity in New York city seven years later. He could never bring himself to acknowledge that Edmund Burke might have had a point, back in 1790, when he warned against "deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men" and made the astonishingly accurate prediction that the revolution in France would eventually be appropriated by "some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery."
Hitchens has no doubt put something of himself into his brilliant portrait of Paine. He too is a radical political writer who has swapped subjection to a British monarch for citizenship of the US, but admirers of Hitchens as a prose stylist may be a little saddened to find that he has caught a dose of the folksy radical kitsch that often afflicted Paine. His discourse is growing gouty with sonorous archaisms like "bethink," "yore," "stoutly" and "to boot": Martin Luther King's speech is "imperishable," Tories are "Tory worthies," Paine's epigrams are "resonant words," and Burke's pamphlets "sulphurous screeds." And Rights of Man is The Rights of Man to boot.
Hitchens remains a great writer, and a thinker of depth, range and vigour. He would seem to have come round to Paine's view that things would have been much better if only the French revolutionaries had been more like their American predecessors; and if that goes against the grain for old-fashioned radicals, perhaps it's the price one must pay for a radicalism that is prepared to be educated by defeat but not disheartened. As Paine dedicated his book to Lafayette, Hitchens dedicates his to Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq. He does so "in the hope that his long struggle will be successful, and will inspire emulation." One can only hope that there is more to be hoped for than hope.
