When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, inspired by the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire, the Reverend Richard Price, a Dissenting Minister, gave a sermon in London which enthusiastically endorsed the events.. ‘Tremble all ye oppressors of the world’ he declared, ‘…you cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together’. This prompted Edmund Burke, to argue, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), that the revolution was founded on ‘abstract rights’, destructive of the civic order and warned against the danger of it reaching England. Much better, he argued, to stick with the ‘consolidated wisdom’ of long experience.

Paine’s response to Burke was the Rights of Man, written in two parts between 1791 and 1792 and which stimulated large protest movements as the decade unfolded. He set out his justification of the French Revolution on the grounds that the monarchy had been replaced by constitutional government, equal rights to all citizens, with sovereignty transferred to the people through parliament. The same should happen in Britain, Paine argued, where no constitution existed and where hereditary and monarchical government ruled. Ordinary people had no representation and were living in servitude; subjects without a voice, rather than citizens.

He wrote: ‘There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the ‘end of time’, or of commanding for ever how the world should be governed, or who shall govern it…’. Paine argued that Britain needed a modern constitution, for ‘the living, not for the dead’, which embodied the rights of the citizens, as well as the powers of government and the rules and procedures, by which the government is held fully accountable to the people.

He carries on: ‘A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. It is the body of elements, to which you can refer, and quote article by article; and which contains the principles on which the government shall be established, the manner in which it shall be organised, the powers it shall have, the mode of elections, the duration of parliaments, or by what other name such bodies may be called; the powers which the executive part of the government shall have; and, in fine, everything that relates to the complete organization of a civil government, and the principles on which it should act, and by which it shall be bound’.

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