Media advisory: Historian finds Thomas Paine didn't write crucial passage in 'Rights of Man'

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas historian is available to discuss his finding that Thomas Paine could not have written the crucial passage about the French Revolution in his hugely influential 1791 work, "Rights of Man."

Jonathan Clark, Hall Distinguished Professor of British History, recently set out the case in an essay titled “Monuments to Liberty,” published in The Times Literary Supplement. It precedes his larger, forthcoming work, "Thomas Paine: Britain, America and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution."

Why is this argument important? For two major reasons, Clark said. First, the generally accepted idea of the Enlightenment pictures it as a relay race, with a baton being handed from runner to runner. Especially, this view relies on the American Revolution inspiring and triggering.

Second, the conventional account of radical and reforming movements from Paine’s time onward, classically set out in E. P. Thompson’s book "The Making of the English Working Class," claims that Paine set the terms of the debate and did so because he had a special insight into both the American Revolution and the French. Clark contends these arguments are untenable if Paine did not write all of "Rights of Man."

He said all of this matters, especially for Americans, because Paine is commonly recognized as a U.S. founding father for the ideas expressed in his 1776 pamphlet "Common Sense." It inspired American colonists to seek freedom from Britain. He wrote "Rights of Man" in 1791 as a defense of the French Revolution against its critics and a call to revolution elsewhere.

It contains a key 6,000-word narrative of the origins and early stages of the French Revolution. However, Clark first noticed that the prose style of this passage was not Paine’s and is probably that of a native French speaker.

Clark then found evidence to identify the author as the Marquis de Lafayette, who was making an attempt to become “the George Washington of the French Revolution.” Lafayette had strong personal reasons to magnify his involvement in the American Revolution in order to further his career in French politics, he said.

"This key passage embodies not neutral history but Lafayette’s very personal perspective on events,” Clark said. “Paine was great friends with Lafayette, and therefore he didn't steal from Lafayette. Instead, Lafayette talked with him and provided him with information, but I argue that Paine didn't realize that Lafayette was giving a particular interpretation to French history.”

The claim that Lafayette was responsible for the key interpretation embedded in "Rights of Man" challenges historians to re-examine how this work pictures the French Revolution — and also therefore the American Revolution as its predecessor — as a long-anticipated protest against the denial of natural rights, Clark said. In his view, the importance of natural rights discourse has been overstated.

“This thesis comes ultimately from Lafayette, but it's not something which is just objectively there,” Clark said. “I'm arguing that this is Lafayette's propaganda to promote his own career.”

Clark is also completing a book on the Enlightenment and recently presented a trailer at a conference at Yale University.

To arrange an interview with Clark, contact George Diepenbrock at 785-864-8853 or gdiepenbrock@ku.edu.