Glossary | Filthy Little Atheist

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Abolition: The movement to end slavery and the slave trade; Paine's *African Slavery in America* (1775) and the preamble he drafted for Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act (1780) are landmark American documents in the cause.
Also: abolitionist, abolitionism.
Agrarian: Pertaining to the land; in eighteenth-century usage often the radical claim that the soil was originally common property of all -- the argument Paine made in *Agrarian Justice* (1797).
Anglican: The Church of England, the state-established Protestant church Paine was christened into despite his Quaker father; the institutional target of much of his religious writing.
Also: church of england, established church.
Antifederalist: Opponents of the 1787 U.S. Constitution who argued it gave too much power to the central government; many later became Jeffersonian Republicans, the faction Paine identified with on his return.
Also: antifederalists, anti-federalist.
Barlow: Joel Barlow (1754-1812): Connecticut Wit, American consul in Paris, Paine's closest English-speaking friend through the Luxembourg years; he saw *The Age of Reason* Part I through the press.
Also: joel barlow.
Bastille: The Paris fortress-prison stormed on July 14, 1789, the symbolic opening of the French Revolution; Lafayette gave its main key to Paine to send to Washington, where it still hangs at Mount Vernon.
Burke: Edmund Burke and Paine had been allies on the American question in the 1770s and dined together in London in the 1780s. The French Revolution divided them. Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France* (November 1790) was a long, eloquent, and (in Paine's view) sentimental defense of inherited institutions; *Rights of Man* (March 1791) was Paine's reply. The exchange founded modern conservative and modern liberal thought respectively.
Also: edmund burke.
Calumny: An eighteenth-century word for malicious slander; Paine used it often in defending himself against the political and clerical press of the 1790s.
Common sense: Paine's January 1776 pamphlet, the most widely read American political pamphlet ever published; over 100,000 copies sold in three months in a colonial population of 2.5 million.
Condorcet: Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): mathematician, philosophe, Paine's collaborator on the 1793 Girondin draft constitution; died in hiding from the Jacobins.
Also: marquis de condorcet.
Continental army: The army Congress raised in 1775 to fight the British, commanded by Washington; the *American Crisis* No. I was read aloud to it on December 23, 1776, three days before the crossing into Trenton.
Convention: The French legislative assembly that succeeded the Legislative Assembly in September 1792 and tried Louis XVI; Paine sat as deputy for the Pas-de-Calais.
Also: national convention, french convention.
Conway: Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907): Virginia-born Unitarian, abolitionist, and Paine's first scholarly biographer; editor of *The Writings of Thomas Paine* (4 vols., 1894-96), the source edition for this site.
Also: moncure conway, moncure d. conway.
Crisis: Paine's 13-number wartime pamphlet series (December 1776-April 1783), opening with 'These are the times that try men's souls.'
Also: the american crisis, the crisis.
Deism: Deism is the belief in a single Creator inferred from the order and beauty of nature, with no further revelation, no scripture, no ordained priesthood, no miracles, and no claim of personal providence. Paine was a deist, never an atheist; the distinction matters because his enemies routinely conflated the two and his friends routinely failed to defend it.
Also: deist, deistical.
Dissertation: An eighteenth-century scholarly essay; Paine's *Dissertation on First Principles of Government* (1795) is one of his most sustained essays on the franchise and representation.
Excise: The British indirect-tax service; Paine was an excise officer at Alford, Grantham, and Lewes for most of the 1760s and early 1770s, and his first published pamphlet (1772) petitioned for a pay raise for his colleagues.
Also: exciseman.
Federalist: The American political party of Hamilton, Adams, and Jay, in power 1789-1801; Paine's enemies for most of the years he was alive, posthumous slanderers thereafter.
Also: federalists.
Franchise: The right to vote; Paine in *Rights of Man* and the *Dissertation on First Principles of Government* argued that it should not depend on owning property -- an argument a generation ahead of every existing democracy.
Franklin: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): American printer, scientist, statesman; the man whose 1774 letters of introduction made Paine's American career possible.
Also: benjamin franklin.
Freethought: An eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for unforced inquiry into religious questions, untethered to any creed; Paine became the patron saint of nineteenth-century Anglo-American freethought after his death.
Also: freethinker.
Girondin: The moderate-republican faction in the 1792-93 French Convention, drafted the constitution Paine helped write; purged and largely guillotined by the Jacobins in 1793.
Also: girondins, girondists.
Headstrong club: The Lewes debating society Paine joined in the late 1760s, meeting at the White Hart Inn; awarded a nightly Plumed Hat to whoever argued most stubbornly. Paine took home the Hat often.
Hereditary: Of monarchy and aristocracy: rule passed by birth rather than choice; Paine's central political objection. 'All hereditary government is in its nature tyranny.' (*Rights of Man*, 1791)
Also: hereditary government, hereditary right.
Independence: The American break from Britain; *Common Sense* (January 1776) made the case the Continental Congress declared on July 4, 1776.
Also: declaration of independence.
Infidel: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for one who rejects revealed religion; Paine's enemies' favorite word for him after *The Age of Reason*.
Also: infidelity.
Jacobin: The radical-republican faction in the French Revolution, dominant 1793-94 under Robespierre, the faction that imprisoned Paine; named for the Dominican (Saint-Jacques) convent where they met.
Also: jacobins.
Jefferson: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): Paine's close friend and political ally for 30 years; sent the U.S.S. *Maryland* to bring Paine home from France in 1802 and paid the Federalist political price for it.
Also: thomas jefferson.
Lafayette: Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834): French aristocrat, American Revolutionary general, gave Paine the Bastille key in 1790 to forward to Washington.
Also: marquis de lafayette.
Luxembourg: The converted Paris palace where Paine was imprisoned by the Committee of Public Safety from December 1793 to November 1794; he wrote *The Age of Reason* there.
Also: luxembourg prison.
Monarchy: Government by a single inherited ruler; Paine's lifelong adversary in *Common Sense*, *Rights of Man*, and the late constitutional writings.
Also: monarchical, monarchism.
Natural rights: Rights claimed to belong to all human beings by nature, before and beyond any government; the philosophical premise of *Rights of Man* and the American Declaration of Independence.
New rochelle: The Westchester County, New York town where the State of New York granted Paine a 277-acre confiscated Loyalist farm in 1785; his American home for the rest of his life and his original burial place.
New style: The Gregorian calendar (New Style) was adopted in Britain in 1752; before then Britain used the Julian calendar (Old Style), 11 days behind. Paine's January 29, 1737 birth (O.S.) is February 9, 1737 (N.S.).
Also: old style, n.s., o.s..
Pamphlet: A short, cheaply-printed political tract; the dominant medium of eighteenth-century public argument and the form that made Paine famous on three continents.
Also: pamphleteer.
Philosophe: An eighteenth-century French intellectual, especially of the Enlightenment generation that produced the *Encyclopedie*; Paine's natural intellectual habitat in Paris.
Also: philosophes.
Primogeniture: The legal doctrine that the eldest son inherits the entire estate; Paine attacked it in *Rights of Man* and Pennsylvania abolished it in the constitution he influenced.
Quaker: The Society of Friends, founded in seventeenth-century England, rejected ordained clergy, sacraments, oaths, and military service. Paine's father Joseph was a Quaker; his mother Frances was an Anglican; the marriage was officially mixed and Paine was christened into the established church but raised in the meeting. The Quaker influences on his prose -- the plainness, the suspicion of ceremony, the comfort with the word *Friend* as a form of address -- never left him.
Also: quakerism, society of friends.
Raynal: Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713-1796): French clergyman and historian whose *Revolution of America* (1781) Paine answered with his *Letter to the Abbe Raynal* (1782), one of his most cogent essays.
Also: abbe raynal.
Revealed religion: Religion held to rest on a particular divine revelation -- a scripture or set of miracles -- as opposed to natural religion or deism; the principal target of *The Age of Reason*.
Rights of man: Paine's two-part 1791-92 reply to Burke; Part II's program of progressive taxation, child allowances, old-age pensions, and public education was a century ahead of any government's practice.
Robespierre: Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794): leader of the Jacobins and dominant figure on the Committee of Public Safety; arrested Paine December 28, 1793, fell himself July 27, 1794.
Also: maximilien robespierre.
Sansculotte: Literally 'without breeches' -- the Paris working-class radicals of the French Revolution who wore long trousers rather than aristocratic knee-breeches; the Convention's street base in 1793-94.
Also: sansculottes, sans-culotte.
Silas deane: Silas Deane (1737-1789): the American agent in Paris whom Paine, in a January 1779 public letter, accused of profiting from secret French aid; the accusation was correct but cost Paine his Foreign Affairs post.
Stake: Paine's word in *Agrarian Justice* (1797) for the one-time payment of 15 pounds sterling he proposed every adult should receive at age 21; the first proposal in English of what is now called a universal capital grant.
Thetford: Town in Norfolk, England, where Paine was born January 29, 1737 (Old Style); a 'rotten borough' returning two MPs from a few hundred eligible voters, an early lesson in political corruption.
Tory: Conservative supporters of crown and church in eighteenth-century British politics; the party Paine despised by instinct.
Also: tories, toryism.
Washington: George Washington (1732-1799): commander of the Continental Army; ordered *The American Crisis* No. I read to the troops at Trenton; later froze Paine out, prompting Paine's furious 1796 *Letter to George Washington*.
Also: george washington.
Whig: British political party historically opposed to absolute monarchy and supportive of parliamentary supremacy; the eighteenth-century radicals' party of choice.
Also: whigs.
Wollstonecraft: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797): British philosopher, author of *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), and a member of Paine's London and Paris circles.
Also: mary wollstonecraft.