Rights of Man

Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine, including 31 articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard its people, their natural rights. Using these points as a base it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke's attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The interests of the monarch and his people are united, and insists that the French Revolution should be understood as one which attacks the despotic principles of the French monarchy, not the king himself, and he takes the Bastille to symbolise the despotism that had been overthrown. Human rights originate in Nature, rights cannot be granted via political charter. Edmund Burke says that true social stability arises if the nation's poor majority are governed by a minority of wealthy aristocrats, and that lawful inheritance of power (wealth, religious, governing) ensured the propriety of political power being the exclusive domain of the nation's élite social class – the nobility.