Thomas Paine’s reflections on the revolution in France

This article looks into an unpublished manuscript in French found in Jacques-Pierre Brissot’s papers in the Archives Nationales. The manuscript’s author and/or translator presents it as a diary written by Thomas Paine during his time as a deputy in the National Convention. Yet both the manuscript’s form and its content suggest that it may well be a forgery. The context in which it was written is crucial. In the 1820s, memoirs and histories looked back upon the French Revolution as the political contest among ultras, liberals and republicans and revived some of the issues raised during the French revolutionary decade. The author of this manuscript was openly pro-Bourbon and seemed to turn Paine into a moderate partisan of monarchy. Many clues show that the views expressed on the events of the Revolution do not match Paine’s writings or are contradicted by records in French archives

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