While in prison, he continued to work on The Age of Reason (1793–1794). In December 1793, he was arrested and was taken to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. Consequently, the Montagnards, especially Maximilien Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. Paine fled to France in September where, rather immediately and despite not being able to speak French, he was elected to the French National Convention. Paine's work, which advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government, was duly targeted, with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792. The British government of William Pitt the Younger, worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to England, had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. His attacks on Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.
He wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said: "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain".Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. His The American Crisis (1776–1783) was a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Virtually every rebel read (or listened to a reading of) his powerful pamphlet Common Sense (1776), proportionally the all-time best-selling American title, which crystallized the rebellious demand for independence from Great Britain. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".Born in Thetford in the English county of Norfolk, Paine migrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving just in time to participate in the American Revolution. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution and inspired the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain) (Febru – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary.
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