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  • Thomas Paine’s Continental Mind
  • Jason D. Solinger (bio)

Anglais de naissance Américain d’adoption Français par décret

—Plaque commemorating Thomas Paine, 10 Rue de l’Odéon, Paris

Adopted by America and decreed a citizen by France, Thomas Paine left his native England at the age of thirty-seven and spent most of the rest of his life off the British isle. He was a cosmopolitan whose concern for the “rights of men” propelled him across borders through a run of canny transformations, from excise officer to celebrated author to French revolutionary. One of the clearest testaments to Paine’s cosmopolitanism is the fact that each of the countries in which he lived disowned him once its nationalist movement got under way. Forced out of England, imprisoned in France, and written out of the histories of the United States, Paine succumbed to the fate of most cosmopolitans, like his contemporaries the English Macaronis and his short-lived allies the Girondists, trading in his cosmopolitan credentials for alien status.1 Prior to the seismic shift that tilted this landscape in the direction of national culture, however, Paine, like those other cosmopolitans, fashioned himself as a man of the world. His style was cosmopolitan, notwithstanding the fact that his plain-spoken prose and untidy appearance have often been viewed as the antithesis of cosmopolitan sophistication. To conceive of cosmopolitanism as a style or as a lifestyle, as David Simpson has put it, one must acknowledge that cosmopolitanism is not always ecumenical. Its democratic grandeur expresses itself as a political disposition, an Enlightenment vision marked by a respect for other cultures and a concern for human rights. Paine shared this vision, but in ways that have yet to be fully appreciated he also partook of the style of cosmopolitanism, its gestures and mannerisms and slips of the tongue, its posture of knowing, an ennui at odds with what Simpson calls cosmopolitanism’s “ethic of openness and curiosity” (54). Paine’s writing rarely exhibits ennui, but it does embody a distinctly British style of cosmopolitanism, [End Page 593] a style that bespeaks the authority of time spent on “the continent.”

Throughout his American Revolutionary oeuvre—particularly his historic pamphlet Common Sense (1776) and his wartime American Crisis papers (1776–83)—Paine uses this term to refer to North America and the colonies in general. However, both the attributes he assigns to the continent and the history of the word itself suggest that Paine’s use of the term is shaped by something other than a descriptive imperative. To put it in a nutshell, the continent imagined by Paine bears an unlikely resemblance to the European continent. In one of the most lyrical passages of Common Sense, a pamphlet whose fame arguably owes more to its style than to its ideas, Paine praises the “continental minds” of those who have migrated to America, leaving uncertain whether “continental” refers to the colonists’ connection to Europe or North America. It is a punning ambiguity, one that enables him to suggest a parallel between the continental vantage point of the colonist and that of a British traveler on the European continent. In the process, Paine refigures the British metropole as a provincial spot, the starting point of a transatlantic journey that bears a closer resemblance to the gentleman’s Grand Tour than a tour of America, then synonymous with criminal transportation.2 In so representing British North Americans as New World cosmopolites, Paine was drawing on a well-established tradition of masculine instruction to persuade readers on both sides of the Atlantic that the colonists were civilized and sociable, and consequently deserving of self-rule.

The notion that continental travel, and the knowledge it afforded, qualified men for positions of authority and governance was a commonplace in male conduct books and educational tracts of the day. In them the European continent was first imagined as a finishing school as well as a staging ground for careers at court or in Parliament. It goes without saying that neither Philadelphia nor New York near the end of the eighteenth century would have been mistaken for the European destinations of the Grand Tour. But as I have...

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