Impact and conviction for seditious libel
- When
- 1791 onward
- Where
- England, site of the controversy and trial
The book damaged Burke's case and caused a furore; Paine was convicted of seditious libel in absentia while in France.
Of the 300 or more pamphlets spawned by the revolution controversy, Rights of Man was the first to seriously damage Burke's case and restore credit to the French in Britain and America. Its publication caused a furore in England. Paine was tried in absentia and convicted of seditious libel against the Crown, with Sir Archibald Macdonald, 1st Baronet as prosecutor, but was unavailable for hanging, being in France and never returning to England.
Sources
- Rights of Man Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-07
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.