The Rights of Man

Absolute monarchy is a system in which a king or queen rules without restriction. The word of the monarch is law. There are no independent legislatures or other checks on the sovereign. Every officer of the government acts under the monarch’s authority. Prior to the French Revolution, absolute monarchs ruled France for centuries. Paine argues that, in 1789, the people of France rebelled not against the king himself but against the entire system of absolute monarchy, which permeated society at every level.

The Assembly of the Notables, a select group of 140 men nominated by the king, met in France in 1787 to recommend new taxes to the local parlements. Paine regards this meeting as “the first practical step toward the revolution” (54). The gathering of the Notables, led by the Marquis de Lafayette served as a precursor to the calling of the Estates-General, from which sprang the National Assembly and the constitutional reforms of 1789-1791.

The Bastille was a notorious Parisian prison that symbolized the tyrannical rule of France’s absolute monarchs. Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, an event widely regarded as the beginning of the French Revolution. Paine describes the storming of the Bastille in the first part of Rights of Man.