(1737-1809), a political and deistical writer, born in England. In 1774 he emigrated to America, with a letter from Franklin, whom he had met in England. Paine threw himself heart and soul into the cause of the colonists, and his pamphlet entitled Common Sense, written to recommend the separation of the colonies from Great Britain, and his periodical called The Crisis, published during the Revolutionary War, gave him the right to be considered one of the founders of American independence. In 1787 he went to France, where he was well received, and then crossed to England. Here, too, he was given a cordial welcome by Burke and Fox and their party; but despite his friendship with Burke he wrote, in answer to Burke's Reflections upon the Revolution in France, the Rights of Man, in which he attacked Burke severely. A prosecution was commenced against him for his views on the English Constitution, expressed in the Rights of Man, but while the trial was pending he was chosen member of the French National Convention for the Department of Calais, and, making his escape, set off for France, where his Rights of Man had gained him great popularity. On the trial of Louis XVI he voted against the sentence of death, proposing his imprisonment during the war and his banishment afterward. This conduct offended the Jacobins, and toward the close of 1793 he was excluded from the Convention, arrested and committed to prison, where he lay for ten months, escaping the guillotine by an accident. Just before his confinement he had finished the first part of his work entitled the Age of Reason, which was published in London and Paris in 1794. By the publication of this work, he forfeited the favor of many of his American admirers. He remained in France till August, 1802, and then embarked for America, where he spent the remainder of his life, occupied with financial questions and mechanical inventions.