An Englishman by birth, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was a radical polemicist and staunch supporter of the American and French Revolutions. He wrote Rights of Man as a direct response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Published in London, Rights of Man appeared in two parts, the second of which prompted the British government to charge Paine with seditious libel. Paine fled for France in September 1792 and never returned to England. He was convicted in absentia.

By the time Rights of Man appeared in print, Paine already was well-known throughout the English-speaking world. In the 1770s, he had moved to the American colonies and adopted the American revolutionary cause as his own. He wrote Common Sense (1776), a bestselling pamphlet that denounced monarchy and probably contributed more to the movement for American independence than any other piece of writing. During the American Revolutionary War, he published a series of pro-revolutionary essays under the title The American Crisis (1776-1783) and even served in the Continental Congress. After the war, he was granted an estate in New York and thereafter regarded himself as an American citizen.

When Paine drafted Rights of Man, therefore, he had already achieved a reputation as a defender of liberty against Old-World government tyranny.