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Le sens commun, adressé aux habitants de l'Amérique, par Thomas Paine, secrétaire du Congrés pour les Affaires Étrangères, pendant le guerre de l'Amérique, et membre de la Convention Nationale de France en 1792. Traduit sur la dernière édition, publiée à Londres par l'auteur

Authors of source text

Thomas Paine

Contributions

Anonymous (153)
translator
François Buisson
publisher

Related resources

is translation of
Common sense, addressed to the inhabitants of America, on the following interesting subjects: I. Of the origin and design of government in general, with concise remarks on the English Constitution, II. Of monarchy and hereditary succession, III. Thoughts on the present state of American affairs, IV. Of the present ability of America, with some miscellaneous reflections has translation

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Notes

Probably based on the censored Parsons edition of 1792. Buisson's translation was published in the spring of 1793, announced in 'Le Moniteur' (2 March 1793) and reviewed in 'La Décade philosophique' (1794), vol.2, p.162.

Bonneville labelled Buisson's commissioning of this rival translation to the Cercle Social's Griffet de Labaume translation as pure "greed", in his 'Bulletin des Amis de la Vérité' #63 (3 March 1793). He went on to lambast him for using a censored version where Labaume's version included the suppressed passages of the English edition. He boasted that Labaume had used a personal copy that Paine had offered to Turgot via Benjamin Franklin in 1781, in which the blanks were filled in. Either Turgot or Franklin probably then gave it to La Rochefoucauld d'Enville who employed Labaume as his secretary. This attack on the veracity of translations appeared to be part of a larger competition over control of Paine’s prestige. It came in the context of Buisson's ambitious plans to become Paine's main publisher by also offering a second edition of the translation of the first volume of 'Rights of Man' , in a version that he claimed Paine had adopted, as well as a collection of his writings in the same year.

See Carinne Lounissi, 'Thomas Paine in French' (Journal of Early American HIstory II (2021): 156ff.