The Rage Around Tom Paine [ 37 ] along with Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, but as one of the first internationals, he could claim the protection of no nation. To many Americans, he had forfeited his claim to United States citizenship—based on bis service in the Revolutionary army—by agreeing in September 1792 to sit in the French Convention for Pas de Calais after having been elected from four departments. At the trial of Louis XVI, Paine pleaded for the King's imprisonment and banishment rather than death, and after the fall of the Girondins in June 1793 he was deprived of his French citizenship and parliamentary immunity. Imprisoned on December 28,1793, Paine spent eleven months of the Reign of Terror in the Luxembourg, where he composed part of The Age of Reason before he was released in November 1794 on the intervention of the new American minister, James Monroe, who claimed Paine as an American citizen. Restored to his place in the Convention, Paine continued to espouse the political faith stated in his Rights of Man, which had appeared in two parts early in 1791 and 1792 in England as a reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. After his active political role ended, Paine lived quietly in Paris until the Peace of Amiens in 1802 made it possible for him to return to the land that had first launched him to international fame. His mistreatment in France has been greatly exaggerated, in the judgment of Crane Brinton, who wrote that Paine was "not wholly free from delusions of persecution" and that he was "generally regarded by French politicians as a harmless humanitarian!'2 Americans might have forgiven Thomas Paine for his active role in the French Revolution—a cause which claimed the allegiance of the Jeffersonian Republicans, at least—but many could never forgive him for his last great work, The Age of Reason, published in the United States in two parts, 1794 and 1795. Although the opening paragraphs of this celebrated tract contained the statement, "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life!' it was violently denounced throughout the Christian community as atheistic and considered a frontal attack upon the Church itself.3 Nor could 2 Of the nine-man committee appointed earlier to form a new constitution for France, only Paine and Sieyes survived the Terror, "Thomas Paine in England and in France" The Atlantic Monthly, TV (December 1859), 701; Crane Brinton, "Thomas Paine" Dictionary of American Biography, XIV, 159-66. 3 William M. Van der Weyde, ed., The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (10 vols.;