>Although the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and the Nonjuring Clergy were
>always mainstays of reaction, "violence against Catholics" was insignificant
>until the White Terror of the Vend´eean uprising. When it came, the
>violence, despite sometimes terrible excesses (one of which is
>immortalized in Poulenc's opera) was legitimate revolutionary self
>defense.
>
>Shane Mage
This may be true--and I wish I knew enough to argue the point with you; the point I underlining however is Andrew Collier's: "the assumption of Spinoza and Rousseau is that if everyone first gives their allegiance to the state, all the religions within the state can tolerate one another. But this misses the point since no religious believer can give his or her first allegiance to the state, So instead of a prescription for universal tolerance, it is a prescription for the persecution of all religions. On this rock the French revolution crashed; a revolution that had the consensus of the Third Estate behind it bcame a revolution resisted by the Catholic half of the people, and consequently a revolution that had live by terror." Marx, p. 115. You may justify that terror as legitimate revolutionary self defense but Collier's point is that the liberal democratic nation state is not, has not been and cannot be tolerant of religious diversity.
Rakesh