It was a rejection of this practice of intolerance that fed powerfully into the demands of the revolutionaries of 1789. To these men it seemed self-evident that a good government was not a confessional state but one that recognised and protected the natural rights of its citizens. Constraints upon the exercise and abuse of executive power were best achieved through representative democracy, rather than the Christian education of the Prince. It followed that the monarch's power derived not from God but from the nation and its representatives; the latter were no longer the clergy or the aristocracy, but the members of the Third Estate. With this the entire structure of the ancien régime was brought into question, and it would not be long before the secularisation of the French state began. 

This was confirmed with the enactment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790. There is much that might be said about this controversial piece of legislation. At one level it looked like an attempt to integrate the Church into the Revolution on a Gallican basis. Crucially, it stipulated that bishops were to be subject to election and that the electors were to be not the clergy but all citizens, including those who were not Catholics. It also obliged the clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the French state. If nothing else, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was a massive political blunder. It alienated not only the Church hierarchy but also Louis XVI and the greater proportion of the French population. According to Perreau-Saussine, it is at this moment that the breach between religion and the modern world can be dated.

Certainly, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy raised an issue of major importance: what was the place of the Church in a democratic polity that presupposed a direct and unmediated relationship between the state and individual. The Church, after all, was neither the people nor the state, but a corporate body resting upon the non-democratic principle of apostolic hierarchy. If democracy meant popular sovereignty it could not but call the authority and privileges of the clergy into question. The point made by Perreau-Saussine is that the Revolution of 1789 failed to resolve this question, with the result that the Church had no public role and Catholics were excluded from the nation.

From this a series of broader questions followed. What reason did the Church have to recognise a state that had taken away its privileged status? Why should the faithful obey a state that was in conflict with the Church and that ignored divine law? More troubling still, what were the goals of the state to be when they were not set by the Church? Was the judgment of the people any more sound than the judgment of the clergy?  

Beneath this, both then and now, has lain a more fundamental unease among Christians about the hubristic enterprise of emancipating humans from the will of God and of seeking to refashion humanity through the wholesale reconstruction of society. Without wishing to assert that Christianity always prevented injustice and tyranny, Perreau-Saussine nevertheless contends that the sense of the sacred communicated by the Church brought with it a sense of moral restraint. "The secularisation of the state", he writes, "seemed to offer it the potential for action without limits. Challenging the political or quasi-political role of the Church opened the way to potentially totalitarian political monism."