Page - 353 - in Glaubenskämpfe - Katholiken und Gewalt im 19. Jahrhundert

English Abstracts Eveline G. Bouwers Of Violence and Martyrdom: Catholic Responses to Liberal Educational Policy in Belgium In 1879, Belgian liberals passed a school law that aimed to crack down on clerical influence on primary education. The law met with widespread pop- ular opposition. This chapter examines the nature of that resistance, focus- ing on violent encounters between (rural) Catholic protestors and state offi- cials. It traces the genealogy of the conflict to the year 1857, when Belgian political unionism  – i.e. the alliance of Catholics and liberals  – collapsed, and shows how conflicts over the boundaries of religious space occasion- ally turned violent in subsequent decades. Incidents were often anticyclical to political power, which explains the primacy of anticlerical violence during the 1870s, when Catholics formed the government, and the surge in Catholic attacks following the implementation of the liberal school law of 1879. Exam- ining the challenged seizure of a building used for religious purposes in a West-Flemish village, this chapter emphasizes the plurality of Catholic voices on both elite and popular levels as well as proposes a new periodization for understanding the Belgian »school war« (1879–1884). Tim Buchen Collective Violence and the Religious Politicization of the Peasantry in a Habsburg Periphery: »Rabatz« and »Antisemitic Excess« in Western Galicia, 1846–1898 In Galicia, the largest of the Austrian crownlands, several thousand Roman Catholic farmers and agricultural labourers were involved in physical assaults on social and religious opponents in 1846 as well as in 1898. This chapter examines the influence of religious ideas and clerical mobilisation strategies on the eruption of violence and its course as well as on the interpre- tation of both waves of violence. It illuminates the continuities and ruptures in relations between the faithful and ecclesiastical actors, and it probes how both groups participated in constructing images of enemies of the »Catholic people« in the nineteenth century. It is argued that even though the clergy played an important role in both cases  – calling for temperance in 1846 and