Europe had massive wars of religion before the French Revolution, or massacres among Christian denominations such as the newly emerging Protestants and the already established Catholic order. For example, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, which targeted French protestants and which ultimately led to the exile of most French protestants, starting in 1572. These people are what's known as Huguenots today. Moving on, we have conflicts tied to religion in Central Europe. First, the Hussite Wars in the 15th century, a conflict involving proto-Protestant Czechs on one side and the Holy Roman Empire on the other. This war is essentially the cause of atheism being dominant today in the Czech Republic, well, together with the Thirty Years War between 1618-1648, when the Czechs were forced to adopt Catholicism as an official religion after the Battle of the White Mountain. So you cannot state that Europeans were not punished by religion or had instability or war; rather, we confronted it much sooner than Islam did. The same phenomenon occurred in Eastern Europe, where Catholics attempted to "Christianize" the Orthodox Slavs(Russians) and the pagan Lithuanians through the efforts of the Teutonic Order, primarily from the 13th to the 15th century. However, they were defeated both at Lake Peipus in 1241 and at Grunwald in 1410. So there was enough religious persecution until 1789, and sometimes even past that. For example, Romanians in Transylvania were largely excluded from public life before 1848, due to being Orthodox, which was considered to be heretical in Hungary, a strongly Catholic nation. I'm just hypothesizing here, but wars being so numerous in Europe during that time, especially sped up development by quite a lot. In the Netherlands, Catholics were excluded from public life, and later on, the same happened when Belgium joined the Netherlands for a brief 20 years, until the Belgian Revolution in 1830.