Pierre Bayle 1647 – 1706

Pierre Bayle was a French Huguenot philosopher and encyclopedist who lived in exile in Rotterdam after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His Historical and Critical Dictionary, organized as a network of biographies with copious skeptical footnotes, became one of the most widely read and influential books of the late seventeenth century and a principal source for the philosophes of the next generation. He defended the rights of conscience and religious toleration even for atheists, and argued that morality is independent of religious belief. His sustained skepticism shaped Hume, Voltaire, and the Enlightenment.

Pierre Bayle was born at Carla-le-Comte in Foix in November 1647, the son of a Reformed minister. Educated at the Protestant academy of Puylaurens and at the Jesuit college of Toulouse, he was briefly converted to Catholicism in 1669, returned to Calvinism the next year and was thereby an apostate liable to severe penalties in France. He fled to Geneva, took up a tutor's post, and from 1675 taught philosophy at the Reformed academy of Sedan; when Louis XIV closed the academy in 1681 he moved to the Illustrious School at Rotterdam, where in 1693 his bitter quarrel with the Calvinist hard-liner Pierre Jurieu cost him his chair and where he spent the rest of his life as a private writer.

His major works are the Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682), the Commentaire philosophique on Augustine's 'compel them to come in' (1686–1688), the journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres which he wrote almost single-handedly from 1684 to 1687, and above all the great Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; vastly enlarged 1702), in which short biographical articles support an avalanche of digressive philosophical footnotes.

Bayle pressed a sceptical fideism that exposed every philosophical, theological, and historical doctrine to the embarrassment of its own contradictions, defended the rights of the 'erring conscience' and a generous religious toleration extending to atheists, and gave the problem of evil its sharpest early-modern formulation through the figure of his Manichaeans. The Dictionnaire was the indispensable workbook of Voltaire, Hume, and the early Enlightenment. He died at Rotterdam in December 1706.