Bayle the Man, Bayle the Political Animal

Pierre Bayle. Political Writings . Translated and edited by Sally Jenkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. lxiii + 367. $70.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

Elisabeth Labrousse, Edward James, Antony McKenna, Maria-Cristina Pitassi, and Ruth Whelan, eds. Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, Vol. I, 1662-1674 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999). Pp. xliv + 432. £75.00 cloth.

Elisabeth Labrousse, Laurence Bergon, Hubert Bost, Edward James, Antony McKenna, Maria-Cristina Pitassi, Wiep Van Bunge, and Ruth Whelan, eds. Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, Vol. II, 1674-1677 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2001). Pp. xx + 529. £89.00 cloth.

Two issues have occupied substantial segments of the Bayle scholarship in recent years. One is the question of Bayle's attitude toward religion, and the other is the best characterization of his politics. The late Elisabeth Labrousse set the terms for these debates when she concluded in the early 1960's that Bayle was a fideistic Calvinist in religion and a monarchist in politics. These questions matter for all eighteenth-century scholars if it is accepted that Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique was the "arsenal of the Enlightenment." Today we talk of many Enlightenments, so the questions can be put like this: Was Bayle the progenitor of a Religious Enlightenment or a Radical Enlightenment? Of a Monarchist Enlightenment or a Republican Enlightenment?

We will not enter into the question of the reception of Bayle's work throughout the eighteenth century, which probably was very different from what he might have expected. Rather, we will focus on what we can make of Bayle's intentions from the first two volumes of the new edition of Bayle's correspondence and the publication of a selection of his political writings in English translation. These texts provide an opportunity to reappraise Labrousse's conclusions. Gianluca Mori has recently argued that Bayle's philosophy implies atheism, starting from as early as his first philosophical work and becoming ever more clear by his final works of the early 1700's (Bayle philosophe, 1999). In the introduction to her volume of selections from Bayle's Dictionnaire, Sally Jenkinson suggests that Bayle was no more monarchist than republican, depending on the context. So, how do these texts help us resolve these debates?

Mori insists that he is not saying anything about Bayle the man, who may or may not have had personal religious beliefs inconsistent with his philosophy. As he points out, it is virtually impossible to know the inner thoughts and feelings of any thinker; all we know are the texts they left. But there is a counter-theory that holds that no writer can insulate his philosophy from his personal life, and that whatever we can know about biography and psychology will bear upon philosophy. The correspondence in these volumes allows us as near to the man as possible, and what we find here is no evidence that Bayle was self-consciously an atheist, at least in these early years. Bayle is consistent throughout these letters in writing to family that he prays for their and his own health and prosperity. In his letters to family and to friends he is clearly a partisan of the Reformed (Protestant) religion. Of course, all of this could have been sociable hypocrisy, but one might expect a few clues if that was the case, and there are none that are obvious.

But there are two paths which could eventually lead to atheism. One is the image that emerges of Bayle as a voracious reader, bibliophile, man of letters, and self-conscious citizen of the republic of letters. Some of this meant reading the religious polemics of friends like the Protestant Pierre Jurieu, and his Catholic adversaries. But some of this side of his life is rather insulated from the world of religion. For example, Letters 29 and 65 are tours de force of pagan classical scholarship, and other letters demonstrate an early engagement with skepticism, irony, and satire. This side of...