opinion, to use a seventeenth-century expression, that Bayle
won so many admirers. Skepticism, stemming from the
Greeks, and brilliantly restated by Montaigne, was now wel-
comed by intellectuals who had become dubious about find-
ing absolute truth.

The times were also ripe for a reexamination of the past.
Flourishing national literatures and arts in France and in
England led to heated comparisons between classical and
contemporary cultures. The Bible itself was not exempt from
scrutiny. To cite only a few seventeenth-century examples,
Hobbes in England, Robert Simon, a French priest, and
Spinoza in Holland, engaged in what is known as the "higher
criticism." Bayle was to do so too, and in a highly original
fashion.

Political conditions were not favorable, however, to free-
dom of thought and expression in seventeenth-century Eu-
rope. In France, then at the height of her political power
and considered the center of European culture, the ideal was
the absolutist state with its insistence on uniformity. Re-
ligious and political nonconformity were ruthlessly sup-
pressed. The nunnery of the Jansenists, a Catholic sect, was
razed to the ground. The persecution of the Huguenots,
whose children were legally kidnaped, and who suffered the
quartering of dragoons to force their conversion, is a sad tale
well-known. It is no wonder then that Bayle, born a Huguenot
and the victim of persecution, set out to make orthodoxy
appear ridiculous and appealed for toleration.

So circumstance and the man combined to produce the
works of Bayle, and his greatest achievement, the Dictionary,
became the Bible of the eighteenth-centuryphilosophes and
the choice of Thomas Jefferson.

Pierre Bayle, the son of a Huguenot minister, was born
in 1647 in the village of Carla in the remote county of Foix,

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