The third centenary of the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle
Michel Begon October 1996
Published in Rotterdam in October 1696, then reissued until the 19th century often and read at the time of cultivated throughout Europe, the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle is considered the first great work of philosophical movement Enlightenment. Pamphlets of Voltaire, that great book, fifty years ago, scholarship, the alacrity and impertinence; both Voltaire has he inspired to the point of shameless plunder. While Descartes preferred to remain silent on the condemnation of Galileo in particular, that Fontenelle cultivated doubts, but sparingly, or that Locke's argument was abusing authority, Pierre Bayle invented the methodical banter, which made him the founder of the republic of letters, the precursor of modern journalism and the inventor of the execution by derision. Yet this was no Voltaire, but a Protestant, nor an anarchist, but a Ariège. It is true that the tradition of the county of Foix was always rebelling against established authority.
The third centenary of this major event in Western civilization has been commemorated with a symposium, 13, 14 and 15 September 1996 in the Reformed Church of Carla-Bayle, built in the 19th century shaped theater. The first President of the Court of Accounts, Pierre Joxe, honored the event with his presence. Communications due to a dozen scholars in Paris and local scholars will be published in the conference proceedings.
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But that was then Pierre Bayle? A first Ariege, who all his life in exile not only kept the homesickness, to the point of the genealogy of the house of Foix and celebrate the river Ariege in his Dictionary, but the emphasis Occitan, rolling the "r" as its Arize rollers. So should you avoid the ridicule of his name pronounced "beast" in Paris and ringing the diphthong "lease", as with us. The "sheriff" langue d'oc is the equivalent of "bailiff" in langue d'oil, naming the royal official, vested with judicial, military or financial.
Pierre Bayle was born November 18, 1647 in the village of Carla, which later took with him the name of the philosopher. This bastide Terrefort cap a hill higher than the neighbors, today planted corn or sunflower, overlooking the Pyrenees exceptional vision, at least in good weather. It was the 17th century a fortified city, shopping and populated with many artisans and vintners, as did the Mas d'Azil it is close. She did, she is still part of the core comprising the Protestant Bordes-sur-Arize, Sabarat, Mas, Gabre and Comrade. Jean Bayle, son of a dyer of Montauban, where he was appointed pastor and married there in 1643, Jeanne de Bruguière, belonging to the Calvinist nobility of the country. The couple had three son and made him even education, away from the intellectual fashions of the time. In his correspondence, Pierre Bayle tells how he accompanied his father when he went to worship Gabre, Plantaurel by crossing the trails, but he missed so much preaching to the paternal, he s' eclipsed for catching trout and crayfish in the streams, or quail in the thicket.
Because he never had the sour austerity that too easily to his coreligionists. He loved fun and laugh, like the Gallic its dictionary are authentic. His love life, we do not know much, except maybe he seduced the wife of Pastor Jurieu, his former friend, now his mortal enemy. And since he was a heretic, in the light of the established church, he prided himself as Apollinaire said later, to be "the heretic of all churches."
Freeman, was his daring defiance of the devout, risking his life or the salvation of his people. Sent to the Protestant Academy of Puylaurens, he quickly slammed the door to register incontinent college Jesuit of Toulouse and convert in 1669 to Catholicism. His meeting here of great teachers, it is not doubtful. But there was also repelled by the Catholic dogma, the cult of saints and especially the sacrament of the Eucharist, he confesses himself
"The excessive worship he saw the creatures make had seemed very suspicious and philosophy it has raised awareness about the impossibility of transubstantiation, he concluded that there was fallacy in the objections that he had died. "
(Chimera Cabal of Rotterdam)
Both Pierre Bayle returned he, in 1670, the Reformation, as King Henry IV made several times before dying Catholic as a dagger defrocked monk. But times were no longer going to and fro. Since 1665, the converts back to heresy was punishable by banishment or death, just as today, Muslims renouncing Islam for Christ. He had to flee, at age 23. First came to Geneva and then at Rouen, then to Paris, soon to Sedan, and finally to Rotterdam. Incidentally, he met and rallied theological controversies of the Calvinist Geneva:
"Arguments of grace have universal strangely shared minds. (...) It went so before, up to tradespeople wondered if they were to grace the universal or particular. "
Sincerely Protestant, as he wrote his deathbed, he hated the Orthodox of any edge, and imperialism of Louis XIV, he discovered with joy the libertines authors and works of his gallant time, he became infatuated more than any other in history and science natural he taught philosophy at Sedan and Rotterdam in the spirit of free inquiry, he began his most acerbic pen in the service of intelligence against superstition and tolerance against bigotry by publishing, in 1682, his Letter on Comets, become famous, at least by the citations of textbooks. A comet falling from the sky in 1680, which the astrologers were highly, to frighten the credulous and inflate their trade, Bayle took argument against the authority and respect for elders. The scandal was so huge in Europe that even the Calvinists were indignant. No, Bayle wrote, man is not the center of the world and the meteors are not omens of Providence. Moreover, ancient superstitions were fostered by the princes, priests and false savants to terrorize the people, and it is feared that such practices have not changed ... the 17th century.
"Politics has become intertwined as to represent the omens to be good resources, or to intimidate individuals, or to fill them with confidence. "
He aggravated his case for going to war against History of Calvinism in the Jesuit Maimbourg, since not happy to refute the slanders encourage the propaganda of Louis XIV, he put into question the partiality of all historians in the name of what he calls the "historical Pyrrhonism" and we would call the critical method in the humanities:
"The bias is evident in most historians. (...) These are stories that are worth nothing to the truth, but their number takes the place of some merit which they are opposed to the authority of a good historian and thus things become problematic. What diversity have we not seen during the last war relations between Paris and printed one we printed in Brussels or in Holland? (...) For to say, as some do, that the newspapers of other countries never tell the truth and that's always telling us, it's the most ridiculous prevention world, foreigners can not they not say the same for them? "
From such a text, while still valid, both the denunciation of" disinformation "rule that calls for tolerance and mutual trust in the possibility of objectivity, even history. But back then it was a lost cause! One can believe that the libels of the philosopher rather excited the rage of religious faction, who had seized power in Paris, where Madame de Maintenon, secretly married the king in 1684. For, as early as 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed the liberties of Reformed Churches, hired the famous "dragonnades", causing the exile of hundreds of thousands of Huguenots, and in 1689 invaded again United Provinces, on the occasion of the War of the League of Augsburg. Not without good reason, American historians speak of these events as the "first world war" ("World War I"), in which, of course, France was not yet on the part of Western democracies.
Animosity Royal took the turn of a personal vendetta against Pierre Bayle, whose brother Jacob, pastor of Carla after his father was the victim. Arrested for his relationship with philosopher Jacob Bayle died in prison, from the year 1685 at the Chateau Trompette in Bordeaux. The philosopher was very affected.
But Louis XIV lost this war, as follows, Non-European opinion, or even French, in his favor. Supporter of the other side, it was Pierre Bayle willy nilly ideologue. In March 1684 he edited the periodical called the New Republic of Letters, soon banned in France, to publish his free opinion on almost everything. Publishing director, he was long the sole writer, before the whole of Europe only reached him of the copy. It was a huge publishing success. One can not but compare this ariégeois Holland Germaine de Stael denouncing the Emperor from Coppet, Switzerland, or Victor Hugo lightning, since Jersey, Napoleon the Little. The tradition of activist intellectuals date of 1684, as historian Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie noted recently. Yet Bayle was not against the absolute monarchy, seeing at least a safeguard against civil war.
Prepared over twenty years, the Historical and Critical Dictionary appeared in 1696, with a hundred articles rated (Anaxogaras, Ariege, Arminius, Charron, Chrysippus, David, Eve, Muhammad, Manichaean, Nestorian Origen, Ovid Pomponazzi, Spinoza, etc..), but with two opposing effects. For better, there was still a huge bestseller, despite its volume and its prohibition in France, the book was the best seller of the late twentieth century. At that time throughout Europe cultivated read French! But worse, Pierre Bayle was accused of impiety and atheism, even by French Protestant churches of the United Provinces, including the Rev. Peter Jurieu. Atheism is a false accusation. She rather that pastors pledged to William of Orange became King of England by the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, he criticized his Republicanism. The memory of Cromwell and two brothers Witt still haunted the minds!
Dictionary covers philosophy, theology and history. Bayle shows himself an opponent of great philosophical systems, those of Aristotle, Spinoza and Leibniz in particular, which claim to reveal the truth of God and the World. Near Cartesianism, it accepts only piecemeal and local truths, which is not without it closer to the Anglo-Saxon empiricism. It therefore seeks patiently to show such inconsistency or clarify the point of history, to demonstrate the absurd inanity large sums of theological and philosophical.
The Reformation did to be true that the Bible and rejected any addition; Bayle, more restrictive, held the Bible as true in its passages dictated by the Holy Spirit and denounces the absurdity or incongruity many of the episodes. He did so out of demystification. He then puts his wry erudition in the service of his criticism. Speaking of Adam and Eve, here it competes with many pages of whether they ate the flesh of sin in Heaven or after having been expelled. If the father and mother the human race had committed adultery in the gardens of Eden, Paradise is not the pristine refuge from acts sinful believed there would be a contradiction. But if both were expected to procreate they were ousted by God of Paradise Lost, would not they at that time exceeded the biological age of childbirth? Serious debate, in which Bayle involves many renowned authors, with arguments increasingly fanciful, pretending to condemn them in turn:
"What we need mostly condemn, c is Error profane and libertine who say that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was none other than the pleasure of love, hence they conclude that the fall of our first parents was not something else the share of women that want to lose her virginity, and the part of man, that achieving this desire. "
Discussing predestination including the incompatibility of the goodness of God with his infinite foreknowledge, or simply the coexistence of good and evil, Bayle noted that the thesis has dualistic Manichaean not been rebutted. He recalls Then the war of the Albigenses and Cathars? It deals in any case the theological problem of how ludicrous: if a mother loving her daughter plan to secure knowledge that ball where she goes, she will lose her virginity, and if the mother knowingly allowed this disgrace accomplished, that she did not like his daughter, which is impossible, but if it prevented his fall by forbidding him the ball, she thereby prevent the misfortune from happening, which is in contradiction with the duality of good and evil. With such arguments, every schoolboy and even felt any big bluestem arrested in his flesh, he glaring at outrageous Dictionary and begging for more. Immediately out of stock, reprinted in disaster, completed in 1701, the huge structure had no fewer than 13 editions until the 19th century.
Pierre Bayle died in his room in Rotterdam a disease of the lungs, December 28, 1706, a famous but poor and hated. Historically, it never left his house, as the cool and rainy Holland seemed detestable. In his correspondence with his family, remained in the county of Foix, we know how much he regretted his homeland, the stature of Carla face of the Pyrenees and Mont Valier, vineyards on the slopes of Terrefort, where he gathered with his brothers black grapes when the October sun yellowed Plantaurel peaks, streams flowing gently crayfish the Arize and, further, the Ariege.
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In his time the reputation of Pierre Bayle was immense, both fear and hatred of the authoritarian regime of Louis XIV increased the glory of its most determined opponents. Voltaire took his style and laced up his boots to write his stories and his Philosophical Dictionary libertines in the overwhelming power and the Church of jokes and biting death. Therefore, ridicule could kill policy! In return, they cast opprobrium against Pierre Bayle, as evidenced by its near-namesake maliciously and elsewhere disciple Stendhal.
"My father did not buy the Dictionary of Bayle, the sale of our cousin Drier, not to compromise my religion, and he told me. "
Life of Henry Brulard
Today, our textbooks are so few and philosophical case for a as heroes, they accolent his name with that of Bernard de Fontenelle, more bland, but less formidable. Yet the influence and particularly the example of Pierre Bayle remained alive until today, especially in the Ariege. It is not an intellectual County of Foix who has attended the dictionary in his or her selected pieces four large folio of the 18th century.
perhaps more touching is the affection that the Dutch keep for the philosopher and his homeland. If the roads of Ariege and campsites near lakes in the Pyrenees in summer are particularly frequented the Dutch, is a sign of old friendship and unwavering. About thirty years, a team from the Netherlands took in hand the restoration of the Protestant Church of Carla-Bayle and left there in remembrance of his passing, an inscription in Flemish.
was recently inaugurated in his birthplace of Carla on the High Street between Temple and the Church, the museum in memory of the most famous writer and philosopher of Ariege. He welcomes every year thousands of visitors moved by so much suffering and so much courage.
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