Religious controversy and historical methodology in Pierre Bayle's Critique générale.

Abstract

Famous for his Dictionnaire historique et critique, Pierre Bayle (1547-1706) is best known as the sceptical father of Enlightenment thought. Although considered to be an atheist since the time of Voltaire, his biography reveals the likelihood of his having had a Christian outlook, at least until the last years of his life. Since about 1960 scholars have shown his Calvinist ideology to exist in his writings, particularly those predating the Dictionnaire historique et critique. An early, lessor known work, the Critique generale de l'Histoire du calvinisme reflects his Calvinist outlook. Composed to refute the Histoire du calvinisme written by the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg (1610-1686), who denounced the Protestant Reformation and justified the coercive measures of Louis XIV against the Huguenots, it contains the one of the first Protestant compositions of the Reformation as an historical phenomenon. More importantly, it contains the first mention and elucidation of historical pyrrhonism, an historiographic concept that Bayle derived from his readings of the Libertines, especially Francois de La Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672). Bayle's historical pyrrhonism is considered to be the foundation of modern historical criticism. Armed with historical pyrrhonism and an exacting dialectic, Bayle refuted Maimbourg so successfully that the name Maimbourg became synonymous with bad history, in the process helping to define the essential qualities of the historian for the eighteenth century.