BAYLE’S DOUBLE IMAGE DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Jonathan Israel

While it is clear that during the later eighteenth century Bayle’s stand- ing and importance were already set on that long era of decline which characterized his legacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he nevertheless continued to exert a vast and pervasive infl uence over the Enlightenment during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. For each of several pivotal fi gures, such as the Anglo-Dutch republican, Bernard Mandeville, the English Deist, Anthony Collins, the Berlin Huguenot, Charles Étienne Jordan, and the Danish philosophe, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), Bayle’s writings appear to have been the single most important intellectual and literary stimulus. At the same time, a stark dualism is evident in his status in European thought as there were other key fi gures, such as the Swiss enlighten- ers, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz (1663–1750) and Jean Barbeyrac, and the leading Spanish Early Enlightenment writer, Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676–1764), for whom Bayle seemed an entirely pernicious and “atheistic” infl uence only to be condemned and segregated from the proper, worthy and permissible Enlightenment. According to the Newtonian Abbé Chaudon, in his Dictionnaire anti-philosophique (1767), Bayle is a philosopher who should be reviled by anyone who wishes to uphold true moral values.1 There were also Catholic writers, hostile to the liberal Protestant theology of Bayle’s “rationaux” opponents in Holland and Berlin, such as the Abbé Claude-François Houtteville (1688–1742), caught between these two incompatible tendencies who experienced great diffi culty in making up their minds whether Bayle ought to be celebrated as a genuine “fi deist” or generally denounced as a crypto-atheist. Indeed, there were evidently two distinct, sharply divergent and bitterly rival interpretations of Bayle, ceaselessly in strife with each other throughout the middle decades of the Enlightenment,

1 [Abbé Chaudon], Dictionnaire anti-philosophique, 2 vols, Avignon 1769 (1767), I, pp. 52–56.

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rival interpretations which in some ways exactly parallel the dispute going on among historians today about whether Bayle was genuinely a “fi deist” or, on the other hand, a profoundly subversive and radi- cal thinker conspiring against the existing order under the cover of “fi deism”. The fascinating phenomenon of Bayle’s dual image during the En- lightenment was indeed an important component of the Enlightenment itself and requires more investigation than it has so far received. But before further exploring the parallel between the two debates, that in the eighteenth century, and the two rival sets of Bayle interpretations featuring in the scholarly literature today, we should note a crucially important difference between the two controversies about how to con- strue Bayle’s legacy. For the propagators of “Bayle the fi deist” image during the Enlightenment, invariably men of the moderate mainstream Enlightenment, purposely designed, by means of this construction, not just to defi ne but also to diminish Bayle’s role, that is they meant to lessen his infl uence and reduce the impact of radical thought, whereas it is not, of course, inherent in the motivation of those who follow Élisabeth Labrousse, Richard Popkin and others in recent times, in depicting Bayle as a “fi deist”, to reduce his signifi cance. Nevertheless, it is arguable that it is precisely this—in my opinion mistaken—view, tenacious especially in the United States, Britain and Holland—which explains why Bayle is often not taken very seriously, or considered an interesting philosopher, in American and British philosophy depart- ments and, equally, why Bayle’s vast contribution to the Enlightenment continues to be greatly underestimated. Reading Bayle, as is well known, had a profound and formative impact on countless readers of the High Enlightenment and often changed their outlook markedly. This has been remarked, for instance, about the young Frederick the Great, during the 1730s, and largely contributed, seemingly, to his disenchantment with the philosophy of Wolff.2 Frederick’s admiration for Bayle persisted in later years and Voltaire cannot have been altogether pleased when, in 1776, the king, expressing admiration for those who had inspired the profound “revolu- tion” wrought by the Enlightenment, remarked in a letter to him that

2 J. Häseler, Ein Wanderer zwischen den Welten. Charles Etienne Jordan (1700–1745), Sigmaringen 1993, pp. 30, 103–104, 136; E. Birnstiel, “Frédéric II et le Dictionnaire de Bayle”, in: H. Bost and Ph. de Robert (eds), Pierre Bayle citoyen du monde, Paris 1999, pp. 147, 156.

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