II.

Life

Bayle was born on November 18, 1647, in Le Carla (now Le Carla-Bayle) a small town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His family was Protestant, or Huguenot, which is to say that it belonged to a minority of 5 per cent of the otherwise almost entirely Catholic population of France. Being Protestant meant severe disadvantages. The Edict of Nantes (1598) sought to put an end to the horrors of the century’s wars of religion, guaranteeing certain civil rights to the Protestants. The rights were minimal, however, and in practice hardly respected. Bayle aggravated his own situation when, at the Jesuit school that he chose to attend, he abjured Protestantism only to return to it upon graduation, thus leaving him in Catholic eyes not just a heretic, but a relapsed heretic. He was thus persona non grata in France for the rest of his life.

Bayle first fled to Calvinist Geneva, where he eked out a living as a tutor. He eventually slipped back into France for a teaching position at the Protestant Academy at Sedan, which he held until its closing in 1681. Not long before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which erased what remained of Huguenot rights, Bayle arrived in Rotterdam, where he taught at a school for Protestant refugees. The financial success of the Dictionary finally enabled Bayle to devote himself entirely to the life of scholarship that he always craved. Not to be distracted from that life, he rejected an attractive offer of marriage as well as a university chair. He never left Holland. Never blessed with robust health, and often afflicted with migraine, Bayle died on December 28, 1706, probably due to a heart attack brought on by tuberculosis.