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Life
The exiled skeptic whose vast Dictionary turned doubt into a method and handed the Enlightenment its arguments for tolerance.
The most dangerous writer of the eighteenth century. He used wit as a weapon and spent his life fighting ignorance, superstition, and cruelty in their most powerful forms.
Connection
Pierre Bayle armed the philosophes Voltaire — Voltaire and the Encyclopedists mined Bayle's skeptical Dictionary for a generation; he called it the arsenal of the Enlightenment.
Ideas
Words
“An opinion is none the truer for passing from age to age; errors are not improved by being old.”
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
“To hold a pen is to be at war.”
Key Moments
1647 CE
Born in France
c. 1681 CE
Exile in Rotterdam
1686 CE
Commentary on the Words
1697 CE
The Critical Dictionary
1694 CE
Born in Paris
1734 CE
Letters on England
1759 CE
Candide
1778 CE
Death in Paris
Works
Historical and Critical Dictionary
Candide
Treatise on Tolerance