1. Leonard Krieger, "Series Editor's Introduction," in Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster, ed. Orest Ranum, Classsic European Historians (Chicago, 1976), ix.

2. It was widely believed by those who favored Catholic unity that Protestantism in France was on the decline. See Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (Cleveland, 1963), chapter 1.

3. See Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), 114.

4. See Olivier Abel, "De l'obligation de croire: les objections de Bayle au commentaire augustinien de 'Contrains-les d'entrer,'" Etudes théologiques et religieuses, 61 (1986): 36.

5. Cf. Orest Ranum, "Introduction," in Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Forster, ed. Ranum: "He was never reluctant to judge all of the past in the light of the single most important historical event of all time: the brief passage of the man-God Jesus through a life on earth" (xxvi). Ranum also points out that the chapter on Jesus and his teachings lies at the physical center of the book in all its various editions.

6. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle, in Oeuvres, ed. L'Abbé Velat and Yvonne Champailler (Paris, 1961), 830-31. Subsequent citations, with the initials DHU, will be given in the text.

7. The imaginary virtuous heathens of More's Utopia and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels —including, arguably, the virtuous Houyhnhnms—may be seen to exemplify this tradition.

8. Regarding Bossuet's general attitude toward Louis's adulterous behavior, see Ranum, "Introduction," ix-xlvi.

9. See Erich Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge: Der Beitrag der franzözischen Protestanten zur Entwicklung analytischer Denkformen am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1959), 306.

10. Hazard, The European Mind, 1 4. Cf. DHU, 957: "Une coutume nouvelle était un prodige en Egypte: tout s'y faisait toujours de même; et l'exactitude qu'on y avait ô garder les petites choses, maintenait les grandes."

11. See DHU, 959.

12. Since Bayle was arguing not for a deistic minimalism that would level out religious differences but for religious toleration that would allow groups to follow divergent doctrines regarding the Christian mysteries, the historiographic implications of his rationalism may seem less radical than those of the deists. But since Bayle's whole argument depends on the indubitability of independently available moral principles that serve as criteria for interpreting Christian revelation, and hence that allow one to condemn religious intolerance and persecution, he needs to follow the deists in closing the remaining gap between Christian ethics and natural ethics. This he does explicitly in the Commentaire philosophique (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus Christ "Contrains-les-d'entrer," ed. Jean-Michel Gros [Paris, 1992], 104-6), where he rejects the notion that natural morality is worldly and self-interested but assimilates it to the Christian rejection of the world and suppression of the passions. Although theological orthodoxy, as we have seen in Bossuet, allowed one to acknowledge the presence of the natural light among pagans and treat it as a glimmering of the moral truths that would be revealed and explained by Jesus, Bayle's argument would seem to require him to say that moral truths are no less clear and distinct to the pagans than they are in Scripture. But, unlike the deists, Bayle does not claim that the natural light tells us enough about religion to allow us to dispense with revelation, only that it allows us to reject certain false interpretations of revelation—namely, those that conflict with moral truth.

13. Bayle and other writers, however, will not neglect to cite the fact that Turks and other Muslims were also much more tolerant than the Christians.

14. Compare Roy Porter's characterization of the historiographic principle that animated late seventeenth-century British historians: "What came first was right, so the historian's business was to discover what came first" (Gibbon: Making History [New York, 1988], 18).

15. The advice comes from a long speech, "reported" by Dio, in which Maecenas advises Augustus regarding the governance of the empire. (See Dio's Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols., Loeb Classical Library [London, 1917], bk. 52.) Although contemporary scholarship considers this speech to be "in reality a political pamphlet setting forth Dio's own views of government" which, complete with anachronisms, was put into the mouth of Maecenas (see Cary's introduction, 1:xv), Bayle—elsewhere a pioneer of critical historiography—does not question its authenticity.

16. Bayle, De la tolerance: Commentaire philosophique, ed. Gros, 72. Subsequent citations, appearing with the abbreviation CP, will be given in the text.

17. See Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 8 (The Hague, 1965), especially the essay on the article "David" in Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique. Although Bayle's position might seem to be the most prudent one for the representative of a persecuted minority to take, it was bitterly opposed by his coreligionist Pierre Jurieu, who argued for the right of revolution against Louis XIV. Jurieu also argued, as did "Maecenas," against the toleration of new religions. See his Le vrai système de l'église et la véritable analyse de la foi (Dordrecht, 1686). See also Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the French Huguenots of the Dispersion (1947; rpt., New York, 1972), esp. 139-65.

18. In the body of the Commentaire (244), Bayle writes:"Toute secte qui s'en prend aux lois des sociétés, et qui rompt les liens de la sûreté publique, en excitant des seditions . . . mérite d'être incessamment exterminée."

19. The incident to which Bayle refers is the subject of Juvenal's Satire 15. Although Juvenal ultimately focuses more on the barbarism that results from the conflict than on the superstitious exclusivism that generates it, Bayle's characterization of the cause is quite consistent with what we find in Juvenal:

summus utrimque

inde furor volgo, quod numina vicinorum
odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos
esse deos quos ipse colit. (ll. 35-38)

This quotation is from Juvenal and Persius, rev. ed., trans. G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1940), 288-90.

20. Pierre Jurieu would actually argue that sects that are not well established should be abandoned or persecuted, while sects that are well established should be immune from persecution. See Le vrai système, 165 ff. The fact that Jurieu could argue for such a distinction provides one more reason to doubt that Bayle could have had such a thing in mind.

21. See the first chapter of Bayle's "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:1011b.

22. See Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1964), 2:502.

23. See Bayle, "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial" 3:1011b.

24. Ibid., 3:1012b.

25. It might seem that in the context of Bayle's theory of toleration the paradox also presents some practical difficulties since it presents grounds both for suppressing Christianity and for tolerating it. However, in chapter 6 of the Seconde partie of the Commentaire, Bayle will explain that the right of a government to suppress the threat of sedition that comes from a dangerous religion—in this case Roman Catholicism—does not extend to impinging on the rights of conscience. One can disarm those who threaten the public peace without having to try to change their religious beliefs.

26. Bayle also refers to taking revenge on those who have sacked Delphi, but this case, as he indicates, does not involve claims to truth or desires to compel consciences. Only in the Egyptian example is there mortal hatred that is generated by the fact that the inhabitants of each town think that their religion is the true one.

27. (gibbon cites Bayle frequently and approvingly in the Decline and Fall (twenty-two times, according to the count of David P. Jordan; see his Gibbon and His Roman Empire [Urbana, Ill. 1971], 169). Gibbon looked on Bayle as a kindred spirit—in part because both had made youthful conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism—and considered the skepticism of Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique to serve as an annihilator of "false religions." See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 64-65. For arguments that have helped to move scholarly opinion toward accepting Bayle's protestations that he was a sincere Calvinist, see Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. 2, and Richard Popkin's essays on Bayle in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego, 1980), 29. See also Richard H. Popkin, "Introduction," in Pierre Bayle, The Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, 1965). For a recent case study of the eighteenth century's appropriation of Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, "Reading Pierre Bayle in Paris," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia, 1987).

28. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 2:339-40. Subsequent citations to this work, abbreviated NHR, will appear in the text. Page numbers will appear without the volume number.

29. Elsewhere, in his essay "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," Hume associates superstitious fear with a willingness to submit to the power of priestly mediators and distinguishes such superstition from the enthusiast's disposition "to regard himself as a distinguished favorite of the Divinity." This allows for a clear distinction between superstitious Catholics and enthusiastic sectarian Protestants. J. G. A. Pocock argues that Gibbon's account of the shift between early Christianity and Catholic hierarchy is a movement from enthusiasm to superstition informed by Hume's distinction ("Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighteenth-Century Life, n.s. 8 [1982]: 83-94). In my view, Hume's tendency in the Natural History is less to distinguish between early Christian enthusiasm and Catholic superstition than to assimilate early Christianity to Catholicism, particularly with respect to morality and intolerance, and this assimilation informs Gibbon's general contrast between paganism and Christianity. This is not to say that the enthusiasm/superstition dichotomy has no role in Gibbon's analysis. But I will show that the dichotomy is less an organizing principle than a single element in a complex structure of dichotomies.

30. We have briefly encountered such republicanism in our discussion of Usbek's enlightened viewpoint in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. For a deservedly influential study of the transmutation of republican theory to meet the ideological needs of competing parties in the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

31. On Bossuet and Livy, see Ranum, "Introduction," xxv.

32. Livy, trans. B. O. Foster, 14 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London, 1919), 1:69.

33. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Il Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tiro Livio (Milan, 1977), 161. Translation is that of Leslie J. Walker, in The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli (New Haven, Conn., 1950), 241-42.

34. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion, lue à l'Académie de Bordeaux le 18 Juin 1716," in Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. André Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-55), 3:38. The "Dissertation" is of interest, despite the fact that it was not published until 1799, because it represents a striking combination and distillation of ideas—some of which we have encountered separately in Bayle, Livy, and Machiavelli—that inform a strand of Gibbon's analysis of Roman paganism. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated "DPR" and given in text; page numbers will appear without the volume number.

35. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896), 1:22. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated DF and appear in the text.

36. Gibbon's irony is transparent at least to those "similarly enlightened." See Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore, 1989), 62.

37. In addition to the episode in Juvenal referred to by Bayle (see p. 123 above, and n. 19), another ancient discussion of Egyptian intolerance is to be found in Plutarch, who offers several explanations for religious divisions among the Egyptians, including, most prominently, the notion that these divisions were instituted by a cunning and evil Egyptian king in order to keep his volatile people from uniting in rebellion against him.

See Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, ed. and trans. J. Gwyn Griffiths (Cardiff, 1970). Such an explanation, of course, would go against the grain of the Enlightenment argument for secular control of religion but would also be unattractive to early modern proponents of intolerance. Hence it would be surprising to find it mentioned in the discourse under discussion in this chapter.

38. "But," as Gibbon notes in the following sentence, "insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights, and this new species of martyrdom served only to introduce a new scandal into the church."

39. For the purpose of this analysis, I am leaving out of account Gibbon's use of the idea that the civic virtue that had obtained in the Roman republic has, by imperial times, undergone a process of corruption. While Gibbon certainly appeals to this notion, his use of it does not require us to see the relationship between elite and masses as specific to the empire. For while it is true, for example, that the legions that were once motivated by patriotism now, during the empire, are pushed by "other motives of a different but not less forcible nature—honour and religion," this does not mean that the same people who were once motivated by civic duty now require the spurs of honor and religion. Rather, it means that an army of the propertied with a stake in the republic ("citizens with a country to love and property to defend") has given way to a mercenary army "drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate of mankind." Machiavelli and others in the early modern discourse of civic humanism follow Livy (see pages 135-37) in treating religion as an instrument of social control imposed very early in Roman history. Gibbon's notion of the decline of civic humanism in Rome does not seem to depart from this view and hence does not treat the masses as any more virtuous during the republican period, or any less in need of religious control, but merely as less conspicuous. On Gibbon's relationship to the tradition of civic humanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 105, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 153-69.

40. See note 29.

41. Hume's distinction between enthusiasm and superstition is part of this tradition. My reservations about Pocock's perceptive observation that Gibbon organizes his treatment of early Christians and Roman Catholicism around the distinction between enthusiasm and superstition (see note 29) are based partly on my sense that the basic distinction is older than Hume and partly on my sense that Gibbon does not use it as a consistent organizing principle but simply as one phase in a shifting structure of dichotomies.

42. See Bayle, "Reponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:954a.