The “hereticide”. Freedom of conscience and popular indignation in a debate around Pierre Jurieu

Abstract

ABSTRACT The brilliant Protestant theologian Pierre Jurieu was a proud supporter of freedom of conscience and the right of resistance against the repressive policies of Catholic France. Once he took refuge in Calvinist Holland, however, Jurieu showed himself unwilling to extend the same religious freedoms to Catholics, Protestant dissidents and atheists that he had advocated against Catholics in France. This contradictory position, which demanded freedom of conscience for his own denomination but denied it to others, caused several reactions. Among them were Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire philosophique and the Traite de la liberte de conscience of the Socinian Noel Aubert de Verse, both published in 1686–1688. The two works are very similar, and there is a dialogue between their authors. However, the Traite uses a brilliant “Spinozist” argument in favour of toleration (inspired by the Republican tradition present in Socinian political thought) that Bayle could not adopt at that time, because it would have compromised his particular pro-monarchical strategy of opposition to Jurieu. This article aims to illustrate the unexpected convergence of opposing positions on the question of toleration in the modern age.