'pbLa pensée et Pierre Bayle’s work (1647-1706) have been an enigma, which has always been the subject of conflicting interpretations. In the face of persecution prior to the dismissal of the Nantes Edit, he preferred exile in Rotterdam. His review of the ‘News of the Republic of Letters’/emb was one of the first forms of the European public space, and the fascinant ‘historical and critical embDictionary’/emb (1696) could be said to constitute the Enlightenment Matrix. In his ‘philosophical commentary’/emb, where he praised tolerance, he criticised the religious oppression of ‘France all Catholic’. However, in his ‘Advice to Refugees’/Emb, he fustrated any religious sedition by refugee protesters. The intrication of these two lines from Hobbes and Machiavel on the one hand, and from Milton and Bodin to Calvin on the other, helps to understand the political and politico-theological paradoes, which are the founders of a modernity today in crisis. In seeking to think of these ‘disputes’, Bayle invests a pluralistic, de-linarised style of writing, which corresponds to the oblique nature of its pleading for the truthfulness of the other.’/PB