En 1685, sous le règne de Louis XIV, au moment où la monarchie française voulut extirper l'altérité protestante en révoquant l'édit de Nantes (1598), trois contemporains, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) et Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) élaborèrent des utopies dans lesquelles ils nous font connaître leur vision d'une France idéale. Ces trois utopies, nous voulons les restituer au cours de ce mémoire de maîtrise et souligner quelles sont leurs propositions respectives en matière de gouvernement et de relations interreligieuses. Nous aborderons leurs positions quant aux conséquences politico-religieuses de la Révocation. Et enfin nous dirons quel est le traitement que ces trois auteurs réservent dans leurs textes à la question de la tolérance étatique. / In 1685, during the reign of Louis XIV, the French monarchy tried to extirpate the Calvinist alterity from the kingdom by revoking the Edict of Nantes (1598). At that time three contemporaries, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) and Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), the first Catholic, the others Protestants, conceived utopias in which they introduce us to their vision of an ideal France. The general aim of this master's thesis is to analyze these three utopias and show their proposals in matters of government and interfaith relationship. More precisely, we will study the authors' positions about the politico-religious consequences of the Revocation. We will also see in their writings how they understand the tolerance issue.

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Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) construit sa pensée tantôt en se rapprochant d’esprits contemporains, tantôt en s’en éloignant. Pour examiner sa figure complexe, nous confrontons ses textes à ceux des écrivains de Port-Royal, tels Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole et Blaise Pascal, ainsi qu’à ceux de Bossuet. Notre analyse se situe au prolongement des études ayant tenté ces comparaisons, comme l’ont fait É. Labrousse, K. Nozawa et L. Simonutti pour le débat théologique, et A. McKenna et G. Mori sur le plan philosophique. Après avoir vérifié que la théologie de Bayle et celle de Port-Royal sont également fondées sur les idées thomistes de conscience humaine et de loi naturelle, nous avons précisé que la relecture des textes de Nicole permet à Bayle de reformuler le concept thomiste d’ignorance pour proposer une forme plus radicale de tolérance religieuse : tous les hommes ont le droit de suivre leur conscience – fût-elle errante. Nous avons ensuite rapproché la pensée politique de Bayle de celle de Port-Royal ainsi que de celle de Bossuet. Bayle, Arnauld et Bossuet, partisans de l’obéissance civile au pouvoir politique, condamnent Pierre Jurieu qui réclame le droit des peuples contre les souverains, au nom de la liberté de conscience. Ils s’opposent également aux traités « monarchomaques » du XVIe siècle, dont Jurieu est héritier. Cette condamnation conduit Bayle à séparer politique et religion, ainsi qu’à s’opposer à Bossuet, qui permet à Louis XIV d’imposer aux huguenots la conversion au catholicisme, y compris par la force ; Bayle s’approche ainsi de Pascal qui n’adhère pas à l’emploi de la force pour étendre le catholicisme. / Our study is aimed at emphasizing the Catholic influence on Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)’s texts. For the purpose of arriving at sweeping interpretations, we deal with the texts of writers of Port-Royal, such as Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal, and those of Bossuet. We follow and develop Bayle studies that have attempted these comparisons such as E. Labrousse, K. Nozawa, A. McKenna, G. Mori. At first, we confirm that the theology of Bayle and Port-Royal is based on Thomistic ideas of human conscience and natural law. And the re-reading of the texts of Nicole allows Bayle to rephrase the Thomistic concept of ignorance to propose a radical form of religious tolerance : all men have the right to follow their conscience – even if it is errant. Our next approach is toward Bayle’s political thought. For this purpose, we compare his texts with Catholic texts. Bayle, Arnauld and Bossuet, advocates of civil obedience to political power, condemn Pierre Jurieu, who demands peuples right of rebellion against a monarch in the name of freedom of conscience. They are also opposed to French Huguenot theorists at the end of the sixteenth century named « Monarchomachs », who offered to Jurieu intellectual justifications for resistance to religious persecution. This condemnation leads Bayle to separate political domain from religious domain, contrary to Bossuet’s view, that allows Louis XIV to impose on the Huguenots the conversion to Catholicism, including by force. In this context, Bayle is similar to Pascal, who disapprove of using the political force to extend Catholicism.

This thesis presents a new study of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1696), with special reference to Bayle’s polemical engagement with the theologian Pierre Jurieu. While recent years have seen a surge of interest in Bayle, there is as yet no consensus on how to interpret Bayle’s ambiguous stance on reason and religion, and how to make sense of the Dictionnaire: although specific parts of the Dictionnaire have received much scholarly attention, the work has hardly been studied as a whole, and little is known about how the Dictionnaire was influenced by Bayle’s polemic with Jurieu. This thesis aims to establish a new method for reading the Dictionnaire, under a dual premise: first, that the work can only be rightly understood when placed within the immediate context of its production in the 1690s; second, that it is only through an appreciation of the mechanics of the work as a whole, and of the role played by its structural and stylistic particularities, that we can attain an appropriate interpretation of its parts. Special attention is paid to the heated theological-political conflict between Bayle and Jurieu in the 1690s, which had a profound influence on the project of the dictionary and on several of its major themes, such as the tensions in the relationship between the intellectual sphere of the Republic of Letters and the political state, but also the danger of religious fanaticism spurring intolerance and war. The final chapters demonstrate that Bayle’s clash with Jurieu was also one of the driving forces behind Bayle’s reflection on the problem of evil; they expose the fundamentally problematic nature of both Bayle’s theological association with Jurieu, and his self-defence in the second edition of the Dictionnaire. The title of this thesis comes from Herman Melville’s novel: ‘Pierre, or the Ambiguities’.