The art of writing in the Explanations of Bayle's Dictionary

The Rotterdam Consistory having sentenced a few articles on the occasion of the first edition of the Critical and Historical Dictionary, the later editions will contain a few explanations. Bayle, through his mastery of crypted writing will turn those texts - supposed to be of justification and self-censorship - into a plea for the freedom to philosophize. In his first texts, for instance in Several Thoughts on the Comet, he exercized an art of writing all the more efficient as it had been almost claimed as such in "Advices to the readers". Indeed, he belongs to a generation of writers attempting to give some kind of audience a few keys for reading that should enable, by by-passing censorship, to deprive it of part of its noxiousness and raison d'etre. Such a paedagogical approach unfolds itself in the News from the Republic of Letters and his Dictionary. Such keys still enable the contemporary reader to thwart the traps of those strange "Explanations".