Bayle’s two consciences and the paradox of the “conscientious persecutor”

Bayle scholars have wondered for many decades about the possible self-contradictions and difficulties of Bayle’s theory of toleration, and how to save the theory’s internal coherence. In this article, I will try to add new evidence to an interpretation I have already suggested, and maintain (1) that ‘conscience’ admits a double definition by Bayle: an intellectualist and traditional one, and a sentimentalist definition borrowed from Malebranche; (2) that the irruption of the latter in the Commentaire philosophique undermines the foundation of Bayle’s theory and threatens to justify persecution exercised “in good faith”; (3) that in his later years, also because of this paradox, Bayle abandons a moral foundation of toleration based on the “innocence of invincible error”; and (4) that, in his eyes, the only solution to the question of toleration is a political one in the context of a secular state.