# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/pierre-bayle
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:48:50.606Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/pierre-bayle"
name: "Pierre Bayle"
slug: "pierre-bayle"
description: "A Huguenot refugee who published a dictionary so dangerous he buried his best arguments in the footnotes. Leibniz wrote a book to refute him, Voltaire called him the greatest dialectician who ever lived, and Jefferson put the English translation in the Library of Congress's founding collection."
tagline: "French philosopher and writer (1647–1706)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Pierre_Bayle_by_Louis_Ferdinand_Elle.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1647-11-18"
deathDate: "1706-12-28"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           60.35
  momentum:             4.772093023255815
  historical:           24.181296
  currentAttention:     26.51162790697675
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "RISING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
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  - name: "History"
    slug: "history"
  - name: "France"
    slug: "france"
sources:
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    title: "Pierre Bayle"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Pierre Bayle"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Pierre Bayle was born 18 November 1647 in France, a Huguenot in a kingdom that would soon make that faith untenable. In 1681 he fled religious persecution for the Dutch Republic. From exile he began publishing his Historical and Critical Dictionary in 1697, a work that hid its most controversial ideas in sprawling footnotes or tucked them into articles on safe-seeming topics. His skeptical philosophy and his case for religious toleration fed directly into the Enlightenment—so much so that he's considered a forerunner of the Encyclopédistes a generation later. He died 28 December 1706, having shaped the terms of the argument that followed.