War & Peace Quote by Pierre Bayle

Tolerance, in Bayle's hands, isn't a feel-good virtue; it's a political technology. Writing in the shadow of France's religious crackdowns and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Bayle watched the state try to manufacture unity through coercion and get the opposite: underground faiths, informers, exile, periodic violence. His line lands because it reverses the official logic of his era. Authorities claimed intolerance preserved order; Bayle insists intolerance is the engine of disorder. Peace doesn't come from everyone agreeing. It comes from everyone being allowed to disagree without fear.

The subtext is strategic and slightly subversive. Bayle isn't asking Catholics and Protestants to settle their metaphysics. He's downgrading theology as a basis for governance and upgrading coexistence as a measurable public good. "Squabbling" is doing cultural work here: it shrinks grand claims of holy purification into the petty reality they produce - feuds, factionalism, neighbor-against-neighbor policing. He's also taking a quiet jab at power: intolerance isn't just a private vice, it's something institutions administer, and it predictably creates instability that then justifies more repression.

Intent-wise, Bayle is arguing for a society that can survive pluralism. Tolerance becomes a peace treaty among imperfect humans, not a sentimental embrace. The sentence is neat, almost mathematical - source leads to outcome - because he's trying to make tolerance sound less like charity and more like common sense statecraft. In a Europe addicted to confessional uniformity, that clarity was its own provocation.