Gros, Jean-Michel <br/><br/>
The Art of Writing in the Explanations of Bayle’s Dictionary 

 -  2005.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 20 
<br/><br/> 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 coded writing will transform these texts - supposed to be of justification and self-censorship - into a plea for the freedom to philosophize. In his first texts, for instance in VariousSeveral Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, he exercised 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 category of audience a few keys for reading that should deny censorship part of its noxiousness and raison d'être by bypassing it. Such a pedagogical approach is seen 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".