ABSTRACT
For the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, civil safety was a matter of erasing religious conflicts, which constituted the main threat to countries’ political peace. In the Commentaire philosophique (1686), he developed a theory of tolerance which also addressed the question of state security and the religious elements that endangered it. The question of safety will serve both as a justification and as a limitation of this theory of tolerance. In this sense, achieving social peace (and thus lasting safety for the kingdom) requires control, by both the religious confessions and the civil powers, of the passions that lead to persecutions and conversions and thus to disorder and social insecurity.
