Baron d'Holbach

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was a philosopher, writer and encyclopedist of German birth who became a naturalised Frenchman and one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment. He was born in Edesheim, in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a well-known salon. He is remembered above all as one of the most radical advocates of materialism and atheism in the eighteenth century.

The son of a wine-grower from the region, he was adopted as a child by an uncle who had made a fortune on the Paris stock exchange, and this allowed him a thorough education. He studied at Leiden University from 1744 to 1748, where he befriended John Wilkes, and then settled in Paris. After the death of his first wife in 1754, he married her sister and inherited a large fortune, which let him devote himself entirely to intellectual life. For decades he hosted regular gatherings at his home on the rue Royale, held on Thursdays and Sundays, attended by contributors to the Encyclopédie such as Diderot, Grimm, D'Alembert, Condorcet and Helvétius, along with British visitors such as Hume and Adam Smith. He was also a discreet and generous patron to his friends.

He contributed close to four hundred articles to the Encyclopédie, mostly on chemistry, metallurgy and geology, and translated many German scientific works into French. His reputation, however, rests on his writings against religion, which he published anonymously or under pseudonyms and which were printed outside France, usually in Amsterdam. Christianity Unveiled appeared in 1761, and in 1770 came The System of Nature, his best-known book. In it he argued that the universe is matter in motion governed by necessary natural laws, that human beings are purely physical and possess no immaterial soul, and that free will is an illusion. For him religion arose from ignorance and served as a support for despotism, so he regarded it as an obstacle to moral progress. His ethics, set out in The Universal Morality (1776), rested on the pursuit of happiness rather than on scripture. In his last years he turned to political questions, as in The Social System.

The Church pressed to suppress The System of Nature, and many writers produced refutations. Much of his work was not widely attributed to him until the early nineteenth century. His ideas influenced figures such as Marat, Danton, Sade, Godwin, Shelley, Kant and Marx, and he is now regarded as one of the principal exponents of French materialism.