Baron d'Holbach 1723 – 1789

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was a German-born French philosopher who became one of the most outspoken atheist and materialist voices of the high Enlightenment. His salon in Paris gathered Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, and a wide circle of philosophes, while his anonymous works, including The System of Nature and Good Sense, defended a thoroughgoing naturalism in which human beings are wholly part of nature and religious belief is a product of ignorance and fear. He also produced a substantial number of articles for the Encyclopedie.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was born in 1723 at Edesheim in the German Palatinate to an enriched merchant family. He was educated at the University of Leiden, moved to Paris in 1749 to inherit the title and fortune of his uncle Franz Adam d'Holbach, and was naturalized French. His house in the rue Royale Saint-Roch became from the 1750s the most celebrated salon of the radical French Enlightenment, hosting Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Garrick, and on extended visits Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin.

He contributed hundreds of articles, especially on chemistry and natural history, to the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert, and translated, often with editorial expansion, German and English works of natural science and freethought. His own atheist and materialist works — Christianity Unveiled (1761), The Sacred Contagion (1768), the System of Nature (1770), the System of Society (1773), and the Universal Morality — were published anonymously or under aliases in Amsterdam to evade French censorship.

D'Holbach is the most uncompromising voice of the radical Enlightenment: matter in motion is the sole reality, religion is a useful invention of priests, morality is founded on sociable self-interest, and rational legislation is the path to human happiness. The System of Nature, the first systematic statement of philosophical atheism in modern Europe, marked a high point of pre-revolutionary French thought. He died at Paris in January 1789.