Baron d'Holbach (1723 to 1789)

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Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), was a German-born French man of leisure, known as a conversationalist, host, scholar, secular moralist, and philosopher. He was celebrated for his freely spoken views on atheism, determinism, and materialism and for his contributions to Diderot's "Encyclopédie".

Born in December 1723 in Edesheim not far from Karlsruhe in the Palatinate, Paul Henri Thiry was baptized a Roman Catholic. When he was 12 years old, his father took him to an ennobled and financially successful uncle, Franciscus Adam d'Holbach, a naturalized Frenchman living in Paris. From him the young Thiry received his upbringing, a fortune, and a new surname. After an early education in Paris, Paul Henri d'Holbach went in 1744 to the university at Leiden. By 1749 the young man had returned to France and become naturalized, and in 1753 he inherited his uncle's title and fortune.

At his town house in Paris and on his country estate at Grandval, D'Holbach entertained writers, philosophers, and other men of influence. His salon contributed much to the development and communication of 18th-century thought; but D'Holbach himself made a more direct contribution. This master of five languages wrote and studied continuously. In the 1750s he translated German scientific articles, and he contributed almost 400 such articles to Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie.

In 1761 began D'Holbach's written attacks on theologians and religious power. Under the name of his deceased friend N. A. Boulanger, D'Holbach published Le Christianisme dévoilé, a critical examination of Christianity. D'Holbach often resorted to pseudonyms or anonymity to protect himself from the conservative and repressive authorities. In the 1770s D'Holbach produced his positive substitutes for the religious and political dogmas he despised: Système de la Nature (1770), a secular ethics detailing the interrelation of ethics and government; Le Bon sens (1772; Good Sense), a very readable restatement of the radical ideas of the 1770 work; Politique naturelle (1773), a discussion of the moral influences exercised by government; and Morale universelle (1776), regarded by some as his ethical masterpiece.

D'Holbach taught that most of man's woes stemmed from religion. "Ignorance and fear, " he claimed, "are the two hinges of all religion." He taught that morals were quite possible without religion: "Let … reason be cultivated … and there will be no need of opposing to the passions such a feeble barrier as the fear of the gods." D'Holbach, a provocative, freethinking iconoclast, died in January 1789.

Further Reading

S. G. Tallentyre (pseud. for Evelyn Beatrice Hall), The Friends of Voltaire (1907), contains an essay on D'Holbach, who also figures prominently in the essays on Diderot and Helvetius. Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d'Holbach: A Study in Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (1914), is a short biography; W. H. Wickwar, Baron d'Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution (1935), connects D'Holbach with later events. A discussion of D'Holbach in relation to English and French materialism, sensationalism, and atheism is Virgil W. Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy: Its Background and Development (1956). See also G. V. Plekhanov, Essays in the History of Materialism (trans. 1934).

Additional Sources

Svitak, Ivan, The dialectic of common sense: the master thinkers, Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1979.

(1723-89) Writer of the French Enlightenment, opposed to utilitarianism. Originally educated in the natural sciences, he wrote the articles on chemistry for the Encyclopédie. Holbach rejected Christianity, and was regularly condemned by the Church and the Parlement de Paris. He believed that the only way to long-term happiness was a severe morality. Despite these views, he was immensely rich, and was known particularly for the dinners he gave. He changed his opinion about the political system which might achieve his ideal. At first, he supported absolutism, in agreement with Voltaire. Then he moved to support the legal aristocracy, in agreement with Montesquieu. In terms of the ends to be achieved, he disagreed with both, and with the Enlightenment in general.

— Carl Slevin

Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d' (1723-89). Atheist and materialist philosopher. Born in Germany, he was brought up in France by an uncle whose title and fortune he inherited. He had an excellent education, culminating in a stay in Leiden, a centre of new scientific thought. Settling in Paris in 1749, he became the ‘maître d'hôtel de la philosophie’, generously entertaining visitors from all over Europe in his town house in the rue Royale and his country house at Le Grandval. He was very close to Diderot and made an important contribution to the Encyclopédie, mainly in the fields of chemistry and metallurgy. In Paris he was, with Naigeon, the centre of a workshop for the production of anti-Christian propaganda, editing clandestine manuscripts (Fréret, Boulainviller, Du Marsais, Boulanger, etc.), translating the works of English free-thinkers, and composing original pamphlets and treatises. ‘Il pleut des bombes dans la maison du Seigneur’, Diderot wrote of this activity in 1768.

Almost all Holbach's own writings were published anonymously or under other names (e.g. that of Boulanger). Before 1770 he wrote or collaborated on several critiques of Christianity and other religions, notably Le Christianisme dévoilé (1766) and La Contagion sacrée (1768); these continue the free-thinking tradition of the libertins, pushing it towards an intransigent, scientific atheism. A second group of works, beginning with the famous Système de la nature (1770; summarized in Le Bon Sens, 1770) and including Le Système social (1773) and La Morale universelle (1776), expose a global, materialist philosophy of nature. All phenomena are explained in terms of matter and movement, free will and the immortality of the soul are declared to be illusory, and politics and ethics are placed on a new, natural foundation. Holbach is not an elegant or subtle writer. Diderot mocked his friend's ponderousness, and Goethe wondered that his ‘grey’, ‘deathlike’ writing could have attracted devotees, but for all its literary failings, his great body of work played a vital role in the movement of ideas of the late 18th c.

[Peter France]

Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’ (1723-89) German-born French intellectual. Paul Heinrich Dietrich took the name and French nationality of his maternal uncle, who had made a fortune in Paris. For many years Holbach's salon in Paris was the central meeting-point of many of the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. His own philosophical stance was one of unswerving atheistic materialism, and he took pains to demonstrate that this is compatible with a life of altruism and virtue. His most important philosophical work was the Système de la nature (1770, trs. as The System of Nature, 1795).

Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d' (pôl äNrē' tērē' bärôN' dôlbäk'), Ger. Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach (poul' hīn'rĭkh dētrĭkh bärōn' fŭn hôl'bäkh), 1723-89, French philosopher, one of the Encyclopedists. Although a native of the Palatinate, he lived in Paris from childhood. He became a member of a group of notable thinkers and literary men including Diderot, Helvétius, Condorcet, and Rousseau. A supporter of naturalistic and materialistic views, he was a vigorous opponent of Christianity and all positive forms of religion. His best-known work is Système de la nature (1770), first published under the name of Mirabaud.

Bibliography

See biography by W. H. Wickwar (1935, repr. 1968); study by M. Cushing (1914, repr. 1971).

Holbach, Paul Thiry, Baron D' (1723–1789), French philosopher, scientist, man of letters, founder of a salon, and critic of the ancien régime. Holbach's life and literary career are somewhat shadowy because he published his books clandestinely to avoid persecution and did not write a memoir, diary, or a great number of letters.

Holbach was born in the village of Edesheim in the Palatinate, a German-speaking area close to France and its culture. His parents, non-noble landowners, raised him as a Catholic. In childhood, he was influenced greatly by his uncle François-Adam d'Holbach, a rich financier ennobled in Vienna in 1720 and made a baron in 1728. His uncle arranged for the young boy to leave his parents' home and live with him in Paris. Little is known about Holbach's education except that in 1744 he began his legal studies at the eminent University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic and spent several years there and at his uncle's estate in that country.

Holbach settled in Paris and became a French citizen in 1749 and a barrister before the Parlement of Paris, one of the highest courts of France. But his legal career proved short-lived, for he took much more interest in his social and intellectual life. He organized a salon, holding regular Thursday and Sunday dinners at which he provided excellent food and wine and encouraged the frankest exchange of ideas. Such freethinkers as Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Jacques-André Naigeon, and Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, became members of his social circle, as did many others of varied beliefs. The salon lasted in Paris and at Holbach's country estate nearby into the 1780s.

Holbach could afford such entertaining. His uncle had given him valuable property in 1750 and, at his death in 1753, left his nephew a large legacy in addition to the title of baron of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, in 1750 he married his cousin, Basile-Geneviève-Suzanne d'Aine, a daughter of the wealthy Nicolas and Suzanne d'Aine. Two years after his wife's death in 1754, he married one of her sisters, Charlotte-Suzanne d'Aine. Holbach's fortune was enlarged by these marriages; and in 1756 he purchased the office of secretary to the king, an expensive sinecure conferring automatic French nobility.

Holbach also aspired to be a man of letters. In the early 1750s he wrote a pamphlet favoring Italian over French music and started his collaboration on the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, to which he contributed hundreds of signed and anonymous articles on science, technology, religion, politics, geography, and other topics. In addition, from 1752 to 1771, he translated anonymously into French more than ten important German and Scandinavian books on chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy. In these books and in his articles for the Encyclopédie, he helped prepare the way for advances in the emerging science of geology and the revolution in chemical theory initiated by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his colleagues.

Holbach's passion for chemistry and mineralogy, his esteem for Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, and other classical writers, and his admiration for the thought of French and English deists and atheists led him to forsake Catholicism and champion a deterministic, materialistic, and atheistic view of the universe. He thought matter in motion to be the sole reality and believed that men and women were purely physical beings moved by self-interest, yet capable of a humane secular morality. From 1759 to 1770, he secretly translated, edited, and authored many books that denounced all religions and their clergy for fostering illusory supernatural beliefs in God, the soul, miracles, and immortality, all of which Holbach thought increased human suffering. Several of these works sold well, especially Le système de la nature (1769, with a 1770 imprint; The system of nature). Naigeon and a few other members of his circle assisted him in his literary enterprise. In 1770 the Parlement of Paris and the royal administration condemned some of these works, but Holbach escaped prosecution. He concealed his authorship of these writings from all but a few trusted friends, and the government did not zealously seek to discover the identity of the author. He seems to have had protectors in high office.

In the early and mid-1770s, Holbach elaborated on his politics. In several books he asserted that rulers should maximize happiness for the greatest number of their subjects rather than allowing them to suffer from poverty and humiliation. To accomplish this, he rejected divine right absolute monarchy, enlightened despotism, rule by an aristocracy, and democracy. Instead, in the anonymous La politique naturelle (1773; Natural politics), he supported a monarchy that encouraged a wide distribution of land ownership and that was checked by representative bodies of landowners. How much power would be given to these bodies is unclear, but he believed France should not replicate the British House of Commons, which he visited in 1765 and considered corrupt. He also lacked confidence in change by revolution, and in 1776 dedicated his anonymous Éthocratie (Government based on morality) to the recently crowned Louis XVI.

After 1776 Holbach largely stopped writing for publication and did not reveal his opinions of the American Revolution and the calling of the Estates-General in France. He died in January 1789, six months before the fall of the Bastille. During the French Revolution, he became publicly known as the author of controversial works, for Naigeon and Condorcet either republished or wrote commentaries about several of them and identified them as having been written by Holbach. Since then his works have often been reprinted. He deserves to be remembered as the host of a brilliant salon, the writer and translator of important scientific works, and a fervent polemicist for materialistic atheism and political reform. His life exemplifies the French philosophes—their sociability, passion for natural science, and criticism of existing religious and political institutions.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Holbach, Paul Thiry d'. Oeuvres philosophiques. Edited by Jean-Pierre Jackson. Paris, 1998–. A modern French edition of many of Holbach's important books. There is no equivalent edition in English, but there are translations of some of his books.

Secondary Sources

Kors, Alan Charles. "The Atheism of d'Holbach and Naigeon." In Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, edited by Michael Hunter and David Wooton, pp. 273–300. Oxford and New York, 1992. On Holbach's irreligious beliefs.

——. D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris. Princeton, 1976. A valuable study of the salon and its members.

Ladd, Everett C. "Helvétius and D'Holbach . . ." Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 221–236. On Holbach's politics.

Naville, Paul. D'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle. Rev. ed. Paris, 1967. The standard study of his life and works.

Rappaport, Rhoda. "Baron d'Holbach's Campaign for German (and Swedish) Science." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 323 (1994): 225–246. On Holbach's science.

Wickwar, W. H. Baron D'Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution. London, 1935. Informative on Holbach's life and thought.

—FRANK A. KAFKER

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