Baron d'Holbach

Paul Heinrich Dietrich

Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron d'Holbach
Full name	Paul Heinrich Dietrich
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	French materialism
Main interests	Atheism, Determinism, Materialism
Influenced by Hobbes
Influenced Marx

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789^[1]) was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He is best known for his atheism, and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being the System of Nature (1770).

Biography

Background

D'Holbach's house in Edesheim

D'Holbach's mother (née Holbach) was the daughter of the Prince-Bishop's tax collector. His father, Johann Jakob Dietrich, was a wine-grower. He was raised in Paris by his uncle Franz Adam Holbach, who had become a millionaire by speculating on the Paris stock-exchange. With his financial support, d'Holbach attended the University of Leiden from 1744 to 1748 and went on to marry his second cousin, Basile-Geneviève d'Aine, in 1749. In 1753 both his uncle and his father died, leaving the still young d'Holbach with an enormous inheritance. D'Holbach would remain wealthy throughout his life.^[2] In 1754, his wife died from an unknown disease. The distraught d'Holbach moved to the provinces for a brief period with his friend Baron Grimm and in the following year received a special dispensation from the Pope to marry his deceased wife's sister, Charlotte-Susanne d'Aine.^[3]

Baron d'Holbach

D'Holbach's salon

Although he spent much of his time at his country estate at Grandval, d'Holbach used his wealth to maintain one of the more notable and lavish Parisian salons, which soon became an important meeting place for the contributors to the Encyclopédie. Meetings were held regularly twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays, in d'Holbach's home in rue Royale, butte Saint-Roche between approximately 1750 - 1780. Visitors to the salon were exclusively males, and the tone of discussion high-brow, often extending to topics more extensive than those of other salons.^[4] This, along with the excellent food, expensive wine, and a library of over 3000 volumes, attracted many notable visitors. Among the regulars in attendance at the salon—the coterie holbachique -- were the following: Diderot, Grimm, Condillac, Condorcet, D'Alembert, Marmontel, Turgot, La Condamine, Raynal, Helvétius, Galiani, Morellet, Naigeon and, for a time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The salon was also visited by prominent British intellectuals, amongst them Adam Smith, David Hume, John Wilkes, Horace Walpole and Edward Gibbon.

D'Holbach was known for his generosity, often providing financial support discreetly or anonymously to his friends, amongst them Diderot. It is thought that the virtuous atheist Wolmar in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse is based on d'Holbach.^[2]

Holbach died in Paris on 21 January 1789, a few months prior to the French Revolution^[1]. His authorship of his various anti-religious works did not become widely known until the early 19th century.

Writings

Contributions to the Encyclopédie

D'Holbach by Louis Carmontelle

For the Encyclopédie d'Holbach authored and translated a large number of articles on topics ranging from politics and religion to chemistry and mineralogy. As a German who had become a naturalised Frenchman, he undertook the translation of many contemporary German works of natural philosophy into French. All in all, between 1751 and 1765 he contributed some four hundred articles to the project, mostly on scientific subjects, in addition to serving as the editor of several volumes on natural philosophy. D'Holbach may also have written several disparaging entries on non-Christian religions, intended as veiled criticisms of Christianity itself.^[5]

Anti-religious works

Despite his extensive contributions to the Encyclopédie, d'Holbach is better known today for his philosophical writings, all of which were published anonymously or under pseudonyms and printed outside of France, usually in Amsterdam. His philosophy was expressly materialistic and atheistic and is today categorised into the philosophical movement called French materialism. In 1761 Christianisme dévoilé ("Christianity Unveiled") appeared, in which he attacked Christianity and religion in general as an impediment to the moral advancement of humanity. The deistic Voltaire, denying authorship of the work, made known his aversion to d'Holbach's philosophy, writing that "[the work] is entirely opposed to my principles. This book leads to an atheistic philosophy that I detest."^[6] Christianity Unveiled was followed by others, notably La Contagion sacrée (1768 - "The Sacred Contagion"), Théologie portative (1768 - "Portable Theology") and Essai sur les préjugés (1770 - "Essay on prejudice"). D'Holbach was helped in these endeavours by Jacques-André Naigeon, who would later become his literary executor.

The System of Nature

In 1770, d'Holbach published his most famous book, The System of Nature (Le Système de la nature), under the name of Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, the secretary of the French Academy of Science who had died ten years previously. Denying the existence of a deity, and refusing to admit as evidence all a priori arguments, d'Holbach saw in the universe nothing save matter in motion, bound by inexorable natural laws of cause and effect. There is, he wrote "no necessity to have recourse to supernatural powers to account for the formation of things."^[7]

The System of Nature is a long and extensive work presenting a thoroughly naturalistic view of the world. Some d'Holbach scholars have pointed out that Denis Diderot was a close personal friend of d'Holbach's, and that it is unclear to what extent d'Holbach was influenced by him. Indeed, Diderot may possibly have been the author of parts of the System of Nature.^[8] Regardless, however, of the extent of Diderot's contribution to the System of Nature, it is on the basis of this work that d'Holbach's philosophy has been called "the culmination of French materialism and atheism."^[9]

D'Holbach's objectives in challenging religion were primarily moral: He saw the institutions of Christianity as a major obstacle to the improvement of society. For him, the foundation of morality was to be sought not in Scripture but in happiness: "It would be useless and almost unjust to insist upon a man's being virtuous if he cannot be so without being unhappy. So long as vice renders him happy, he should love vice."^[10]

The explicitly atheistic and materialistic The System of Nature presented a core of radical ideas which many contemporaries, both churchmen and philosophes found disturbing, and thus prompted a strong reaction. The Catholic Church in France threatened the crown with withdrawal of financial support unless it effectively suppressed the circulation of the book. The list of people writing refutations of the work was long. The Roman Catholic Church had its pre-eminent theologian Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier write a refutation of the Système titled Examen du matérialisme (Materialism examined). Voltaire hastily seized his pen to refute the philosophy of the Système in the article "Dieu" in his Dictionnaire philosophique, while Frederick the Great also drew up an answer to it. Its principles are summed up in a more popular form in d'Holbach's Common Sense, or Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural (Bon Sens, on idées naturelles opposees aux idées surnaturelles) (Amsterdam, 1772).

Politics and morals

In his last works, d'Holbach's attention largely shifts away from religious metaphysics towards moral and political questions. In the Système social (1773), the Politique naturelle (1773–1774) and the Morale universelle (1776) he attempts to describe a system of morality in place of the Christian one he had so fiercely attacked, but these later writings were not as popular or influential as his earlier work. D'Holbach was strongly critical of abuses of power in France and abroad. Contrary to the revolutionary spirit of the time however, he called for the educated classes to reform the corrupt system of government and warned against revolution, democracy, and mob rule.

His political and ethical views were influenced by British materialist Thomas Hobbes. D'Holbach had personally translated Hobbes' work De Homine ("The Man") into French.^[11]

Influences

The materialistic philosophy of Baron d'Holbach had an influence in the historical materialism of Karl Marx, who studied the ideas of d'Holbach and his fellow French thinker Helvetius in Paris.^[12]

See also

• Atheism
• List of atheists
• The System of Nature

References

Bibliography

Works

• Le Christianisme dévoilé, ou Examen des principes et des effets de la religion chrétienne (Christianity unveiled: being an examination of the principles and effects of the Christian religion) published in Nancy, 1761
• La Contagion sacrée, ou Histoire naturelle de la superstition, 1768
• Lettres à Eugénie, ou Préservatif contre les préjugés, 1768
• Théologie Portative, ou Dictionnaire abrégé de la religion chrétienne, 1768
• Essai sur les préjugés, ou De l'influence des opinions sur les mœurs & le bonheur des hommes, 1770
• Système de la nature ou des loix du monde physique & du monde moral (The System of Nature, or Laws of the Moral and Physical World), published 1770 in 2 volumes in French under the pseudonym of Mirabaud. vol.1 text, vol.2 text at Project Gutenberg, en français.
• Histoire critique de Jésus-Christ, ou Analyse raisonnée des évangiles, 1770
• Tableau des Saints, ou Examen de l'esprit, de la conduite, des maximes & du mérite des personages que le christiannisme révère & propose pour modèles, 1770
• Le Bon Sens, published 1772 (Good Sense: or, Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural). This was an abridged version of The System of Nature. It was published anonymously in Amsterdam.
• Politique Naturelle, ou Discours sur les vrais principes du Gouvernement, 1773
• Système Social, ou Principes naturels de la morale et de la Politique, avec un examen de l'influence du gouvernement sur les mœurs 1773
• Ethocratie, ou Le gouvernement fondé sur la morale (Ethocracy or Government Founded on Ethics) (Amsterdam, 1776)
• La Morale Universelle, ou Les devoirs de l'homme fondés sur la Nature, 1776 en français, PDF file.
• Eléments de morale universelle, ou Catéchisme de la Nature, 1790
• Lettre à une dame d'un certain âge
• Essai sur l'art de ramper, à l'usage des courtisans

Secondary literature

English

• David Holohan (Translator), Christianity Unveiled by Baron d'Holbach: A Controversy in Documents, (Hodgson Press, 2008).
• Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d'Holbach: a study of eighteenth-century radicalism in France (New York, 1914).
• Alan Charles Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton University Press, 1976).
• Alan Charles Kors, "The Atheism of D'Holbach and Naigeon", Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
• John Lough, "Helvétius and d'Holbach", Modern Language Review, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Jul., 1938).
• T. C. Newland, "D'Holbach, Religion, and the 'Encyclopédie'", Modern Language Review, Vol. 69, No. 3, (Jul., 1974), pp. 523–533.
• Virgil W. Topazio, D'Holbach's Moral Philosophy: Its Background and Development (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1956).
• Everett C. Ladd, Jr., "Helvétius and d'Holbach", Journal of the History of Ideas (1962) 23(2): 221-238.
• Virgil V. Topazio, "Diderot's Supposed Contribution to D'Holbach's Works", in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, LXIX, 1, 1954, pp. 173–188.
• S. G. Tallentyre (pseud. for Evelyn Beatrice Hall), The Friends of Voltaire (1907).
• W. H. Wickwar, Baron d'Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution (1935)
• G. V. Plekhanov, Essays in the History of Materialism (trans. 1934)
• John Lough, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert (London : Oxford University Press, 1968)

French

• René Hubert, D'Holbach et ses amis (Paris: André Delpeuch, 1928).
• Paul Naville, D'Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle. Rev. ed. Paris, 1967
• J. Vercruysse, Bibliographie descriptive des écrits du baron d'Holbach (Paris, 1971).
• A. Sandrier, Le style philosophique du baron d'Holbach, Honoré Champion (Paris, 2004).

External links

• Works by Baron d'Holbach at Project Gutenberg
• Baron D'Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France by Max Pearson Cushing (1914)
• Stanford Encyclopedia Entry
• Find-a-grave biography

D'Holbach's Coterie Baron d'Holbach  · Denis Diderot  · Baron von Grimm  · Jean-François Marmontel  · Charles-Georges Le Roy  · Guillaume Thomas François Raynal  · Jean-François de Saint-Lambert  · Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard  · François-Jean de Chastellux  · Augustin Roux  · André Morellet  · Jacques-André Naigeon