Baron D'Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France

INTRODUCTION Diderot, writing to the Princess Dashkoff in 1771, thus analysed the spirit of his century: Chaque siecle a son esprit qui le caracterise. L'esprit du notre semble etre celui de la liberte. La premiere attaque contre la superstition a ete violente, sans mesure. Une fois que les hommes ont ose d'une maniere quelconque donner l'assaut a la barriere de la religion, cette barriere la plus formidable qui existe comme la plus respectee, il est impossible de s'arreter. Des qu'ils ont tourne des regards menacants contre la majeste du ciel, ils ne manqueront pas le moment d'apres de les diriger contre la souverainete de la terre. Le cable qui tient et comprime l'humanite est forme de deux cordes, l'une ne peut ceder sans que l'autre vienne a rompre. [Endnote 1:1] The following study proposes to deal with this attack on religion that preceded and helped to prepare the French Revolution. Similar phenomena are by no means rare in the annals of history; eighteenth-century atheism, however, is of especial interest, standing as it does at the end of a long period of theological and ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost from view. Hence it has seemed fit to center this study about the man who stated the situation with the most unmistakable and uncompromising clearness, and who still occupies a unique though obscure position in the history of thought. Holbach has been very much neglected by writers on the eighteenth century. He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous occupons depuis longtemps a rassembler les materiaux qui doivent servir a venger la memoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz, et dans l'ouvrage que nous nous proposons de publier sous le titre "D'Holbach juge par ses contemporains" nous esperons faire justement apprecier ce savant si estimable par la profondeur et la variete de ses connaissances, si precieux a sa famille et a ses amis par la purete et la simplicite de ses moeurs, en qui la vertu etait devenue une habitude et la bienfaisance un besoin." This work has never appeared and M. Tourneux thinks that nothing of it was found among M. Walferdin's papers. [2:2] In 1834 Mr. James Watson published in an English translation of the Systeme de la Nature, A Short Sketch of the Life and the Writings of Baron d'Holbach by Mr. Julian Hibbert, compiled especially for that edition from Saint Saurin's article in Michaud's Biographie Universelle (Paris, 1817, Vol. XX, pp. 460-467), from Barbier's Dict. des ouvrages anonymes (Paris, 1822) and from the preface to the Paris edition of the Systeme de la Nature (4 vols., 18mo, 1821). This sketch was later published separately (London, 1834, 12mo, pp....