Paul-Henri-Dietrich d'Holbach

German-born French philosopher

• Born: December 1, 1723
• Birthplace: Edesheim, Rhineland-Palatinate (now in Germany)
• Died: January 21, 1789
• Place of death: Paris, France

Holbach hosted the most renowned philosophical salon in Paris for four decades, was a major contributor to the Encyclopedia, launched a relentless attack against Christianity, and developed a secular moral and political philosophy. He influenced the French Revolution and later anticlerical writers.

Early Life

Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Holbach (pawl-ah-ree-dee-treek dawl-bahk) was the son of Johannes Jacobus Thiry and Jacobea Holbach. Losing his mother at the age of six, he was brought to Paris at twelve by a wealthy, childless uncle, Franciscus-Adam d’Holbach, who had taken French citizenship and purchased noble status. Paul later studied not at the Sorbonne (still mired in Scholasticism), but the cosmopolitan University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, a great center of scientific research. The university was both tolerant and a safe haven for free-thinkers.

Holbach, blessed with an extraordinary memory, acquired broad expertise in the physical sciences, exceptional command of English—partly through enduring friendships formed with English students—and religious disbelief. Returning to Paris in 1749, he became a French citizen and, on February 3, 1750, married his second cousin, Basile-Geneviève-Suzanne d’Aine. Disconsolate when she died at twenty-five, he married her younger sister, Charlotte Suzanne d’Aine, two years later (1756). Holbach was coheir with his cousin (also his mother-in-law), inheriting his uncle’s name and large fortune in 1753. Through his wife, he acquired Grandval, an estate in Sucy, southeast of Paris, where he typically lived from spring to autumn each year. Financially independent, happy in marriage, and passionately committed to the intellectual tasks he took up, Holbach would never seek recognition for his writings or his innumerable discreet acts of charity.

Life’s Work

Cherishing the intellectual comradeship he had found in Leiden, Holbach re-created it soon after marrying. He formed an intellectual coterie by hosting a salon that would endure for four decades and generate the freest, most probing philosophical discussions of the French Enlightenment. It was dubbed the Café d’Europe, because it attracted not only the greatest philosophes of France but also brilliant individuals from Britain and across the Continent. It was also known as “the synagogue” for its unfettered discussion of religion.

At the heart of the group were the encyclopedists, including editor Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who became Holbach’s close friend and lifelong intellectual comrade-in-arms. They shared broad interests in science, as well as a faith in science’s ability to better humankind by destroying superstition and discovering solutions to persistent problems. They believed that religion is not simply untrue but a great impediment to human progress.

From the early 1750’s, Holbach became a major contributor to the Encyclopédie: Ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751-1772; Encyclopedia, 1965). He wrote 376 articles in fifteen years. He also translated and published numerous German scientific books during these years, and most of his encyclopedia articles were based on German research, particularly in the fields of chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy, but he ranged over many other subjects as well. When clerical opposition to the Encyclopedia brought suppression of the great enterprise in 1759 and some, such as Voltaire, withdrew, Holbach worked with Diderot through the clandestine effort needed to complete this proud achievement of the French Enlightenment.

By then, Holbach’s career was taking a new course. Appalled by the Catholic Church’s power of censorship, control of education, and resistance to scientific progress, he threw himself into the most intense, relentless attack on Christianity—and religion in general—that Europe had ever witnessed. With coworker Jacques-André Naigeon (1738-1810), who had already been helping him prepare material for the Encyclopedia, he unleashed such a torrent of antireligious books that Diderot quipped that it was raining bombs on the house of the Lord.

Holbach published thirty-five such “bombs” in a decade; most were printed in Amsterdam and smuggled into France. Many of these volumes were translations of works by seventeenth and eighteenth century English Deists or were French manuscripts that had already circulated surreptitiously. Eleven, all pseudonymous, were written by Holbach himself, beginning with Le Christianisme dévoilé: Ou, Examen des principes et des effets de la religion chrétienne (1761; Christianity Unveiled, 1795). His most important work was Système de la nature: Ou, Des Lois du monde physique et du monde moral (1770; The System of Nature, 1797). This multivolume edition was condensed as Le Bon-sens: Ou, Idées naturelles opposée aux idées surnaturelle (1772; Common Sense, 1795).

Collectively, Holbach’s onslaught was a compendium of rationalistic attacks on Christianity and religion in general. Inconsistencies in the Bible were cataloged, the “cruel, vindictive, tribal” divinity of the Old Testament was challenged, and the failure of an “omnipotent, omniscient” God to prevent undeserved suffering was repeatedly questioned. In the face of the emerging scientific picture of nature ruled by unvarying physical laws, accounts of miracles that seemed to violate such laws, including those at the core of Christianity, were ridiculed and dismissed.

Holbach went further, affirming an unflinching materialism and atheism that rejected free will and any hope of a hereafter. Promises of a happier life to come were a cruel fraud, he declared; in admonishing individuals patiently to endure injustice and oppression, priests, typically in league with tyrannical rulers, were cheating them of their only chance for happiness. Like most ancient Greek philosophers, Holbach believed the universe had always existed. While granting that this concept is perplexing, he declared that it was more irrational to assert that the vast physical universe was created out of nothing by a spiritual Being whose own origin was more problematic than an uncreated universe.

To those who contended that religion was an indispensable ground for morality, Holbach put forward a secular ethical and political philosophy, a task that occupied the final portion of his career. Like his ancient counterpart, the antireligious materialist Epicurus (341-270 b.c.e.), Holbach’s ethics rested on the self-interested pursuit of happiness. He believed such happiness could best be achieved by meeting human needs, individual and social, which science was best equipped to understand. He judged acceptable all pleasures that do not harm oneself or others but stressed the importance of contributing to society, because each individual depends on others and needs their approbation.

Holbach believed that, as part of nature’s uninterrupted web of cause and effect, the human mind and human actions are determined by natural law, and one’s moral sense, no less than any other aspect of the mind, is shaped by one’s experiences in life. This denial of free will and any sort of innate conscience did not lead him to hopeless fatalism, however. He asserted that people are not simply buffeted by external causes: A just society will help mold good consciences within each individual, as will enlightened education, which frees people from superstition and teaches them to trust in reason and scientific knowledge, the surest guides to the greatest happiness nature permits.

The kind of political order Holbach judged most likely to sustain an enlightened, happy society was constitutional monarchy, in which a parliament prevents tyranny by either the monarch or a reckless populace. Since sovereignty derives from the people’s consent, he believed, a government that fails to preserve the common welfare may be overthrown. He thought, however, that enduring progress can only come though slow, careful reform, rather than political upheaval. Nevertheless, Holbach favored numerous then-radical changes in government, including the abolition of hereditary aristocracies, progressive taxation to reduce great disparities in wealth, laissez-faire commercial policy, ending torture and excessive punishments, legalized divorce, complete separation of church and state, absolute religious tolerance, inviolable freedom of thought and the press, and state-provided universal secular education.

These reforms were advocated in Holbach’s last books, including La Politique naturelle: Ou, Discourse sur les vrais principes du gouvernment (1773; natural politics: or, discourse on the true principles of government) and La Morale universelle: Ou, Les Devoirs de l’homme fondé sur la nature (1776; universal morality: or, the duties of man grounded in nature). Like all his other works, these did not bear his name. Thus, the man who produced perhaps the most systematic exposition of materialism and atheism ever penned, and who produced a generous-minded, humanistic social philosophy, lived unknown to most of his countrymen.

Significance

The philosophes believed that reason and scientific knowledge would lead to human progress and counted themselves “friends of humanity.” Their vision of a more just, more enlightened society gave important impetus to the French Revolution and is an enduring legacy in the modern world. Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Holbach’s passionate participation in their enterprise epitomizes the unusual confluence of wealth and philosophy that made the philosophes so influential. His crusade against religion helped shape the revolution’s harsh treatment of the Church and helped account for the fact that unbelief was more common in France over the next two centuries than elsewhere in Europe. Because he published so many antireligious books by others, many of them Deists; because long after his death his books were republished without his name; and because his style was often prolix and repetitious; many have failed to recognize the unity and scope of his philosophy. While his belief in determinism and the social implications he drew from this belief are still not widely accepted, they seem less shocking in an age of neuroscience, and they find echoes in our criminal justice system.

Bibliography

Crocker, Lester. The Embattled Philosopher: A Biography of Denis Diderot. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1954. A fine biography that illuminates the relationship between Holbach and the engaging Diderot.

Joshi, S. T. Atheism: A Reader. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000. Provides a wider perspective on the skeptical tradition in which Holbach figures so prominently.

Kors, Alan Charles. D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Useful corrective to conspiratorial characterizations of “the synagogue.”

Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Good brief introduction to Holbach’s era informed by recent interpretations.

Topaz, Virgil W. D’Holbach’s Moral Philosophy: Its Background and Development. Geneva, Switzerland: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1956. Informative about impact of English writers and French materialism on Holbach.

Wickwar, W. H. Baron d’Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935. Still the basic English monograph on Holbach; lists his publications.