In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin in 1755. Reading of Voltaire's tragedy, The Orphan of China, in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier, c. 1812 | Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

The Enlightenment was created in France with the publication of the Encyclopedie, that massive work that did a Herculean task of moving the Western mind toward the "modern," that is, science, materialism, and Atheism.

The guiding genius of that project was Denis Diderot (1713·1784). It was he who stimulated 140 people to contribute to it, edited that vast project of seventeen volumes of text - 11,000,000 words - and eleven volumes of plates, and then saw the project through to its completion after many tribulations.

Through all of the trials, a friend stood beside him. He was Paul-Henri Thiry Dietrich (1723-1789), and he was so devoted to Diderot that he was buried beside his friend. This man was the famous Baron d'Holbach. The Baron d'Holbach was an exemplar of the Enlightenment, especially of its radical left wing.

He came from inauspicious beginnings and wrote some of the most controversial books of his time; his masterpiece, The System of Nature (1770), remains a wonder of reason, a triumph of the Age of the Enlightenment, and a challenge to future generations. In what is now Germany, there was a principality of Speyer, and it was in one of its cities, Edesheim, that Francis Adam Holbach was born.

He went to Paris toward the end of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715), made a fortune, and became a naturalized citizen of France. He had no offspring, but he brought to Paris and cared for the orphan children, one female, and one male, of his two sisters. His nephew, Paul-Henri Dietrich, was also born in Edesheim, and he came to Paris at the invitation of his uncle before he was twelve years old.

Paul Thiry d'Holbach | Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

ALMA MATER

During the war of Austrian Succession, Paul-Henri's uncle sent him to an estate he owned in Holland near the famous University of Leyden, which Paul-Henri attended.

The Chevalier de Jaucourt, who was to make significant contributions to the Encyclopedie, called this university the "first and foremost in all Europe." W.H. Wickwar, one of the authorities on d'Holbach, adds that the university was one of the freest and most modern of any university; it was the only one that still commanded universal respect as a seat of learning.

Promising young men came there from many countries. Among d'Holbach's fellow students were more than twenty English students; two of them became chancellors of the Exchequer, and one a Lord Mayor of London.

Paul-Henri was brilliantly educated. He knew French, German, English, Italian, and Latin "extremely well." At the University of Leyden, he attended classes taught by the great scientist, Herman Boerhaave (1668- 1738), one of the most exciting teachers in all of Europe and an advocate of reason and science.

As a result of his experience at the University of Leyden, Paul Henri became an authority in natural sciences, especially chemistry and·mineralogy. After the war, Paul-Henri returned to Paris, and in August 1749 became a naturalized citizen of France.

About 1753, the uncle died and left most of his enormous fortune to his nephew. The estates of Westphalia alone brought Paul-Henri 60,000 livres a year. He was not only wealthy; he was now the Baron d'Holbach. D'Holbach used his wealth to establish a townhouse in Paris and a summer residence at Grandval, which was a short drive from Paris.

But it was his townhouse that became important. Many philosophes met there for dinner on Sundays and Thursdays, and visitors from all over Europe and America joined them when they were in Paris. Ten to twenty guests would dine from 2:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M... The dinners were so lavish that, according to Diderot's daughter, Diderot could only dine there once a week. More than that would have killed him, he said.
Insight into the Ludwigstrasse in Edesheim (Rhineland-Palatinate). The birthplace of Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach was in the house n° 4. Old picture postcard from 1940. | Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

ROLL CALL

"D'Holbach's dinners attracted some of the greatest wits and intellects of his century," and a list of them represents a roll call of the Enlightenment; moreover, the list provides considerable insight into the intellectual interchange of one of the leading salons of the Enlightenment.

The regulars were Nicholas Boulanger (1722-1759), a very learned man in history and languages; Charles Pinot Duclos (1704-1772), a novelist as well as a widely-read student of social customs; Frederic- Melchior, better known as BaronGrimm (1723-1807), a writer and friend to many of the progressive thinkers of the time; Claude- Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771), the author of the famous book The Mind (1758); Jean-Francois Marmontel (1723-1799), a novelist and liberal cleric; Abbe Andre Morellet (1727-1819), a contributor to the Encyclope1die; the historian Abbe Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713-1796); Guillaume-Francois Rouelle (1703-1770), a chemist; Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712- 1778), a frequent guest until his problems drove him to exclude himself and be excluded in turn; Jean-Henri Saint-Lambert (1728-1777), a physician and mathematician; Jean-Baptist Suard (1734-1817), a famous journalist; and Jacques Turgot (1727- 1781), the economist. Foreigners were most welcome at d'Hol bach's table.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), the English author, dined there as did David Hume (1711-1776). It was he who told the Baron as they were sitting down to dinner that Atheists did not exist. D'Holbach turned to him and informed him that he was dining with seventeen.

John Wilkes (1727- 1797), the English politician was also there, as well as Galiani, the secretary of the Neapolitan embassy from 1759-1769. David Garrick (1717-1779), the celebrated English Shakespearean actor, was a close friend of "the good Baron." Benjamin Franklin was an "old friend."

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) joined them, as well as Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The central figure of this salon was, of course, the Baron d'Holbach, who was the intellectual equal of his guests. His knowledge was "encyclopedic," and one of his friends noted that d'Holbach "had read everything and never forgot anything of intellectual or artistic value."

No wonder that his salon became one of the most famous in Paris, and his house was "the social center of the century." D'Holbach's home was so popular and important that it was affectionately called the "synagogue" or the "Holbach Club." "That was the place to hear the most enlightened, most vivacious, and most informative conversation - I mean 'liberal' in regards to philosophy, religion, and government; 'spicy remarks' of another kind had no place there ... "

That statement, by one of d'Holbach's old friends, written after d'Holbach's death, is not quite accurate. The Baron himself had a penchant for salty comments, and there was the case of his wife making sexual overtures to Grimm. The situation became so serious that there was considerable concern about keeping the matter from the public.

In another case, Diderot took offense at another guest for making comments about Diderot's wife; Diderot bluntly told him that, and I cite Wilson's translation, "the jokester runs the risk of being thrown out of the f- king window" (Wilson, Diderot, p. 465).

D'Holbach's publishing career, which would eventually amount to forty books and 400 essays for the Encyclopedie, began innocuously. He wrote two pamphlets in 1752 on some controversial musical subjects, and then he wrote a prose work; then he turned to translating.

An overview of d'Holbach's translations not only shows his intellectual interest but also his initial contribution to the Enlightenment. His first translation was of a work by a professor of chemistry at the University of Upsala in Sweden.

The work had been translated into German, and then d'Holbach retranslated it into French; it was called Agriculture Reduced to Its True Principles (1774). D'Holbach next translated an Italian work which had been translated into German (The Art of Glassmaking by Neri, Merret, and Kunckel; 1752,) which was followed by Mineralogy, or A General Description of the Mineral Kingdom (1753), Introduction to Mineralogy (1756); Metallurgical Chemistry (1758), and among others, Essays on Physics, Natural History, Mineralogy, and Metallurgy.

These works not only reflect the interest of a mind of the Enlightenment but contributed significantly to the enlightenment of his salon. After d'Holbach's death, a close friend wrote that: “We are greatly indebted for the advancement of our knowledge of natural history and chemistry to the work this man did thirty years ago. He is responsible for piquing our interest - the passion of some - for those disciples because he translated some very fine works from German whose subjects were almost unknown to us or frequently overlooked.”

© 2025 Shoaib Rahman


This excerpt is from Shoaib Rahman's The Roots of Enlightenment
A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF THE AGE OF REASON IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPE, which was originally published as a paperback in March 2022. The hardcover edition is now available at Amazon.