Baron d'Holbach

German-born French philosopher (1723–1789)

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Lived 1723–1789, aged 66France

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Era
1723–1789
Aged 66

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

A salonnière who turned the Enlightenment's polite deism into open war on religion itself, writing so many atheist tracts under so many pseudonyms that Paris whispered about a printing conspiracy that didn't exist.

Biography

About

Born in the Rhenish Palatinate in 1723, Paul Thiry moved to Paris and built a salon that became a nerve center for Enlightenment thought, funneling German and Protestant ideas into French intellectual life. He contributed to the Encyclopédie and championed scientific inquiry, but his real project was demolition: a systematic, voluminous assault on religion from every angle. In 1770 he published The System of Nature, a materialist manifesto that denied God, soul, and afterlife in language so uncompromising it scandalized even fellow philosophes. The Universal Morality followed in 1776, arguing…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Baron d'Holbach

Baron d'Holbach

said1770

We are all just cogs in a machine, doing what we were always meant to do, with no actual volition. (1770)

Baron d'Holbach

saidundated

It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

— Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature (Project Gutenberg e-text), vol. 1, chap. IX

Baron d'Holbach

saidundated

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.

— Samuel Wilkinson, trans., The System of Nature (Project Gutenberg e-text), vol. 2, chap. I

Baron d'Holbach

saidundated

Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.

— ibid., preface

Baron d'Holbach

saidundated