Baron d'Holbach

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…