Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, more familiarly known as baron d’Holbach, was one of the most important and prolific thinkers of the eighteenth century. His radical works put forward a deterministic, materialistic, and atheistic philosophy; they circulated widely in Revolutionary France and had a remarkable impact on nineteenth-century thought, particularly on the development of Karl Marx’s ideas.

Born in Edesheim, western Germany, on (or shortly before) 8 December 1723, d’Holbach was the son of Johann Jakob Thiry († 1756) and Katherina Jakobea Holbach († 1743). When still a young boy, he was sent to Paris and entrusted to his maternal uncle, François-Adam Holbach († 1753), a childless man who had made his fortune at the beginning of the eighteenth century and acquired the title of baron (Reichsfreiherr) in 1728. In 1744, d’Holbach’s name appears in the registers of the University of Leiden alongside those of John Wilkes, the famous British journalist and politician, Mark Akenside, whose Pleasures of imagination he translated into French in 1760, and William Dowdeswell. Five years later, in the summer of 1749, one finds him back in Paris and naturalised. On 3 February 1750, d’Holbach married his second cousin, Basile-Geneviève-Suzanne d’Aine (also spelt Daine), and a few years later, after both his father’s and his uncle’s death, he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, including an estate in North Brabant (Kasteel Heeze, which he sold in 1759 to the baron Thuyl de Serooskerken) and a mansion in his native Palatinate (Schloss Kupperwolf). To these already remarkable assets, the salary connected to the position of syndic of the compagnie des conseillers-secrétaires du roi, which d’Holbach obtained upon the death of his father-in-law, Nicolas Daine, was later added. After the birth of his first son, François Paul Nicolas, and the death of his wife in 1754, d’Holbach obtained a papal dispensation to marry his deceased spouse’s sister, Charlotte-Suzanne. Among their witnesses were the famous French philosophe, Denis Diderot, and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the future editor of the Correspondance littéraire [Literary Correspondence]. D’Holbach and his second wife would go on to have three children: Charles Marius (1757-1832), the translator of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Oberon, who was later to marry Voltaire’s great-grand niece, Charlotte Louise Sophie de Dompierre d’Hornoy; Amelie Suzanne (b. 1759); and Louise Pauline (b. 1759), who would later marry the marquis de Nolivos. Thanks to their considerable incomes, in 1757 d’Holbach and his wife bought from the Comtesse de Sourches a house in rue Royale Saint-Roch (present-day rue des Moulins), only meters away from the Palais Royal, the Louvre, and the Comédie Française. It was here, and at the now destroyed Château du Grand-Val in Sucy-en-Brie, which belonged to the Daine family, that the baron welcomed many intellectuals and men of letters, including Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Charles Pinot Duclos, Charles Marie de La Condamine, and the abbé André Morellet, who would later describe these meetings in his famous Mémoires sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la Révolution [Memoirs on the Eighteenth Century and the Revolution] of 1822. On their visits to the French capital, several foreign intellectuals also participated in the gatherings of d’Holbach’s “société d’honnêtes gens” – or “coterie holbachique”, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (himself an active member of the salon until his rupture with the cercle des philosophes) famously and disdainfully dubbed it in the Confessions (1782-1789). The list includes, but is not limited to, the above-mentioned John Wilkes, David Hume, Cesare Beccaria, Horace Walpole, Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Adam Smith, David Garrick, Charles Burney, and Benjamin Franklin. D’Holbach stood thus at the centre of an extensive cultural network, stretching from Scotland to the Kingdom of Naples, from Russia to the American colonies. While regrettably not particularly extensive, d’Holbach’s extant correspondence reflects the breadth and variety of his connections.

Perfectly fluent in English and Latin, as well as German and French, d’Holbach began his career in the Republic of Letters as a translator. Fascinated by the nascent sciences of mineralogy and geology, between 1752 and 1766 he turned out French translations of an impressive number of treatises on mining, metallurgy, and glass making. Among the texts he translated from or via German are Johan Gottschalk Wallerius’ Mineralogia, Eller Mineralriket, Indelt och beskrifvit [Minéralogie, ou description générale des substances du règne mineral, 1759], Johann Christian Orschall’s Œuvres métallurgiques (1760), and Georg Ernst Stahl’s treatise on sulphur (Zufällige Gedanken und nützliche Bedenken über den Streit, von dem sogenannten Sulphure, published in 1766 as Traité du soufre). As they began to work on the Encyclopédie, Diderot and d’Alembert put d’Holbach’s knowledgeability to use and commissioned from him a large number of articles on minerals and metals. Yet, the actual extent of d’Holbach’s contributions to the Encyclopédie remains unknown. While in the preface to volume III, d’Holbach is explicitly indicated as the author of all entries signed (-), scholars often speculate that he may have also authored many of the unsigned articles, with John Lough attributing to him no fewer than 1120 entries. After all, evidence that d’Holbach may be responsible for some of the unsigned articles comes from a famous letter that he addressed on 27 April 1765 to Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan, avocat générale au Parlement de Grenoble, as well as from a document in the Fonds Vandeul, in which the baron is indicated as the author, among others, of such interesting entries as “Prêtres (Religion & Politique)” [Priests (Religion and Politics)], “Représentans” [Representatives], and “Théocratie” [Theocracy]. Regardless of the exact number of d’Holbach’s contributions to that massive summa of eighteenth-century knowledge that is the Encyclopédie, the fact remains that his scientific interests earned him the membership of many learned societies across Europe: a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences from as early as 1754, he was elected to the Kurpfälzische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Mannheim in 1766 and to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1780, six years following Diderot’s stay in Petersburg.

While d’Holbach’s scientific translations were highly valued in eighteenth-century France, today his fame rests primarily on a prodigious number of philosophical treatises that were all published either anonymously or pseudonymously in the 1760s and 1770s. His first major publication, Le Christianisme dévoilé [Christianity unveiled], whose exact date of publication has been the subject of some scholarly controversy, bears on its front page the name of Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, a natural philosopher and erudite who had died in 1759 and whose works (the Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental [Researches into the Origins of Oriental Despotism] of 1761 and the Antiquité dévoilée par ses usages [Antiquity Unveiled] of 1766) d’Holbach was secretly editing and publishing precisely at that time. The Christianisme was followed, in 1768, by the Contagion sacrée [Sacred Contagion], an alleged translation of John Trenchard’s Natural History of Superstition, and by the Lettres à Eugénie [Letters to Eugenia], an epistolary treatise that proposes women as active agents of social change and that was reprinted in 1774 as part of the complete works of Nicolas Fréret. D’Holbach’s Lettres philosophiques [Philosophical Letters], a translation of John Toland’s Letters to Serena, and the Théologie portative [Portable Theology], a mock dictionary of religious jargon that is clearly inspired by Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique and that purports to be the work of none other than a priest – the abbé Bernier – were also published in 1768.

The baron’s perhaps most famous book, the Système de la nature [The System of Nature], appeared in 1770. It contained a thorough explanation of the deterministic and materialistic philosophy underlying d’Holbach’s antireligious sentiments, and immediately generated a huge sensation across Europe, with dozens of refutations published within a few months, including two by the likes of Voltaire and Frederick the Great. To such refutations, d’Holbach responded with the publication of a relatively concise but extremely trenchant text, Le Bon Sens, ou idées naturelles opposées aux idées surnaturelles [Good Sense; or Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural] of 1772, which is often, yet mistakenly, presented as a mere abrégé of the Système de la nature. As reflected in works such as Le Système social [The Social System] (1773), La Politique naturelle [Natural Politics] (1773), L’Ethocratie [Ethocracy] (1776), and La Morale universelle [Universal Morality] (1776), in his old age, d’Holbach, like Diderot, grew more and more interested in issues relating to politics and ethics, reworking ideas he had already put forward in his early writings and harmonising them to create a coherent synthesis. Again like Diderot, d’Holbach is also known to have contributed to the publication of Guillaume Thomas François Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes [A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies] (1770, 1774, 1780), but further research is needed to gauge exactly the extent of his contributions to this fundamental essay on European colonialism.

D’Holbach died on 21 January 1789, a few months before the outbreak of the French Revolution, and was buried in the church of Saint-Roch, alongside Diderot. His extensive library and art collection were sold at an auction shortly after his death, but catalogues of both still survive. D’Holbach’s authorship of some of his radical, anti-theological texts was revealed posthumously by Jacques-Henri Meister in the Correspondance littéraire of March 1789 and later confirmed by Antoine Alexandre Barbier in his fundamental Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes. That notwithstanding, determining exactly the actual extent of d’Holbach’s textual corpus still represents a major challenge for eighteenth-century scholars. Not only did the baron publish the vast majority of his texts either anonymously or pseudonymously; not only did he often present his original works as translations and contributed to such collaborative works as the Encyclopédie and the Histoire des deux Indes; he also incorporated in his works chunks of text pillaged from other authors’ clandestine manuscripts and actively sought to imitate the prose of contemporary writers, most notably Voltaire. To make things even more complicated when assessing d’Holbach’s influence, other authors are known to have read his works before publication: in his letters to Sophie Volland and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Diderot often refers to the prodigious amount of time he spent reading the baron’s manuscripts (or “washing his dirty clothes”, as he puts it), and Jacques-André Naigeon is sometimes indicated as the author of the prefaces and annotation to many of d’Holbach’s texts. Symmetrically, evidence suggests that d’Holbach played some role in the composition of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni’s novels, and that he oversaw the publication of Lagrange’s translation of Seneca’s works, a seven-volume edition as part of which Diderot’s Essai sur les règnes de Claude et Neron [Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero] was also published. The baron was indeed right when he wrote, in a letter of 1765, that he lived a collective existence in the Republic of Letter.s

Works cited

Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. by Maurice Tourneux, Paris: Garnier, 1877-1882.
Barbier, Antoine-Alexandre, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonymes, Paris: Imprimerie bibliographique, 1806, 2 vols.
Chaussinand-Nogaret, Guy, Les Lumières au péril du bûcher, Paris: Fayard, 2009.
D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Die Gesamte Erhaltene Korrespondenz, ed. by Hermann Sauter and Erich Loos, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986.
Diderot, Denis, Correspondance, ed. by Georges Roth, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955-1970, 16 vols.
Dieckmann, Herbert, “L”Encyclopédie et le fonds Vandeul”, Revue d”Histoire Littéraire de la France, 51 (1951), p.318-332.
Kors, Alan Charles, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976 (reprint 2015).
Kozul, Mladen, Les Lumières imaginaires : Holbach et la traduction, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016.
Lecompte, Denis, Marx et le baron d’Holbach: Aux Sources de Marx, le matérialisme athée holbachique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983.
Lough, John, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Lough, John, “Essai de bibliographie critique des publications du baron d’Holbach”, Revue d”Histoire Littéraire de la France, 46 (1939), p.215-234 and 47 (1947), p.314-318.
Lough, John, “Le Baron d’Holbach : Quelques documents inédits ou peu connus”, Revue d”Histoire Littéraire de la France, 57 (1957), p.524-543.
Lüthy, Herbert, “Les Mississippiens de Steckborn et la fortune des barons d’Holbach”, Schweizer Beitrage zur Allgemeinen Geschichte, 13 (1955), p.143-163.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, ed. by Raymond Trousson, in Œuvres complètes, Paris: Champion, 2012, 24 vols, vol.1, p.654.
Sandrier, Alain, “L”Attribution des articles de l”Encyclopédie au baron d’Holbach: bilan et perspectives”, Recherches sur Diderot et sur l”Encyclopédie, 45 (2010), p.44-57: https://journals.openedition.org/rde/4723.
Sandrier, Alain, Le Style philosophique du baron d’Holbach: conditions et contraintes du prosélytisme athée en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Champion, 2004.
Sciuto, Ruggero, Diderot and d’Holbach: A Theory of Determinism, thesis submitted to the University of Oxford, 2018.
Sciuto, Ruggero, “A “Reversible Figure Annotation System” for the Born-Digital Critical Edition of d’Holbach’s Complete Works”, in Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen (eds.), Annotation in Scholarly Editions and Research: Function, Differentiation, Systematization, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020, p.371-387.
Sciuto, Ruggero, Metadata of the correspondence of Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach, Early Modern Letters Online, 2019: http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=paul-henri-thiry-dholbach.
Sciuto, Ruggero, “The Absent Guest: d’Holbach’s Strategic Usage of Voltaire’s Texts”, in L. Nicolì (ed.), D’Holbach: The Great Protector of Wits (1789-2019), Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.
Seguin, Maria Susana, “D’Holbach lecteur/éditeur de Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger”, La Lettre clandestine, 22 (2014), p.121-136.
Vercruysse, Jeroom, Bibliographie descriptive des imprimés du baron d’Holbach, Paris: Garnier, 2017.
William Hardy Wickwar, Baron d’Holbach: A Prelude to the French Revolution, London: Allen-Unwin, 1935.

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Citation: Sciuto, Ruggero. "Baron d'Holbach". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 April 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=14660, accessed 26 January 2025.]