Baron d'Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France — Max Pearson Cushing
Baron d'Holbach, by Max Pearson Cushing You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Baron d'Holbach : a Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France Author : Max Pearson Cushing Release date : May 1, 2004 [eBook #5621] Most recently updated: March 20, 2013 Language : English Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5621 Credits : Produced by David Ross and Richard Farris *** START OF HOLBACH, THE MAN. CHAPTER II. HOLBACH'S WORKS. CHAPTER III. THE SYSTÈME DE LA NATURE. APPENDIX [ENDNOTES] BIBLIOGRAPHY—PART I. BIBLIOGRAPHY PART II. VITA (DETAILED) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. CHAPTER I. HOLBACH THE MAN. Early Letters to John Wilkes. Holbach's family. Relations with Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Garrick and other important persons of the century. Estimate of Holbach. His character and personality. CHAPTER II. HOLBACH'S WORKS. Miscellaneous Works. Translations of German Scientific Works. Translations of English Deistical Writers. Boulanger's Antiquité dévoilée . Original Works: Le Christianisme devoilé . Théologie portative . La Contagion sacrée . Essai sur les préjugés . Le bons-sens . CHAPTER III. THE Système de la Nature AND ITS PHILOSOPHY. Voltaire's correspondence on the subject. Goethe's sentiment. Refutations and criticisms. Holbach's philosophy. APPENDIX. HOLBACH'S CORRESPONDENCE. Five unpublished letters to John Wilkes. [ENDNOTES] BIBLIOGRAPHY. Part I. Editions of Holbach's works in Chronological Order. Part II. General Bibliography. BARON D'HOLBACH A une extréme justesse d'esprit il joignait une simplicité de moeurs tout-à-fait antique et patriarcale. J. A. Naigeon, Journal de Paris , le 9 fev. 1789 INTRODUCTION Diderot, writing to the Princess Dashkoff in 1771, thus analysed the spirit of his century: Chaque siècle a son esprit qui le caractérise. L'esprit du nôtre semble être celui de la liberté. La première attaque contre la superstition a été violente, sans mesure. Une fois que les hommes ont osé d'une manière quelconque donner l'assaut à la barrière de la religion, cette barrière la plus formidable qui existe comme la plus respectée, il est impossible de s'arrêter. Dès qu'ils ont tourné des regards menaçants contre la majesté du ciel, ils ne manqueront pas le moment d'après de les diriger contre la souveraineté de la terre. Le câble qui tient et comprime l'humanité est formé de deux cordes, l'une ne peut céder sans que l'autre vienne à rompre. [Endnote 1:1] The following study proposes to deal with this attack on religion that preceded and helped to prepare the French Revolution. Similar phenomena are by no means rare in the annals of history; eighteenth-century atheism, however, is of especial interest, standing as it does at the end of a long period of theological and ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost from view. Hence it has seemed fit to center this study about the man who stated the situation with the most unmistakable and uncompromising clearness, and who still occupies a unique though obscure position in the history of thought. Holbach has been very much neglected by writers on the eighteenth century. He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous occupons depuis longtemps à rassembler les matériaux qui doivent servir à venger la mémoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz, et dans l'ouvrage que nous nous proposons de publier sous le titre "D'Holbach jugé par ses contemporains" nous espérons faire justement apprécier ce savant si estimable par la profondeur et la variété de ses connaissances, si précieux à sa famille et à ses amis par la pureté et la simplicité de ses moeurs, en qui la vertu était devenue une habitude et la bienfaisance un besoin." This work has never appeared and M. Tourneux thinks that nothing of it was found among M. Walferdin's papers. [2:2] In 1834 Mr. James Watson published in an English translation of the Système de la Nature , A Short Sketch of the Life and the Writings of Baron d'Holbach by Mr. Julian Hibbert, compiled especially for that edition from Saint Saurin's article in Michaud's Biographie Universelle (Paris, 1817, Vol. XX, pp. 460-467), from Barbier's Dict. des ouvrages anonymes (Paris, 1822) and from the preface to the Paris edition of the Système de la Nature (4 vols., 18mo, 1821). This sketch was later published separately (London, 1834, 12mo, pp. 14) but on account of the author's sudden death it was left unfinished and is of no value from the point of view of scholarship. Another attempt to publish something on Holbach was made by Dr. Anthony C. Middleton of Boston in 1857. In the preface to his translation to the Lettres à Eugenia he speaks of a "Biographical Memoir of Baron d'Holbach which I am now preparing for the press." If ever published at all this Memoir probably came to light in the Boston Investigator , a free-thinking magazine published by Josiah P. Mendum, 45 Cornhill, Boston, but it is not to be found. Mention should also be made of the fact that M. Assézat intended to include in a proposed study of Diderot and the philosophical movement, a chapter to be devoted to Holbach and his society; but this work has never appeared. [3:3] Of the two works bearing Holbach's name as a title, one is a piece of libellous fiction by Mme. de Genlis, Les Diners du baron d'Holbach (Paris, 1822, 8vo), the other a romance pure and simple by F. T. Claudon (Paris, 1835, 2 vols., 8vo) called Le Baron d'Holbach , the events of which t