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Home  »  library  »  BIOS  »  Baron Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach (1723–1789)

C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Baron Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach (1723–1789)

Holbach, Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von (G. pron. hol’bäċh; F. pron. ōl-bäk’). A French philosopher and writer; born at Heidelsheim, in the Palatinate, in 1723; died on June 21, 1789. He inherited great wealth from his father, and entertained in his elegant house a number of eminent writers and thinkers of the day, among them Rousseau, Diderot, and Buffon. He was himself a man of no ordinary talent, and held materialistic and atheistic views characteristic of the period preceding the French Revolution, which are expounded in ‘Christianity Unveiled’ (1767); ‘Spirit of the Clergy’ (1767); ‘Sacerdotal Imposture’ (1767); ‘The System of Nature’ (1770); ‘The Social System’ (1773).