A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
by Philipp Blom

—Reviewed by Jay de la Torre

Voltaire (né François-Marie Arouet) and Jean Jacques Rousseau are often celebrated as the dominant thinkers of the Enlightenment. Less noticed by posterity have been two other major figures of the period: Denis Diderot, best known for his work in compiling the massive Encyclopédie, and his friend Paul Henri Thierry Baron D’Holbach, a German-born Parisian aristocrat famous for hosting some of the most boisterous and stimulating dinners of the era. It is primarily on these lesser-known men, Diderot and Holbach, that historian Philipp Blom focuses in his book A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.

Blom reminds us that Diderot and Holbach were, even by today’s standards, radical in their beliefs. Both were materialists and near-atheists who called for an end to what they viewed as oppression by the Christian Church. “Christianity is in no way different from all the other superstitions with which the universe is infected,” wrote Holbach in Le Christianisme dévoilé (Christianity Unveiled). Where thinkers like Rousseau had spoken of the tension between reason and passion, Diderot and Holbach believed that reason and passion were inextricably linked, and only through the exercise of reason could someone hope to fulfill his passion. Blom explains such thoughts and their evolution masterfully, writing with a welcome lucidity that’s all too rare in most books on the history of philosophy.

But Blom goes beyond mere ideas and reminds as that Diderot and Holbach, for all their high-mindedness, were also human beings, susceptible to many of the moral lapses that afflict lesser mortals. Diderot was an infamous womanizer who largely ignored his wife, Antoinette, and doted on his mistress, Sophie Valland. Holbach seems to have been a dreary husband who was jealous and overprotective of his young and attractive second wife.

If Diderot and Holbach did anything to exile themselves to the margins of the discourse of their time, it was to reject all religious dogma. Voltaire and Rousseau presented theories that still allowed for the existence of an omnipotent God, a more agreeable stance in a society that was seeking change, but not upheaval. Eventually, the political calculating of Voltaire (who deftly forged and broke alliances as needed) and the theatrics of Rousseau (who was always prepared to traffic in emotional exhibitionism) would cause Diderot and Holbach to fade in visibility.

Still, while Diderot and Holbach may have been eclipsed in fame by some of their contemporaries, the two men undoubtedly helped lay the intellectual foundations for many biological and social advances in history. For instance, without the precedent of Diderot and Holbach rejecting religion when it came into conflict with reason, it’s unlikely that western society would have found its way to the theory of evolution, to the sequencing of DNA, or even to modern feminism. Blom’s book should cause us to ask whether today we are similarly hasty in dismissing the thoughts of brilliant minds on the fringes of our discourse.

Excerpt: “To the Enlightenment radicals, reason is merely a technical faculty of analysis, part of our material constitution. But while moderate thinkers wanted to create a life governed less by the passions and more by rational behavior, a life purified of physical desire and instinctive acts, Holbach and particularly Diderot wanted to create a society in which individuals could live as far as possible in harmony with their desires and fulfill them. Reason was simply a tool for a life that was essentially passionate and governed by vital drives, by pleasure and pain.”

Further Reading: The System of Nature, Volume I and The System of Nature, Volume II by Paul Henri Thierry Baron D’Holbachby Paul Henri Thierry Baron D’Holbach, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master by Denis Diderot, Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon

Jay de la Torre is the Program and Media Coordinator at Zócalo Public Square. His work has also been published in TAYO Literary Magazine.

*Photo courtesy of Steve and Sara.