A Wicked Company

“Blom here returns to the field of an earlier triumph (Enlightening the World: Encylopédie, the Book That Changed the Course of History, 2005) to take the measure of Encyclopédie’s editor, Denis Diderot. Placing Diderot in the natural habitat of Enlightenment philosophes, the Parisian salon circa 1750, Blom presents one Diderot habituated, hosted by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach. Baron who? readers may wonder, but d’Holbach attracted Diderot, Rousseau, and Hume to his salon and also penned atheistic philosophical tracts. If those endure less in intellectual history than the writings of his guests, d’Holbach’s hospitality receives Blom’s recognition as an incubator of the Enlightenment. Over the baron’s table, as conversationalists volleyed their subversions of the ancien régime and then crystallized the badinage into published works, Blom pauses to summarize its arguments. Those who might not be pleased with such paraphrasing might be placated by Blom’s interludes about the relationships among d’Holbach’s group, their japes, their lusts, their acrimonies: Rousseau, the great lover of humanity, hated Diderot and Hume. A perceptive, readable portrayal of a seminal coterie in the history of ideas.”Gilbert Taylor, BOOKLIST

“Tells the story of a set of remarkable individuals on the radical fringes of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, whose determinedly atheistic and materialist philosophies denied the existence of God or the soul…. [P]art biography and part polemic…it is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the ‘official’ history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds ‘cut in stone’ on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom.”
THE ECONOMIST

“In his new book A Wicked Company, Philipp Blom achieves a rare feat. His aim is to shed new light on a hitherto obscure chapter in the history of 18th-century French thought. More precisely, he resurrects the life and times of Baron d’Holbach, Denis Diderot and their circle of friends, lovers and enemies who met in d’Holbach’s house on rue des Moulins in Paris.This group constituted the Radical Enlightenment, a philosophical school driven by uncompromising atheism and which has been half-forgotten in the wake of what Blom calls the victory of the “soft Enlightenment” – the legacy of Rousseau and Voltaire, which is both “Deist” and Utopian. The trick that Blom pulls off with such dazzling aplomb is to make the story he tells timely, compelling and occasionally even thrilling.This is partly because Blom is such a stylish and clever writer: his prose is as lucid and elegant as any of his 18th-century heroes. But it’s also because the history of d’Holbach and his friends has a great deal to tell us about the way we live now. Most crucially, Blom describes how d’Holbach’s thought is predicated on the importance of challenging totalitarian systems, whether in religion or politics.He does this in his discovery of the all too human truth that idealism never works. This is d’Holbach’s central contribution to political thought, and it is from this position that Blom is able to argue with a convincing swagger that the real history of mankind is not about big ideas but really a matter of “muddling through”.
In his day, Baron d’Holbach had a reputation as great as Voltaire or Rousseau, whom he knew, and was famous both for his atheism and his attachment to food, drink, conversation, writing and sex as the fundamental principles of human existence. In Blom’s portrait he emerges as a kind of 18th-century Christopher Hitchens – a hedonistic contrarian with a compassionate streak. In this he was matched by Diderot, who these days is mainly feted for the Encyclopédie – the encyclopedic dictionary of the arts and sciences of that day and one of the great literary monuments of the 18th century. Diderot was also a sensualist, a great conversationalist (his talk was compared to a fireworks display) and a passionate enemy of all established form of authority, especially God.
The cast of characters assembled around d’Holbach’s table included Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin. It was the English actor David Garrick who dubbed the circle “a wicked company” and, as Blom takes us closer to listen in on debates on morality, society and the evil of lies and religion, it’s easy to imagine Richard Dawkins or indeed Hitchens in the fray.
No less modern is the circle’s views on sex – free love, lesbianism and homosexuality are matters of no more moral consequence than choosing between apples and oranges: a liberal and humane view that is the basis for a very 21st-century form of morality based on tolerance rather than scripture.
Most interesting of all is Blom’s coda to the book, which paints a pen portrait of the Marquis de Sade – exactly the kind of free-thinking revolutionary who might be assumed to be the heir of d’Holbach’s atheism, pursuing philosophical freedom to its breaking point in cruelty and crime. Not so, says Blom; de Sade is the very opposite of d’Holbach’s radicalism, which posited that humans were fundamentally motivated by the pursuit of enlightened self-interest – this is what he meant by “society” – rather than the empty and grubby gratification of individual needs, such as to be found in de Sade’s fantasies of rape or murder. D’Holbach’s philosophy posits, in contrast, that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness, but that it is quite close.
In this spirit, Blom’s book is not only a pleasure to read but also a celebration of the real and material joys to be found in the godless universe.
Andrew Hussey, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, March 28, 2011

“A Wicked Company offers an entertainingly brisk introduction to some of the more intriguing byways of the Enlightenment, and in particular a humane and engaging portrait of Diderot, a man of startlingly modern ideas constrained by his humble circumstances to an almost-stifling public discretion.”
David Andress, author of  THE TERROR and 1789

“Historian Blom returns with a flowing, limpid account of an 18th-century French salon that housed the greatest names in French philosophy…. A swift, readable reminder that ideas are exciting – and have consequences.”
KIRKUS REVIEWS

“A bold book. In A Wicked Company, Philipp Blom recaptures some of the limelight from the most famous figures of the French Enlightenment – Rousseau and Voltaire – by arguing that the more radical ideas of Diderot and Holbach would have more resonance in our own times. Written with pace and verve, the book evokes the vibrancy of the Parisian salons, bringing the protagonists to life – Diderot, Holbach, Rousseau, Hume, Madame de Geoffrin – and puts flesh-and-blood into the story of eighteenth-century intellectual debate. While challenging the usual pantheon of Enlightenment thinkers, the book offers a lively and readable entry into the wider world of elite culture and ideas in the heady, exciting decades before the French Revolution.”
Mike Rapport, author of 1848

“Mr. Blom skillfully evokes the characters of these young men…. Mr. Blom’s coupling of the lives of the philosophers with their thought helps make their ideas less desiccated than they might otherwise have appeared in the hands of a more academic writer. He has an admirable ability to get to the heart of what Spinoza, Hume or Voltaire argued.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Tells the story of a set of remarkable individuals on the radical fringes of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, whose determinedly atheistic and materialist philosophies denied the existence of God or the soul…. [P]art biography and part polemic…it is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the ‘official’ history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds ‘cut in stone’ on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom.”
THE ECONOMIST

“Blom here returns to the field of an earlier triumph…to take the measure of Encyclopedie’s editor, Denis Diderot…. A perceptive, readable portrayal of a seminal coterie in the history of ideas.”
BOOKLIST

“Blom reminds us that some 18th-century reformers were thoroughgoing materialists, scoffing at religion, even deist religion, and criticizing an oppressive, irrational society.”
LIBRARY JOURNAL

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