D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris

by Alan Charles Kors

Students of the Enlightenment have long assumed that the major movement towards atheism in the Ancien Régime was centered in the circle of intellectuals who met at the home of Baron d'Holbach during the last half of the eighteenth century. This major critical study shows, contrary to the accepted views, that in fact, atheism was not the common bond of a majority of the members and that, far from being alienated figures, most of the members were privileged and publicly successful citizens devoted to peaceful and gradual reform.

Alan Charles Kors determines the coterie's membership and discovers it to have been a diverse assemblage of philosophes, men of letters, and scientists. Analyzing the thought and behavior of those members who lived past 1789, the author argues that the hostility to the Revolution expressed by the coterie's survivors was fully consistent with their world view.

Originally published in 1976.

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Hardcover

First published November 1, 1975

About the author

Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries. He has received both the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award for distinguished college teaching. Kors graduated A.B. summa cum laude at Princeton University in 1964, and received his M.A. (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in European history at Harvard University.
Kors has written on the history of skeptical, atheistic, and materialist thought in 17th and 18th-century France, on the Enlightenment in general, on the history of European witchcraft beliefs, and on academic freedom. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, which was published in four volumes by Oxford University Press in 2002.
Kors co-founded – with civil rights advocate Harvey A. Silverglate – and served from 2000 to 2006 as chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).