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The more things change, the more they stay...

Reviewed by: Morley Walker

Posted: 12/31/2010 10:58 AM | Comments: 0

A Wicked Company
The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
By Philipp Blom McClelland & Stewart,
362 pages, $37

‘ALL religions pretend to have emanated from heaven," a prominent atheist says.

"All forbid the use of reason, all pretend to be the only depository of truth... and finally they are all false, and full of contradictions."

A sound bite from Christopher Hitchens’ recent debate with Tony Blair? Perhaps an excerpt from a polemic by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?

No, these words were penned by a German-born intellectual, Baron Thiry d’Holbach, almost 250 years ago in Paris, during the height of what is now called the European Enlightenment.

Holbach and his confreres are the focus of a marvellously detailed and amusing work of narrative history, A Wicked Company , by a Vienna-based author and literary journalist, Philipp Blom.

The major point one takes away from Blom’s vivid portrayal is that there really is nothing new under the sun.

The only advance might be is that those who espouse radical notions in western nations today do not usually risk imprisonment or execution.

As Blom tells us, Holbach’s name has been largely lost to posterity, but in his day he commanded the attention and respect of a Hitchens or, to use a modern Canadian example, a John Ralston Saul.

Twice a week, on Thursday and Sunday evenings, from the 1750s into the 1770s, Holbach played host to the great thinkers and writers who lived in or visited Paris.

In each other’s "wicked company," they gathered in Holbach’s salon to eat sumptuous meals, drink the finest vintages and debate the modern notions that were convulsing Europe.

Their leading light, according to Blom, was the novelist and encyclopedia publisher Denis Diderot, who professed atheism, feminism and sexual freedom

A tireless worker, original mind and fearless defier of authority, Diderot is very much the hero of Blom’s story, even though his fame was eventually eclipsed by that of his friend and rival Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Blom paints as the lesser intellect.

The Scottish atheist philosopher David Hume and his countryman Adam Smith, the patron saint of capitalism, both made pilgrimages to Holbach’s salon.

The one great figure who kept his distance was François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, the epitome of Enlightenment thinkers but a man, according to Blom, who was even more vain and distrustful of rivals than Rousseau.

This highlights the book’s other main takeaway points. First, this was a small and insular world; only the tiniest percentage of Europeans 250 years ago could afford to indulge the life of the mind.

Second, ambitious people, despite their higher intentions, have always succumbed to their vanity, egotism and sexual appetites.

Blom does a superb job of showing how little times have changed.

Morley Walker edits the Free Press Books section.

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