Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie. Their work brought them into contact with a remarkable group of men, who populate the pages of Philipp Blom’s quirky and original book: the economist and journalist Raynal, who never quite shook off his Jesuit origins; the mass of obscurer contributors to the Encyclopédie; the moody and quarrelsome romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who rejected many of their fundamental values; the occasional outsiders like the Scots David Hume and Adam Smith, who were more considerable philosophers than any of them; and Voltaire, a distant and malevolent presence, living in exile in Switzerland, the author of many pungent letters and pamphlets but no serious intellectual work. Blom weaves their disparate lives and opinions together into a more or less coherent narrative. Intellectual history is famously difficult to write for a non-specialist readership. Biography is a good refuge from the difficulties, even if it can rarely do justice to the complexity of the subject.
The link figure in Blom’s group is Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron Holbach. Holbach is not well-known, but perhaps deserves to be. He was a rich German dilletante, by profession a lawyer, educated at Leyden in Holland, who lived most of his life in Paris and died there at the age of 66, a few weeks before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He contributed several articles to the Encyclopédie, mostly on the natural sciences. But his main claim to fame was that he was the author of a number of atheist treatises. These, however, did nothing for his fame in his lifetime because they were written under pseudonyms in order to escape the attention of the censors. As a result, Holbach has come down to posterity not as a philosopher but as the pretentious host mocked by Horace Walpole, and the original of the virtuous unbeliever Baron Wolmar in Rousseau’s Julie.
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