A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment

From the 1750s to the 1770s, the Paris salon of Baron Paul Thiry Holbach was an epicenter of debate, intellectual daring, and revolutionary ideas, uniting around one table vivid personalities such as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterene, David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, the impish Ferdinando Galiani, the radical ex-priest Guillaume Raynal, the Italian Count Beccaria, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who later turned against his friends.

It was a moment of astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that it was viciously opposed by rival philosophers such as Voltaire and the turncoat Rousseau, and finally suppressed by Robespierre and his Revolutionary henchmen. This climactic moment in Western history has largely been forgotten by historians who have looked no further than what the official version of events showed.

In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes and characters of this exceptional group of friends and brings to life their startling ideas. Brilliant minds full of wit, courage, and humanity, their thinking created a different and radical French Enlightenment based on atheism, passion, empathy, and a compellingly insightful perspective on society. A startlingly relevant work of narrative history, A Wicked Company forces us to confront with new eyes the foundational debates about modern society and its future.

Philipp Blom was born in Hamburg and trained as a historian in Vienna and Oxford. He is the author of The Vertigo Years, Enlightening the World, and To Have and To hold. His articles have appeared in leading English-language and German-language newspapers and magazines, including numerous contributions to the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, among others. A host of cultural programming on Austrian National Radio, he lives in Vienna.