humanity, while he attacked the church as the defender of corrupt privileges
using the weapons of mystifying ritual and dogma. Metaphysics is the soil on
which transcendental superstitions grow. Voltaire’s philosophy was an ideology
for secular intellectuals feeling their victory over the old church bases of
intellectual life. The philosophes lost the abstractness of traditional philosophi-
cal topics; their creative energy came from opening up secular topics. The older
role of philosopher concerned with first principles was now differentiated into
the specialized sciences and disciplines.
Coinciding with the Jesuits’ expulsion from France in 1764, Voltaire be-
came a crusader for the victims of religious persecution and published his
strongest attacks on religion. Voltaire is a militant from a Deist stance, how-
ever, and his intellectual quarrels were increasingly against the group of phi-
losophes, who were now turning toward materialism and atheism. The baron
d’Holbach, whose Paris salon hosted the Encyclopedists and their descendants
from 1749 to 1789, began to produce secret anti-Christian writings in the
1760s; in 1770 his materialist Système de la nature set off the debate between
atheism and Deism. Voltaire and his patron Frederick the Great upheld the
side of Deism. Diderot, who had begun his career in 1745 by translating
Shaftesbury’s deism into French, now supported d’Holbach and atheism. The
most extreme members of the group were those with the most personal security.
Voltaire stayed within the range of his patrons’ religious tolerance; d’Holbach
was freer as a wealthy German expatriate in Paris; and the first really radical
naturalism was expressed in 1758 by Helvetius, a retired sinecure holder who
had made a fortune in tax farming for the French crown.
The central network of this period was the Encyclopedists (see Figure 11.1).
They built on the new material base provided by a market for publications. It
was the same structure which had appeared a generation earlier in England,
supporting the Tory and Whig literary circles; and it would appear a generation
later in Germany, with the literary outburst at Berlin, Göttingen, and Weimar.
Diderot and d’Alembert derived their chief income and occupation from the
Encyclopedia from 1746 to 1772, and most of the famous intellectual careers
of this period were begun by contact with this enterprise. The Encyclopedists
flourished as a group. D’Alembert was the only significantly creative one, with
his mathematical Traité dynamique in 1743, before the group formed in 1745.
Its wealthy supporter d’Holbach (26 years old when he joined the Paris group
in 1749) gradually moved from scientific articles to his own materialist phi-
losophy in the 1760s. Condillac, a young theology student at the Sorbonne in
the 1740s who happened to be d’Alembert’s cousin, was pulled in and pro-
duced his metaphysical Traité des sensations in 1754.^22 The young Turgot,
studying at the Sorbonne in 1749–1751, was introduced to the group and
immediately produced his Tableau philosophique des progrès successifs de
606 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths