la religion, cette barriere la plus formidable qui existe comme la
plus respectee, il est impossible de s'arreter. Des qu'ils ont tourne
des regards menacants contre la majeste du ciel, ils ne manqueront
pas le moment d'apres de les diriger contre la souverainete de la
terre. Le cable qui tient et comprime l'humanite est forme de deux
cordes, l'une ne peut ceder sans que l'autre vienne a rompre.
[Endnote 1:1]

The following study proposes to deal with this attack on religion
that preceded and helped to prepare the French Revolution. Similar
phenomena are by no means rare in the annals of history;
eighteenth-century atheism, however, is of especial interest,
standing as it does at the end of a long period of theological
and ecclesiastical disintegration and prophesying a reconstruction
of society on a purely rational and naturalistic basis. The
anti-theistic movement has been so obscured by the less thoroughgoing
tendency of deism and by subsequent romanticism that the real
issue in the eighteenth century has been largely lost from view.
Hence it has seemed fit to center this study about the man who
stated the situation with the most unmistakable and uncompromising
clearness, and who still occupies a unique though obscure position
in the history of thought.

Holbach has been very much neglected by writers on the eighteenth
century. He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition
of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous
occupons depuis longtemps a rassembler les materiaux qui doivent
servir a venger la memoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz,
et dans l'ouvrage que nous nous proposons de publier sous le titre
"D'Holbach juge par ses contemporains" nous esperons faire justement