Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary Europe . By Mark Curran. Royal Historical Society Studies in History. Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2012. viii + 222 pp. $90.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary Europe . By Mark Curran . Royal Historical Society Studies in History. Rochester, N.Y. : Boydell , 2012. viii + 222 pp. $90.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis is an excellent study of the literary career of Paul-Henri Thiry the Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), the atheistic philosophe of German background, and an important landmark in contemporary Enlightenment research. It is also an event in research into the changes in religious apologetics in the late eighteenth century. This study's importance derives both from its intrinsic value but also from the unaccountable fact that d'Holbach, its main focus, has been neglected by Enlightenment scholars at all stages despite the historical impact of his publications. This neglect was due in part, Curran explains, to the lack of sources of biographical information about d'Holbach's life and activities. But it is equally due to the pervasive, strange, and unjust myth that grew up in the nineteenth century and prevailed through the twentieth that d'Holbach is a dull and uninteresting author, a judgment that appears exceedingly odd to anyone familiar with his extremely subversive religious, philosophical, social, and political views. In any case, his Systeme de la nature (1770), in particular, administered a tremendous shock within the world of late Enlightenment European intellectual culture and provoked a powerful and lasting reaction from both Catholic and Protestant theologians and moderate enlighteners which forms a significant chapter in church history.Curran begins by following Jeremy Popkin, Daniel Gordon, Elisabeth Eisenstein, David Bell, and Jonathan Israel in pointing out, quite correctly, that while Robert Darnton's historical researches revealed d'Holbach to have been the hand behind eight of the "ten most popular pre-Revolutionary clandestine anti-religious treatise" that appeared in France (5), and that he was one of the most widely read Enlightenment authors, neither Darnton nor anyone else has thus far seen fit to write about d'Holbach as the pre-eminent figure that he undoubtedly was. Curran advances considerably beyond the point reached by the older scholarship devoted to d'Holbach, in particular the works of W. H.Wckwar and Pierre Naville, by drawing on the substantial material and fresh information from the numerous books, brochures, and articles, the 128 recorded publications, published in the 1770s and 1780s, responding to the challenge offered by d'Holbach's major works. Churchmen and moderate enlighteners eager to defend religion regarded his books as especially dangerous. They did so less for his detailed partially scientific exposition of materialist doctrines as such, a dimension of d'Holbach's original work largely confined to the Systeme de la nature , than to his readiness to deduce moral, social, and political conclusions from his atheism and materialism, something he does, both in that work and still more in La Politique naturelle (1773) the Systeme social (1773) and La Morale universelle (1776). D'Holbach emerged as a social critic in a notably more systematic and challenging manner than either La Mettrie or Diderot.As Curran notes d'Holbach remained high-profile, especially in Catholic and Protestant apologetic literature, through the 1770s and 1780s down to 1789 and not the least valuable feature of this slim volume are two appendices, one extremely useful eighteen-page list of the books published partly or wholly responding to d'Holbach (appendix 2), and another ten-page list of the articles responding to the challenge that appeared in the periodical press (appendix 3). …