page_title: Claude Adrien Helvétius
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Claude Adrien Helvétius / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Le Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher) Deutsch: Le Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher)
context_page_description: Claude Adrien Helvétius was a French philosopher, freemason and littérateur.
context_section_description: Claude Adrien Helvétius was born in Paris, France, and was descended from a family of physicians, originally surnamed Schweitzer (meaning "Swiss" in German; Latinized as Helvétius). His grandfather Adriaan Helvetius introduced the use of ipecacuanha; his father Jean Claude Adrien Helvétius was first physician to Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France. Claude Adrien was trained for a financial career, apprenticed to his maternal uncle in Caen, but he occupied his spare time with poetry. Aged twenty-three, at the queen's request, he was appointed as a farmer-general, a tax-collecting post worth 100,000 crowns a year. Thus provided for, he proceeded to enjoy life to the utmost, with the help of his wealth and liberality, his literary and artistic tastes - he attended, for example, the progressive Club de l'Entresol. As he grew older, he began to seek more lasting distinctions, stimulated by the success of Pierre Louis Maupertuis as a mathematician, of Voltaire as a poet, and of Montesquieu as a philosopher. His wife, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, maintained a salon attended by the leading figures of the Enlightenment for over five decades.
  In 1758 Helvétius published his philosophical magnum opus, a work called De l'esprit (On Mind), which claimed that all human faculties are attributes of mere physical sensation, and that the only real motive is self-interest, therefore there is no good and evil, only competitive pleasures.  Its atheistic, utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines raised a public outcry, and the Sorbonne publicly burned it in 1759, forcing Helvétius to issue several retractions.
  In 1764 Helvétius visited England, and the next year, at the invitation of Frederick II, went to Berlin, where the king paid him much attention. 
  After 10 years, when he thought his fortune sufficient, he gave up the post of farmer-general, and retired to a country estate in France, where he employed his fortune in the relief of the poor, the encouragement of agriculture and the development of industries. For this he won the admiration of many of the philosophers.
  Helvetius´ family lived alternately on Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher) and their Parisian townhouse at the rue Sainte-Anne.
caption: Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher)
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