Baron d'Holbach, French-German philosopher and author (born 1723)

Paul Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, known as d'Holbach, was a Franco-German philosopher, encyclopedist and writer, who was a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He helped in the dissemination of "Protestant and especially German thought", particularly in the field of the sciences, but was best known for his atheism, and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770) and The Universal Morality (1776).