Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (French: [dɔlbak]) (8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789), was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He was well known for his atheism[3] and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770). Less