A friend has drawn my attention to Philipp Blom's
A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment. You can read the full review
here. As the review states
It is the story of the scandalous Paris salon run by Baron Paul Thierry d’Holbach, a philosophical playground for many of the greatest thinkers of the age. Its members included Denis Diderot (most famous as the editor of the original encyclopedia, but, Mr Blom argues, an important thinker in his own right), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of romanticism, and the baron himself; even David Hume, a famous Scottish empiricist, paid the occasional visit. ...It is also an iconoclastic rebuttal of what he describes as the “official” history of the Enlightenment, the sort of history that he finds “cut in stone” on a visit to the Paris Panthéon. There the bodies of Voltaire and Rousseau were laid to rest with the blessing of the French state. Neither deserved it, suggests Mr Blom.
Blom's heroes are the Enlightenment atheists,
Holbach and Diderot. You need to read the whole review to see his argument. You will see that he doesn't like Voltaire or Rousseau!
