The ARTFL Project

Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach (1723-1789) is one of the most important figures of the European Enlightenment. His writings put forward a thorough-going materialistic and deterministic philosophy; they are inspired by a profound dislike of superstition and religious belief and had a huge impact on European philosophy and culture, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. In spite of that, d’Holbach is now somewhat neglected as a thinker and very few of his works are available in a reliable critical edition.

Spearheaded by Ruggero Sciuto from the Voltaire Foundation (University of Oxford), in collaboration with the ARTFL Project, Tout d’Holbach aims to bring together fully searchable transcriptions of the vast majority of d’Holbach’s works. At the moment (Spring 2020), it only includes d’Holbach’s original writings, defined as those considered ‘œuvres originales publiées isolément’ (‘original works published separately’) in Jeroom Vercruysse’s fundamental Bibliographie descriptive des imprimés du baron d’Holbach (1971; new ed. 2017). Moving forward, full transcriptions of d’Holbach’s translations and editions, respectively marked as Ds and Fs in Vercruysse’s bibliography, will be added, as well as works whose attribution to the baron is more controversial. The database does not include d’Holbach’s correspondence or his contributions to collaborative works such as the Encyclopédie or the Histoire des deux Indes.

We would like to thank the Classiques des Sciences Sociales project for their hard work in digitizing many of d'Holbach's works as well as for their permission to use their digital texts for the Tout d'Holbach. You can find a listing of all of their publicly available digitized transcriptions of d'Holbach on their website.

Thanks to the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Voltaire Foundation, a department of the University of Oxford, is currently working on a born-digital critical edition of d’Holbach’s writings: Digital d’Holbach. Unlike Digital d’Holbach, the present database is not a critical edition: none of the texts is annotated, and the transcriptions, while broadly accurate, may contain occasional typos. Tout d’Holbach is a research tool, and one, we hope, that will prove invaluable to researchers collaborating on Digital d’Holbach as well as to scholars working on the European Enlightenment, more broadly.

To search Tout d’Holbach click HERE.

If you would like to know more about Digital d’Holbach, or if you would like to collaborate with us, please contact Ruggero Sciuto at ruggero.sciuto@voltaire.ox.ac.uk