Dimensions
165 x 240 x 35mm
Dazzling recreation of the world of radical free-thinkers in 18th-century France.
Imagine the world's most brilliant and charismatic people around one dinner table, the greatest philosophers, novelists, scientists, actors and political activists - and imagine them joking one moment and then immersed in intense discussion broken by bursts of laughter. Imagine also that this astonishing company was defined not only by who is at the table, but by what they say: opinions radical enough to land them all in prison.
The book focuses on the early life of four young men, two philosophers (Hume and Rousseau) and two philosophes (Didenot and Holbach) as they set out with a mixture of desperation and optimism to travel and study. Philipp Blom's new book dazzlingly combines biography with the history of ideas and the birth of modernism.
