"Too Revolutionary Even for a Revolutionary Age"

"Mr Blom’s book is part biography and part polemic. He sketches the early lives of Diderot, Holbach, Rousseau and other players in the drama, and describes the philosophy they hammered out. 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."

The Economist publishes a review of Philipp Blom's A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment.