Claude-Adrien Helvétius

(1715 - 1771)

Having obtained a post as a farmer general at the age of twenty-three in 1738, Claude-Adrien Helvétius resigned in 1751 and published his controversial work of materialist philosophy, On the Mind, seven years later. The Parlement of Paris and the city’s archbishop condemned the work; it was burned publicly, and Helvétius recanted his stated views. In 1765 he traveled to Berlin as a guest at the court of Frederick the Great and afterward retired to his home in Voré, where he died in 1771.