His grandfather Adriaan Helvetius introduced the use of ipecacuanha;[4] his father Jean Claude Adrien Helvétius was first physician to Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France.

Claude Adrien was trained for a financial career, apprenticed to his maternal uncle in Caen,[5] but he occupied his spare time with poetry.

Aged twenty-three, at the queen's request, he was appointed as a farmer-general, a tax-collecting post worth 100,000 crowns a year.

Thus provided for, he proceeded to enjoy life to the utmost, with the help of his wealth and liberality, his literary and artistic tastes - he attended, for example, the progressive Club de l'Entresol.

As he grew older, he began to seek more lasting distinctions, stimulated by the success of Pierre Louis Maupertuis as a mathematician, of Voltaire as a poet, and of Montesquieu as a philosopher.

[6] His wife, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, maintained a salon attended by the leading figures of the Enlightenment for over five decades.

In 1758 Helvétius published his philosophical magnum opus, a work called De l'esprit (On Mind), which claimed that all human faculties are attributes of mere physical sensation, and that the only real motive is self-interest, therefore there is no good and evil, only competitive pleasures.

In 1764 Helvétius visited England, and the next year, at the invitation of Frederick II, went to Berlin, where the king paid him much attention.

Helvétius' family lived alternately on Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher) and their Parisian townhouse at the rue Sainte-Anne.

The religious authorities, particularly the Jesuits and the new Pope, began to fear the spread of atheism and wanted to clamp down on the 'modern thought' hard and quickly.

"If we commonly meet in London, with knowing men, who are with much more difficulty found in France," this is because it is a country where "every citizen has a share in the management of affairs in general.

[13] The crux of his thought was that public ethics has a utilitarian basis, and he insisted strongly on the importance of culture and education in national development.

[17] His poetic ambitions resulted in the poem called Le Bonheur (published posthumously, with an account of Helvétius's life and works, by Jean François de Saint-Lambert, 1773), in which he develops the idea that true happiness is only to be found in making the interest of one person that of all.