Jacques-André Naigeon

[1] After trying his hand at painting and sculpture, Naigeon became a friend and associate of Denis Diderot, whom he helped to work on the Encyclopédie.

He soon became involved with the Coterie Holbachique, a group of radical French Enlightenment thinkers centered on the Paris salon of Baron d'Holbach.

Naigeon quickly adopted the Baron's atheist principles and collaborated with him on his works, overseeing their clandestine printing in Amsterdam and editing d'Holbach's Morale Universelle and his Essai sur les préjugés.

Naigeon's only original stand-alone work was Le militaire philosophe, ou Difficultés sur la religion, proposées au Père Malebranche (London and Amsterdam, 1768), which was based on an earlier anonymous manuscript and whose final chapter was written by d'Holbach.

This work mostly repeated the atheist, anti-Christian, determinist materialist arguments found in the radical literature of the second half of the 18th century.