HOHENZOLLERN larles I. (died 1576) received from the em- m jror Charles V. in 1529 the counties of Sig- maringen and Vohringen. Charles's sons Eitel Frederick VI. and Charles II. divided the es- tates. The former took Hohenzollern, and adopted for his line the name Hohenzollern- Hechingen; the latter received Sigmaringen and Vohringen, and assumed the name Hohen- zollern-Sigmaringen. The son of Frederick VI., John George, was in 1623 raised by the emperor Ferdinand II. to the dignity of a prince of the empire, which was also conferred in 1638 on the Sigmaringen family. In 1695 and 1707 the Frankish and Swabian branches agreed upon a common law of succession, subsequent- ly ratified by the king of Prussia as the head of the house. The treaty established among them the right of primogeniture, and provided that in case one of the branches should be without a male successor, the estates should be trans- ferred to the other branch ; and that in case both branches should become extinct in the male and female lines, the estates should fall to the royal house of Prussia. In consequence of the political troubles of 1848, the princes Frederick William of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Charles Anthony of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen resigned the government of their territories, Dec. 7, 1849, and the principalities, according to the treaty, fell to the crown of Prussia, which took possession of them March 12, 1850. The two princes received the rank of younger princes of the royal house. Prince CHARLES ANTHONY of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, born Sept. 7, 1811, presided over the Prussian cabinet from Dec. 2, 1858, to March, 1862. His eldest son, Prince LEOPOLD, born Sept. 22, 1835, married in 1861 the infanta Antonia of Portugal. His pa- ternal grandmother was a princess Murat, and his mother was a niece of the empress Jose- phine and adopted daughter of Napoleon I. On July 4, 1870, the provisional government of Spain proposed him to the cortes as candi- date for the Spanish crown. The French gov- ernment declared that the occupation of the Spanish throne by a prince of Hohenzollern would be incompatible with the interests of France, and demanded that the king of Prussia should forbid Prince Leopold to accept the crown. The king refused to make such an order, on the ground that he had no right to give orders to a prince of his house who was of age ; and although Leopold (July 12) vol- untarily declined to be a candidate for the Spanish crown, France was not satisfied, and the result was the Franco-German war of 1870-'71. He is a major general in the Prus- sian army. His brother CHARLES, born April 20, 1839, was in 1866 elected prince of Rou- mania. (See CHARLES I. of Roumania, vol. iv., p. 309.) ANTHONY, the third son, born Oct. 7, 1841, died July 5, 1866, from wounds which he received at the battle of Konig- gratz, July 3. FREDERICK, the fourth son, born June 25, 1843, is an officer of the Prus- sian dragoons of the guard. HOLBACH 763 HOLBACH, Paul Henri Thyry (or DIETRICH) d', baron, a French philosopher, born at Heidels- heim, near Carlsruhe, in 1723, died in Paris, Jan. 21, 1789. He was taken to Paris when very young by his father, from whom he in- herited a considerable fortune. A large part of this he expended in hospitalities to the free- thinkers of his time, whom he regularly enter- tained at his splendid table, so that Galiani styled him the premier maitre d'hotel de la philosophic. The boldest opinions and the most irreligious principles were here discussed without restraint. Much information concern- ing these dinner parties is given in the memoirs of the abbe Morellet, of Mme. d'Epinay, in Grimm's " Correspondence," and in the curious but not impartial work of Mme. de Genlis, Les diners du baron d'Holbach. Holbach attacked with great zeal Christianity and all other pos- itive religions, and labored for the promulga- tion of naturalistic ideas. He began his liter- ary career by translating a number of German philosophical works. He edited and published in 1759 the works of Boulanger, a young en- gineer, who died in that year, and afterward published under Boulanger's name his own works, Le Christianisme devoile, ou examen de* principes et des effets de la religion revelee (1767), and L 1 Esprit du clerge, ou le Christian- isme primitif venge des entreprises et des exces de nos pretres modernes, which a decree of par- liament, Aug. 18, 1770, sentenced to be burned by the public executioner. The same year he published his most celebrated book, Le systeme de la nature, ou des lois du monde physique et moral, under the fictitious name of Mirabaud, secretaire perpetuel de V academic francaise ; this created such scandal that Voltaire himself thought proper to refute it in the article Dieu of his Dictionnaire philosophique, while Goethe declared that he recoiled from it in abhorrence as from a "cadaverous spectre." It passed, however, through eight editions between 1817 and 1824, and a new edition in German was published in Leipsic in 1843. In 1772 a short pamphlet, Le Ion sens, ou idees naturelles op- posees aux idees surnaturelles, reproduced in a more familiar form the principles he had pre- viously advocated ; and this pamphlet, which has been frequently reprinted and largely cir- culated under the title of Le Ion sens du cure Meslier, has more powerfully than any other publication contributed to diffuse the principles of infidelity among the middle classes in France. Le systeme social, ou les principes naturels de la morale et de la politique, appeared in 1773, and La morale universelle, ou les devoirs de Vhomme fondes sur la nature, in 1776. Most of these works were, as soon as they appeared, proscribed by the church and the parliament, and were even disclaimed by philosophers. All his writings appeared either anonymous- ly or under the name of deceased persons, or as translations from the English. In his literary performances he had the help of La- grange, the teacher of his children, of Nai-
