Abstract

To explore the strategic role of translation in radical Enlightenment thought and its interconnection with social revolutions, this contribution focuses on the figure of D'Holbach and the textual case of the Traité des trois imposteurs. It discusses the baron's publishing, translating and writing activities, his sources, mainly Spinoza and Boulainvilliers, and his own work built largely on those same sources. It brings publishers, translators, anonymous manuscript-writers and authors of different historical periods into the same conceptual and historical-archaeological scheme to test the thesis of ‘entangled histories of revolution'. The case of the Traité des trois imposteurs in D'Holbach's edition/translation of 1768 compared with its sources, variants and effects, can be seen as an example of strategic text fabrication and such an entanglement. In each of the translations/editions of the Traité, we encounter an appropriation of the text inspired by the current context and need for renewal. This is also the case in D'Holbach’s “own” work and in each of the other “sources,” namely Lucas (1719), Boulainvilliers (1712) and Spinoza himself. The same happens when we look to the editions/translations that follow until 1796, and especially in the Italian translation (1798) presumably effected by Bocalosi, a radical translation in every sense.