The unlikely estimate that there were 50,000 of these people living in Paris in 1625 comes from a book by Marin Mersenne. A book by Lucien Febvre (“FEV-ruh”) argues that Bonaventure des Périers (“day pair-YAY”) and Étienne Dolet (“ate-YEN doh-LAY”) were only called these people as a rhetorical gesture, since these people didn’t exist in the 16th century. David Hume claimed he did not believe in these people, only to be told he was sitting with fifteen of them, while at dinner with his host’s “Coterie.” The “testament” of one of these people, the (*) priest Jean Meslier (“mel-YAY”), was expurgated by Voltaire, who attacked these people for celebrating John Needham’s creation of “eels” from flour and quipped against them in reply to the Treatise of the Three Imposters. The 18th century’s most famous one of these people wrote The System of Nature. For 10 points, the Baron d’Holbach was what sort of person once thought unable to swear oaths? ■END■
ANSWER: atheists [accept unbelievers, nonbelievers, materialists, or naturalists; or word forms like atheism or “problem of unbelief”; prompt on freethinkers, skeptics, libertines, philosophes, blasphemers, heretics, or anti-clericalists; reject “agnostics” or “deists”] (Hume was eating with D’Holbach’s Coterie.)
<JB, European History>
= Average correct buzz position