La Mettrie is known mainly for L'Homme machine or Machine Man, a work whose title has rung out as a provocation since its publication in Holland in 1747. This was doubtless the effect sought by the author; like the majority of his works, it has little of a formal treatise and is mainly a polemical work addressed to the general reading public of educated people. Because of this, it seems to have been quite widely distributed for most of the eighteenth century, although since the end of the century, it has been more often referred to than read, a fact which has paradoxically increased its scandalous reputation. In any case, the life of its author, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, was such that it could only increase the aura of scandal surrounding his work. A medical doctor who wrote both satires against his colleagues and irreligious philosophical works, he was forced to leave his native France and then Holland before finding refuge at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, where he continued to write ‘scandalous’ works developing amoral conclusions drawn from his uncompromising materialism, which aroused condemnation even among those who had not been shocked by his earlier works. He died, in 1751, of what was commonly described as indigestion.

He was writing at a turning-point in the mid-eighteenth century, when the intellectual scene was dominated by Voltaire, when the works of Buffon, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot were beginning to be published and the Encyclopédie project was getting under way, and he was very conscious of this new self-conscious philosophical party critical of many aspects of the Old Régime.