BOULANGER, NICOLAS-ANTOINE. - Born in 1722, died in 1759. Swiss, but lived in France for his career as a military and civil engineer. Having settled in Paris, he became close to the group of Enlightenment thinkers centered on d'Holbach; he collaborated on the Encyclopédie (editing the entries corvées, langue hébraïque, etc.), admired by the philosophes for his capacity for synthesis and for his singular erudition.
He was in fact acquainted with, and studied as interconnected phenomena, ancient religious forms and traditions and linguistic forms, on which he intended to construct a "general mythology of the human race." He sought to identify, within this indefinite variety, constant elements, and, according to his rationalistic construction, a natural fact generating dogma: the flood. To the cyclical "revolutions of nature" he opposed the idea of progress: this was the central motif of his thought, gathered by his friends at a critical moment for the Enlightenment offensive.
Bibliography2 worksF. Venturi, L'antichità svelata e l'idea di progresso in N. A. B. (1722-59), Bari 1947, with an exhaustive bibliography; (Venturi demonstrat
BIBL.: F. Venturi, L'antichità svelata e l'idea di progresso in N. A. B. (1722-59), Bari 1947, with an exhaustive bibliography; (Venturi demonstrates how unfounded is the hypothesis of a Vichian influence on B., still taken up by Meinecke: he hints at B.'s influence on the work of Pagano).
Passerin, Ettore. “Boulanger, nicolas-antoine.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, col. 1981. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949. https://azioneromana.com/article/boulanger-nicolas-antoine.
MLA
Passerin, Ettore. “Boulanger, nicolas-antoine.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949, col. 1981. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/boulanger-nicolas-antoine.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec2_boulanger_nicolas_antoine,
author = {Passerin, Ettore},
title = {Boulanger, nicolas-antoine},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {II},
pages = {1981},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1949},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/boulanger-nicolas-antoine}
}
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