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 joined the group of Enlightenment thinkers centred on d'Holbach; he collaborated on the Encyclopédie (writing the entries corvées, langue hébraïque, etc.), admired by the philosophes for his capacity for synthesis and his singular learning.
He knew and studied, indeed, as connected phenomena upon which he intended to construct a “general mythology of the human race,” ancient religious forms and traditions, and linguistic forms. In this indefinite variety he sought to identify constant elements and, in accordance with 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 theme of his thought, taken up by his friends at a critical moment for the Enlightenment offensive.