|
The name Nicolas Boulanger is not found in most encyclopedias and is
known only to a few scholars. He was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Voltaire, and Diderot, illustrious names in the history of French letters.
He lived only thirty-seven years, from 1722 to 1759. I came across the
name very late in my research,1
actually in 1963 and read in his works a few years later. I found that
in some aspects he was not only my predecessor, but also a predecessor
of Jung and Freud, actually solving the problem Freud and Jung left unsolved.
Namely, he understood that the irrational behavior of the human species
together with all the heritage of religious rites and much of the political
structure of his own and other ages, were engendered in cataclysmic experiences
of the past, in the Deluge, or deluges, of which there could have been
more than one. In Boulanger’s time geology as a science was in a prenatal stage. But
as a road engineer he made observations in the valley of the Marne that
made him draw conclusions which he substantiated in reading the then existing
books of folklore and sacred writings; also classical writers were available
to Boulanger, either in originals or in translation. He was convinced
that the Deluge was a global occurrence, but this was no innovation on
his part, because it was an accepted notion in his time: actually, he
was the author of the entry “Deluge” in the great French Encyclopédie,
edited by Diderot. In his books he referred sometimes to the Deluge as
to a singular occurrence, but then he spoke of multiple cataclysms. He
seems not to have had an idea from where the water of the universal flood
could come, and did not show awareness of any extraterrestrial agent as
causing the world-wide calamity. Thus Saturn does not figure as connected
with the upheaval. Human beings witnessed the catastrophes and the human
race suffered one or several traumatic experiences; the scars the human
psyche sustained are buried deep in the souls of all of us. “We still tremble today as a consequence of the deluge and our institutions
still pass on to us fears and the apocalyptic ideas of our first fathers.
Terror survives from race to race... The child will dread in perpetuity
what frightens his ancestors.”2 Boulanger’s works were published after his premature death by Diderot,
but his geological observations were not included in the printed volumes;
extracts from these observations and selections appear in a recent work
on Boulanger,3 and do
not impress as compelling. But one has to keep in mind that the age of
geology as a science did not start but after Boulanger’s death. In the
broad realization that our society as well as the savage society still
lived in the shadow of the traumatic experience of the past, Boulanger
not only preceded Jung and Freud but also spelled out the nature of the
traumatic experience or experiences that caused the memory of them to
submerge in the racial mind.. Thus he not only could claim priority in
the understanding of the phenomenon of racial memory and collective amnesia,
but also could claim the fact, unrecognized by Freud, that catastrophic
events served as the trauma. Neither Jung nor Freud knew anything of Boulanger,
and his name is not found in the psychological literature. Not so much
his claim that catastrophic events took place in the past deserves attention—such
view was already found in the writings of William Whiston; again, Buffon,
Boulanger’s contemporary thought that a massive comet hit the sun and
caused the origin of the planetary family; and after Boulanger the scientific
thought of the eighteenth century and of the first half of the nineteenth
again and again sought for the cause of the global upheavals. However
Boulanger’s distinction lay in his contemplating the consequences of such
upheavals for the human psyche. First in the paper by Livio Stecchini, “The Inconstant
Heavens,” included in the September 1963 issue of the American Behavioral
Scientist (Vol. VII, no. 1, p. 30). L’antiquité devoilée par ses usages, ou examen
critique des principales opinions cérémonies et institutions religieuses
et politiques Des différens peuples de la terre (Amsterdam, 1766). John Hampton; Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger et la science
de son temps (Geneva-Lille, 1955). |