To understand the context of the book it is helpful to first take a look at the author, Jean-François de Neufforge , his circumstances and the circumstances under which “Recueil elementaire d’architecture” was written.
De Neufforge was born in the early 18th century in Belgium but spent most of his life in Paris. He worked as an engraver, which explains the beautiful illustrations found on basically every page of the book, and architect. His family was not particularly wealthy, and he was pretty unknown for most of his life. Those circumstances created a pretty unbiased baseline on which the production of the book started. He started the production of the book in 1755, the same time he started gaining recognition for his work and would keep on producing the volumes by himself for the majority of his time until his death in 1791. This explains the sheer volume of content the volumes include.
Translated into English, the title of the book is “the elementary collection of architecture”, which explains its contents pretty well. Looking at the list of contents, one will notice that it includes a wide range of topics from studies on the ancient orders and their modern interpretation, all the way to examples for decorations of all types of buildings.
With its wide range of different styles and topics, the book became widely popular with architects in the 1700s as a sort of lexicon for architecture that incorporated everything architecture had to offer, contemporary and ancient.
In conclusion one can say that the life work of de Neufforge was not meant to persuade anyone to believe in an architectural ideology or educate in a specific architectural topic but give general examples and inspirations from all known architecture at the time.