Was There a French Engine Before Babbage’s Difference Engine?

Most writings discussing Charles Babbage’s attempts at creating mechanical calculating machines use the heroic theory of invention and scientific development as a hypothesis for describing his accomplishments. Many of the mechanisms he imagined, do appear to be the first implementations of ideas used by modern computing machines such as pipelining, parallel computing, anticipating carry, mill (cpu), and store (RAM) (see Bromley [1] and Swade [2]).