A French translation of the Theorie der Parallellinien, together with an extensive commentary, has just appeared in print (A. In the present paper, we present Lambert's main results and we comment on them. This was sixty years before the first writings of Lobachevsky and Bolyai appeared in print.
In doing so, he obtained several fundamental results of hyperbolic geometry. In fact, Lambert developed his theory with the hope of finding a contradiction in a geometry where all the Euclidean axioms are kept except the parallel axiom and that the latter is replaced by its negation. The memoir Theorie der Parallellinien (1766) by Johann Heinrich Lambert is one of the founding texts of hyperbolic geometry, even though its author's aim was, like many of his pre-decessors', to prove that such a geometry does not exist.
