the violent journal L’Orateur du peuple. Commissioned, along with Barras in 1793, to establish the authority of the convention at Marseilles and Toulon, he distinguished himself in the atrocity of his reprisals, but both afterwards joined the Thermidoriens, and Fréron became the leader of the jeunesse dorée and of the Thermidorian reaction. He brought about the accusation of Fouquier-Tinville, and of J. B. Carrier, the deportation of B. Barère, and the arrest of the last Montagnards. He made his paper the official journal of the reactionists, and being sent by the Directory on a mission of peace to Marseilles he published in 1796 Mémoire historique sur la réaction royale et sur les malheurs du midi. He was elected to the council of the Five Hundred, but not allowed to take his seat. Failing as suitor for the hand of Pauline Bonaparte, one of Napoleon’s sisters, he went in 1799 as commissioner to Santo Domingo and died there in 1802. General V. M. Leclerc, who had married Pauline Bonaparte, also received a command in Santo Domingo in 1801, and died in the same year as his former rival.
FRESCO (Ital. for cool, “fresh”), a term introduced into
English, both generally (as in such phrases as al fresco, “in the
fresh air”), and more especially as a technical term for a sort
of mural painting on plaster. In the latter sense the Italians
distinguished painting a secco (when the plaster had been allowed
to dry) from a fresco (when it was newly laid and still wet). The
nature and history of fresco-painting is dealt with in the article Painting.
FRESCOBALDI, GIROLAMO (1583–1644), Italian musical
composer, was born in 1583 at Ferrara. Little is known of his
life except that he studied music under Alessandro Milleville,
and owed his first reputation to his beautiful voice. He was
organist at St Peter’s in Rome from 1608 to 1628. According to
Baini no less than 30,000 people flocked to St Peter’s on his first
appearance there. On the 20th of November 1628 he went to
live in Florence, becoming organist to the duke. From December
1633 to March 1643 he was again organist at St Peter’s. But in
the last year of his life he was organist in the parish church of
San Lorenzo in Monte. He died on the 2nd of March 1644, being
buried at Rome in the Church of the Twelve Apostles. Frescobaldi
also excelled as a teacher, Frohberger being the most
distinguished of his pupils. Frescobaldi’s compositions show
the consummate art of the early Italian school, and his works
for the organ more especially are full of the finest devices of
fugal treatment. He also wrote numerous vocal compositions,
such as canzone, motets, hymns, &c., a collection of madrigals
for five voices (Antwerp, 1608) being among the earliest of his
published works.
FRESENIUS, KARL REMIGIUS (1818–1897), German chemist,
was born at Frankfort-on-Main on the 28th of December 1818.
After spending some time in a pharmacy in his native town, he
entered Bonn University in 1840, and a year later migrated to
Giessen, where he acted as assistant in Liebig’s laboratory, and
in 1843 became assistant professor. In 1845 he was appointed
to the chair of chemistry, physics and technology at the Wiesbaden Agricultural Institution, and three years later he became
the first director of the chemical laboratory which he induced
the Nassau government to establish at that place. Under his
care this laboratory continuously increased in size and popularity,
a school of pharmacy being added in 1862 (though given up in
1877) and an agricultural research laboratory in 1868. Apart
from his administrative duties Fresenius occupied himself almost
exclusively with analytical chemistry, and the fullness and
accuracy of his text-books on that subject (of which that on
qualitative analysis first appeared in 1841 and that on quantitative
in 1846) soon rendered them standard works. Many of his
original papers were published in the Zeitschrift für analytische Chemie,
which he founded in 1862 and continued to edit till his
death. He died suddenly at Wiesbaden on the 11th of June
1897. In 1881 he handed over the directorship of the agricultural
research station to his son, Remigius Heinrich Fresenius (b.
1847), who was trained under H. Kolbe at Leipzig. Another son,
Theodor Wilhelm Fresenius (b. 1856), was educated at Strassburg
and occupied various positions in the Wiesbaden laboratory.
FRESHWATER, a watering place in the Isle of Wight,
England, 12 m. W. by S. of Newport by rail. Pop.(1901) 3306.
It is a scattered township lying on the peninsula west of the
river Var, which forms the western extremity of the island. The
portion known as Freshwater Gate fronts the English Channel
from the strip of low-lying coast interposed between the cliffs
of the peninsula and those of the main part of the island. The
peninsula rises to 397 ft. in Headon Hill, and the cliffs are
magnificent. The western promontory is flanked on the north
by the picturesque Alum Bay, and the lofty detached rocks
known as the Needles lie off it. Farringford House in the parish
was for some time the home of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who is
commemorated by a tablet in All Saints’ church and by a great
cross on the high downs above the town. There are golf links
on the downs.
FRESNEL, AUGUSTIN JEAN (1788–1827), French physicist,
the son of an architect, was born at Broglie (Eure) on the 10th
of May 1788. His early progress in learning was slow, and when
eight years old he was still unable to read. At the age of thirteen
he entered the École Centrale in Caen, and at sixteen and a half
the École Polytechnique, where he acquitted himself with distinction.
Thence he went to the École des Ponts et Chaussées.
He served as an engineer successively in the departments of
Vendée, Drôme and Ille-et-Villaine; but his espousal of the
cause of the Bourbons in 1814 occasioned, on Napoleon’s reaccession
to power, the loss of his appointment. On the second
restoration he obtained a post as engineer in Paris, where much
of his life from that time was spent. His researches in optics,
continued until his death, appear to have been begun about the
year 1814, when he prepared a paper on the aberration of light,
which, however, was not published. In 1818 he read a memoir
on diffraction for which in the ensuing year he received the prize
of the Académie des Sciences at Paris. He was in 1823 unanimously elected a member of the academy, and in 1825 he
became a member of the Royal Society of London, which in 1827,
at the time of his last illness, awarded him the Rumford medal.
In 1819 he was nominated a commissioner of lighthouses, for
which he was the first to construct compound lenses as substitutes
for mirrors. He died of consumption at Ville-d’Avray, near
Paris, on the 14th of July 1827.
The undulatory theory of light, first founded upon experimental demonstration by Thomas Young, was extended to a large class of optical phenomena, and permanently established by his brilliant discoveries and mathematical deductions. By the use of two plane mirrors of metal, forming with each other an angle of nearly 180°, he avoided the diffraction caused in the experiment of F. M. Grimaldi (1618–1663) on interference by the employment of apertures for the transmission of the light, and was thus enabled in the most conclusive manner to account for the phenomena of interference in accordance with the undulatory theory. With D. F. J. Arago he studied the laws of the interference of polarized rays. Circularly polarized light he obtained by means of a rhomb of glass, known as “Fresnel’s rhomb,” having obtuse angles of 126°, and acute angles of 54°. His labours in the cause of optical science received during his lifetime only scant public recognition, and some of his papers were not printed by the Académie des Sciences till many years after his decease. But, as he wrote to Young in 1824, in him “that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory” had been blunted. “All the compliments,” he says, “that I have received from Arago, Laplace and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment.”
See Duleau, “Notice sur Fresnel,” Revue ency. t. xxxix.; Arago, Œuvres complètes, t. i.; and Dr G. Peacock, Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Young, vol. i.
FRESNILLO, a town of the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, 37 m. N.W. of the city of Zacatecas on a branch of the Santiago river. Pop. (1900) 6309. It stands on a fertile plain between the Santa Cruz and Zacatecas ranges, about 7700 ft. above sea-level, has
a temperate climate, and is surrounded by an agricultural district producing Indian corn and wheat. It is a clean, well-
