Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/805

F K E F 11 E Academ} . He was hardly twenty-six years of age when he was admitted as pupil to the Academy of Inscriptions. One of the first memoirs which he read was a learned and criti cal discourse Sur VOrigine des Franpiis. His views, well- grounded, unusual, and audacious, excited great indignation in the Abbe" Vertot, who had written on the same subject in a manner more flattering to the vanity of Frenchmen, and he denounced Fre ret to the Government as a libeller of the monarchy. A lettre de cachet was issued, and Fre ret was sent to the Bastille, He was thus silenced on the perilous subject, and his memoir even remained unpublished till nearly fifty years after his death. During his six months of confinement "a solitude," he says, "whose tranquillity there was nothing to disturb" he devoted him self to the study of the works of Xenophon, the fruit of which appeared later in his memoir on the Cyropccdia. The assertion, frequently repeated, that he was allowed to read nothing but Bayle s famous Dictionary, and that he nearly learnt it by heart and imbibed all its scepticism, is entirely untrue and unjust. From the time of his liberation in June 1715 his life was uneventful. It was a life of the most simple, pure, and complete devotion to knowledge, with absolute indifference to fame. In January 1716 he was received associate of the Academy, and in December 1742 he was made perpetual secretary. He lived and laboured without intermission for the interests and the honour of the Academy, not even claiming any property in his own writings, which almost all remained unpublished till after his death. The list of his memoirs occupies four columns of the Nouvclle Biographic Generate. They treat of a large variety of subjects, chiefly in the fields of history, chronology, geography, mythology, and religion. Through out he appears as the keen, learned, and original critic ; examining into the comparative value and credibility of documents, distinguishing between the mythical and the historical, and separating traditions with an historical element from pure fables and legends. He rejected the extreme pretensions of the chronology of Egypt and China, and at the same time controverted the scheme of Sir Isaac Newton as too limited. He investigated the mythology not only of i the Greeks, but of the Celts, the Germans, the Chinese, and j the Indians, and was a vigorous opponent of " euhemeristic" interpretation. He was one of the first scholars of Europe to undertake the study of the Chinese language : and in this he was engaged at the time of his committal to the Bastille. In addition to these labours and acquirements Fre ret made himself master of modern literature, and was intimately acquainted with the dramatic works of the I French, Italian, English, and Spanish poets. His multi farious pursuits left him no time for carrying on the pub lication of the Memoires of the Academy, an enormous arrear of which had to be made up by his successor. He died at Paris, March 8, 1749. Long after his death several works of an atheistic character were falsely attributed to him, and were long believed to be his. These were the Examen critique des apologistcs de la religion clireticnne (1766), Lettre de Thrasylule A Lcucippe, printed in London about 1768, and a few others. They were republished under the title of (Euvrcs philosophiques in 1776. It is now believed that they were put forth in Freret s name by Holbach, Naigeon, and Lagrangc, and that Freret had nothing whatever to do with them. A very de fective jind inaccurate edition of Freret s works was published in 1796-1799. A new and complete edition was projected by Cham- pollion-Figeac, but of this only the first volume appeared (1825). His manuscripts, after passing through many hands, were deposited in the library of the Institute. FRERON, ELIE CATHERINE (1719-1776), a French critic and controversialist, was born at Quimper in 1719. He was educated by the Jesuits, and made such rapid pro gress in his studies that before the age of twenty he was appointed professor at the college of Louis-Ie-Grand. On resigning his connexion with the Jesuits in 1739, he was employed by the Abbe" des Fontaines as a contributor to his Observations sitr Ics Merits Modernes. After the death of the latter in 1746 he founded a similar journal of his own, en titled Lettres de la Comtesse de * * *. It was suppressed in 1749, but he immediately replaced it by Lettres s-ur qitel- qttes co-its de ce temps, which, with the exception of a short suspension in 1752, on account of an attack on the charac- | ter of Voltaire, was continued till 1754, when it was suc ceeded by the more ambitious L Annee Litteraire. His death at Paris on the 10th March 1776 is said to have been hastened by the temporary suppression of this journal. Freron is now remembered solely for his attacks on Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, and the fame of his criticisms is not due to their inherent merits, which, notwithstanding a certain clever malignity, are very slight, but to the retalia tions they provoked on the part of Voltaire, who, besides attacking him in epigrams, and even incidentally in some of his tragedies, directed against him a virulent satire entitled Le Paiivre DiaUe, and also made him the principal person age in a comedy L jZcossaise, in which the journal of Fre"ron is designated L Ane Litteraire. Besides conducting the serials already mentioned, Freron is the author of Ode sur la lataille de Fontcnoy, 1745; Jlistoirc de Marie, Stuart, 1742, in 2 vols. ; and Histoire de Tcmpirc cCAUcmagnc, 1771, in 8 vols. See Ch. Nisard, Lcs Enncmis dc Voltaire, 1853; Despois, Journalistcs et jovrnaux du XVIII* siecle; Barthelemy, Lcs Confessions de Freron; Ch. Mouaelet,^rrfro,0tt Villuslrc critique, 1864; Freron, sa vie, souvenirs, &c., 1876. FRERON, Louis STANISLAS (1765-1802), a French Re volutionist, son of the preceding, was born at Paris in 1765. His name was, on the death of his father, attached to L Annee Litteraire, which was continued till 1790, and edited successively by the Abbes Royou and Geoffrey. On the outbreak of the Revolution, Frdron, who was a school fellow of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, established the violent journal LOrateur du Peuple. Commissioned along with Barras in 1793 to establish the authority of the Convention at Marseilles and Toulon, he distinguished him self equally with his colleague in the atrocity of his re prisals, but both afterwards joined the Therm idoriens, and Freron became the leader of the Jeunesse Doree. He then made his paper the official journal of the reaction ists, and being sent by the Directory on a mission of peace to Marseilles he published in 1796 Memoire historique sur la reaction royale et sur les malheurs du midi. He died in 1802 at St Domingo, where he was for a few months subprefect. FRESCO. Fresco-painting is the art of mural painting upon freshly-laid plaster lime whilst it remains damp, with colours capable of resisting the caustic action of the lime with which they are mixed or brought into contact. Fresco- painting might be called lime-painting, lime being the vehicle with which the colours are fixed, but the term would not be sufficiently distinctive, because colours mixed with lime may be applied under certain conditions to plaster which has been allowed to dry, an art which the Italians call painting "a secco," to distinguish it from "a fresco" or painting on newly-laid and still wet plaster. The art of painting with colours mixed with lime is very ancient; it was in use in Egypt from the remotest periods of the monumental history of that country ; but as it was carried to perfection by the Italians, it is needless to trace its de velopment elsewhere than in Italy, where the most primitive examples those existing in Etruscan sepulchral chambers dug in tufa are marked by technical peculiarities which survive in fresco-painting to this day. The walls of tufa were prepared by being whitewashed with lime, a method revived in mediaeval mural pictures ; and the outlines of the figures were drawn with a metal point or stylus, and subsequently coloured on the whitewash, which from the percolation of water through the tufa remained permanently IX. - 97