NICOLAS

See also:

• NICOLAS FRERET (1688-1749)

FRERET (1688-1749)  , French scholar, was born at Paris on the 15th of February 1688 . His father was procureur to the parlement of Paris, and destined him to the profession of the law . His first tutors were the historian Charles Rollin and Father Desmolets (1677-1760) . Amongst his early studies history, chronology and mythology held a prominent place . To please his father he studied law and began to practise at the bar; but the force of his genius soon carried him into his own path . At nineteen he was admitted to a society of learned men before whom he read memoirs on the religion of the Greeks, on the worship of Bacchus, of Ceres, of Cybele and of Apollo . 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 critical discourse, Sur l'origine des Francs (1714) . He maintained that the Franks were a league of South German tribes and not, according to the legend then almost universally received, a nation of free men deriving from Greece or Troy, who had kept their civilization intact in the heart of a barbarous country . These sensible views excited great indignation in the Abbe Vertot, who denounced Freret to the government as a libeller of the monarchy . A lettre de cachet was issued, and Freret was sent to the Bastille . During his three months of confinement he devoted himself to the study of the works of Xenophon, the fruit of which appeared later in his memoir on the Gyropaedia .

From the

time of his liberation in March 1715 his life was uneventful . In January 1716 he was received associate of the Academy of Inscriptions, and in December 1742 he was made perpetual secretary . Heworked without intermission for the interests of the Academy, not even claiming any property in his own writings, which were printed in the Recueil de l'academie des inscriptions . The list of his memoirs, many of them posthumous, occupies four columns of the Nouvelle Biographie generale . They treat of history, chronology, geography, mythology and religion . Throughout he appears as the keen, learned and original critic; examining into the comparative value 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 the Greeks, but of the Celts, the Germans, the Chinese and the Indians . He was a vigorous opponent of the theory that the stories of mythology may be referred to historic originals . He also suggested that Greek mythology owed much to the Phoenicians and Egyptians . 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 . He died in Paris on the 8th of March 1749 .

Long after his death several works of an atheistic character were falsely attributed to him, and were long believed to be his . The most famous of these spurious works are the Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chretienne (1766), and the Lettrede Thrasybule a Leuci ppe, printed in London about 1768 . A very defective and inaccurate edition of Freret's works was published in 1796-1799 . A new and complete edition was projected by Champollion-Figeac, but of this only the first volume appeared (1825) . It contains a life of Freret . His manuscripts, after passing through many hands, were deposited in the library of the Institute . The best account of his works is " Examen critique des ouvrages composes par Freret " in C . A . Walckenaer's Recueil des notices, &c . (1841-185o) . See also Querard's France litteraire .