Nicolas Fréret (; 15 February 1688 – 8 March 1749) was a French scholar.
Life
He was born at
Paris on 15 February 1688. His father was ''procureur'' to the ''parlement'' of Paris, and destined him to the profession of the
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior,Robertson, ''Crimes against humanity'', 90. with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been vari ...
. His first tutors were the historian
Charles Rollin
Charles Rollin (January 30, 1661 in Paris - December 14, 1741 in Paris) was a French historian and educator, whose popularity in his time combined with becoming forgotten by later generations makes him an epithet, applied to historians such as ...
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
Bar or BAR may refer to:
Food and drink
* Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages
* Candy bar
* Chocolate bar
Science and technology
* Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment
* Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud
* Bar ( ...
; but the force of his genius soon carried him onto 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
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; grc, Διόνυσος ) is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theatre. The Romans ...
, of
Ceres
Ceres most commonly refers to:
* Ceres (dwarf planet), the largest asteroid
* Ceres (mythology), the Roman goddess of agriculture
Ceres may also refer to:
Places
Brazil
* Ceres, Goiás, Brazil
* Ceres Microregion, in north-central Goiás ...
, of
Cybele
Cybele ( ; Phrygian: ''Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya'' "Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian ''Kuvava''; el, Κυβέλη ''Kybele'', ''Kybebe'', ''Kybelis'') is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible forer ...
, and of
Apollo
Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label=Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label= ...
. 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 views excited great indignation in the Abbé
Vertot, who denounced Fréret to the government as a libeller of the monarchy. A ''lettre de cachet'' was issued, and Fréret was sent to the
Bastille
The Bastille (, ) was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. It was stor ...
.
During his three months of confinement he studied
Xenophon, the fruit of which appeared later in his memoir on the ''
Cyropaedia
The ''Cyropaedia'', sometimes spelled ''Cyropedia'', is a partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persia's Achaemenid Empire. It was written around 370 BC by Xenophon, the Athenian-born soldier, historian, and student of So ...
''. From the time of his liberation in March 1715 his life was uneventful. In January 1716 he was received as associate of the Academy of Inscriptions and in December 1742 he was made perpetual secretary. He worked 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''.
Works
The list of his memoirs, many of them posthumous, occupies four columns of the ''Nouvelle Biographie générale''. 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
Egyptian origin for the
Chinese civilisation and
characters
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
,
[Danielle ELISSEEFF, ''Moi Arcade, interprète du roi-soleil'', ed. Arthaud, Paris, 1985. ]
See Ch.XII, p.100 & 101. Fréret is oppose to Fourmont's theories who back the Chinese culture to Noe's children, Egyptian origins, and Hebraic language. 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 Celts (, see pronunciation for different usages) or Celtic peoples () are. "CELTS location: Greater Europe time period: Second millennium B.C.E. to present ancestry: Celtic a collection of Indo-European peoples. "The Celts, an ancient ...
, the Germans, the Chinese and the
Indians. He was a vigorous opponent of the theory (
euhemerism) 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, under the guidance of
Arcadio Huang
Arcadio Huang (, born in Xinghua, modern Putian, in Fujian, 15 November 1679, died on 1 October 1716 in Paris)Mungello, p.125 was a Chinese Christian convert, brought to Paris by the Missions étrangères. He took a pioneering role in the teachi ...
, a Chinese man working as translator and librarian for king
Louis XIV;
[Cañizares-Esguerra, p.105] and in this he was engaged at the time of his committal to the Bastille. He died in Paris on 8 March 1749.
After his death several works of an
atheist
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no d ...
ic character were falsely attributed to him, and were long believed to be his. The most famous of these are the ''Examen critique des apologistes de la religion chrétienne'' (1766), and the ''Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe'', printed in London about 1768.
An inaccurate edition of Fréret's works was published in 1796-1799. A new and complete edition was projected by
Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac
Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac (), also known as Champollion ''l'aîné'' ('the Elder'; 5 October 1778 – 9 May 1867) was a French archaeologist, elder brother of Jean-François Champollion (decipherer of the Rosetta Stone).
Biography
He was ...
, but of this only the first volume appeared (1825). It contains a life of Fréret. 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 Fréret'' in
C. A. Walckenaer's ''Recueil des notices'', &c. (1841-1850). See also
Quérard's ''France litteraire''.
Notes
References
*
* Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) ''How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and ... Stanford University Press
Melchor Ocampo. Freret - José Herrera Peña - Tripod
{{DEFAULTSORT:Freret, Nicolas
1688 births
1749 deaths
French scholars
Linguists from France
Members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres
People imprisoned by lettre de cachet
Prisoners of the Bastille