Freron, Louis Marie Stanislas
FRERON, LOUIS MARIE STANISLAS (1754-1802), French revolutionist, son of the preceding, was born at Paris on the 17th of August 1754. His name was, on the death of his father, attached to L'Année littéraire, which was continued till 1790 and edited successively by the abbés G. M. Royou and J. L. Geoffroy. On the outbreak of the revolution Fréron, who was a schoolfellow of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, established 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.
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
