Nicolas Fréret

[1] To please his father he studied law and began to practise at the 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, of Ceres, of Cybele, and of Apollo.

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.

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.

He rejected the extreme pretensions of the chronology of Egyptian origin for the Chinese civilisation and characters,[2] and at the same time controverted the scheme of Sir Isaac Newton as too limited.