Fréron, élie-Catherine (1718-76). Journalist. Heaving completed his ‘apprenticeship’ under Desfontaines, he produced his own publication: Lettres de la Comtesse (1745-6), followed—after a hiatus occasioned by official displeasure—by his Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps (1749), which became in 1754 the famous Année littéraire. Actively engaged as both Catholic and monarchist in all the polemics of his effervescent times, he was a constant irritant for the philosophes. It is regrettable that Voltaire's scurrilous and repeated denigration of him should so balefully have obscured the value and the unity of his compendious criticism.

[John Renwick]

(ālē' frārôN') , 1718–76, French critic and journalist. His critical journal, Année littéraire, virulently attacked the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Voltaire made him a butt of his ridicule in several of his works.