Fréret, Nicolas (1688-1749). Classical and Chinese scholar and chronologist. Famous for his free-thinking, incarcerated in the Bastille in 1714 (probably for anti-Jesuit writings), he was almost certainly the author of the Lettre de Thrasybule à Leucippe (1722), the most ambitious of the clandestine manuscripts, not published until 1766. It is a full-length treatise, supposedly written in the 2nd c. ad, mainly attacking revealed religion from an atheist and materialist standpoint; it contains a very clear statement of the pleasure-pain principle. Other manuscript works attributed to Fréret include a scholarly and forceful Examen critique du Nouveau Testament.

[Christopher Betts]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.