Maure” (1853); “Bateleurs nègres” and “Audience chez un chalife” (1859); “Berger kabyle” and “Courriers arabes” (1861); “Bivouac arabe,” “Chasse au faucon,” “Fauconnier arabe” (now at Luxembourg) (1863); “Chasse au héron” (1865); “Voleurs de nuit” (1867); “Centaures et arabes attaqués par une lionne” (1868); “Halte de muletiers” (1869); “Le Nil” and “Un Souvenir d’Esneh” (1875). Fromentin was much influenced in style by Eugène Delacroix. His works are distinguished by striking composition, great dexterity of handling and brilliancy of colour. In them is given with great truth and refinement the unconscious grandeur of barbarian and animal attitudes and gestures. His later works, however, show signs of an exhausted vein and of an exhausted spirit, accompanied or caused by physical enfeeblement. But it must be observed that Fromentin’s paintings show only one side of a genius that was perhaps even more felicitously expressed in literature, though of course with less profusion. “Dominique,” first published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1862, and dedicated to George Sand, is remarkable among the fiction of the century for delicate and imaginative observation and for emotional earnestness. Fromentin’s other literary works are—Visites artistiques (1852); Simples Pèlerinages (1856); Un Été dans le Sahara (1857); Une Année dans le Sahel (1858); and Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876). In 1876 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Academy. He died suddenly at La Rochelle on the 27th of August 1876.
FROMMEL, GASTON (1862–1906), Swiss theologian, professor
of theology in the university of Geneva from 1894 to 1906.
An Alsatian by birth, he belonged mainly to French Switzerland,
where he spent most of his life. He may best be described as
continuing the spirit of Vinet (q.v.) amid the mental conditions
marking the end of the 19th century. Like Vinet, he derived
his philosophy of religion from a peculiarly deep experience of
the Gospel of Christ as meeting the demands of the moral consciousness;
but he developed even further than Vinet the
psychological analysis of conscience and the method of verifying
every doctrine by direct reference to spiritual experience. Both
made much of moral individuality or personality as the crown
and criterion of reality, believing that its correlation with
Christianity, both historically and philosophically, was most
intimate. But while Vinet laid most stress on the liberty from
human authority essential to the moral consciousness, the
changed needs of the age caused Frommel to develop rather the
aspect of man’s dependence as a moral being upon God’s spiritual
initiative, “the conditional nature of his liberty.” “Liberty
is not the primary, but the secondary characteristic” of conscience;
“before being free, it is the subject of obligation.”
On this depends its objectivity as a real revelation of the Divine
Will. Thus he claimed that a deeper analysis carried one beyond
the human subjectivity of even Kant’s categorical imperative,
since consciousness of obligation was “une expérience imposée
sous le mode de l’absolu.” By his use of imposée Frommel
emphasized the priority of man’s sense of obligation to his
consciousness either of self or of God. Here he appealed to the
current psychology of the subconscious for confirmation of his
analysis, by which he claimed to transcend mere intellectualism.
In his language on this fundamental point he was perhaps too
jealous of admitting an ideal element as implicit in the feeling
of obligation. Still he did well in insisting on priority to self-conscious
thought as a mark of metaphysical objectivity in the
case of moral, no less than of physical experience. Further, he
found in the Christian revelation the same characteristics as
belonged to the universal revelation involved in conscience,
viz. God’s sovereign initiative and his living action in history.
From this standpoint he argued against a purely psychological
type of religion (agnosticisme religieux, as he termed it)—a
tendency to which he saw even in A. Sabatier and the symbolo-fidéisme
of the Paris School—as giving up a real and unifying
faith. His influence on men, especially the student class, was
greatly enhanced by the religious force and charm of his personality.
Finally, like Vinet, he was a man of letters and a
penetrating critic of men and systems.
Literature.—G. Godet, Gaston Frommel (Neuchâtel, 1906), a compact sketch, with full citation of sources; cf. H. Bois, in Sainte-Croix for 1906, for “L’Étudiant et le professeur.” A complete edition of his writings was begun in 1907. (J. V. B.)
FRONDE, THE, the name given to a civil war in France
which lasted from 1648 to 1652, and to its sequel, the war with
Spain in 1653–59. The word means a sling, and was applied to
this contest from the circumstance that the windows of Cardinal
Mazarin’s adherents were pelted with stones by the Paris mob.
Its original object was the redress of grievances, but the movement
soon degenerated into a factional contest among the nobles,
who sought to reverse the results of Richelieu’s work and to
overthrow his successor Mazarin. In May 1648 a tax levied on
judicial officers of the parlement of Paris was met by that body,
not merely with a refusal to pay, but with a condemnation of
earlier financial edicts, and even with a demand for the acceptance
of a scheme of constitutional reforms framed by a committee
of the parlement. This charter was somewhat influenced
by contemporary events in England. But there is no real
likeness between the two revolutions, the French parlement
being no more representative of the people than the Inns of
Court were in England. The political history of the time is
dealt with in the article France: History, the present article
being concerned chiefly with the military operations of what
was perhaps the most costly and least necessary civil war in
history.
The military record of the first or “parliamentary” Fronde is almost blank. In August 1648, strengthened by the news of Condé’s victory at Lens, Mazarin suddenly arrested the leaders of the parlement, whereupon Paris broke into insurrection and barricaded the streets. The court, having no army at its immediate disposal, had to release the prisoners and to promise reforms, and fled from Paris on the night of the 22nd of October. But the signing of the peace of Westphalia set free Condé’s army, and by January 1649 it was besieging Paris. The peace of Rueil was signed in March, after little blood had been shed. The Parisians, though still and always anti-cardinalist, refused to ask for Spanish aid, as proposed by their princely and noble adherents, and having no prospect of military success without such aid, submitted and received concessions. Thenceforward the Fronde becomes a story of sordid intrigues and half-hearted warfare, losing all trace of its first constitutional phase. The leaders were discontented princes and nobles—Monsieur (Gaston of Orléans, the king’s uncle), the great Condé and his brother Conti, the duc de Bouillon and his brother Turenne. To these must be added Gaston’s daughter, Mademoiselle de Montpensier (La grande Mademoiselle), Condé’s sister, Madame de Longueville, Madame de Chevreuse, and the astute intriguer Paul de Gondi, later Cardinal de Retz. The military operations fell into the hands of war-experienced mercenaries, led by two great, and many second-rate, generals, and of nobles to whom war was a polite pastime. The feelings of the people at large were enlisted on neither side.
This peace of Rueil lasted until the end of 1649. The princes, received at court once more, renewed their intrigues against Mazarin, who, having come to an understanding with Monsieur, Gondi and Madame de Chevreuse, suddenly arrested Condé, Conti and Longueville (January 14, 1650). The war which followed this coup is called the “Princes’ Fronde.” This time it was Turenne, before and afterwards the most loyal soldier of his day, who headed the armed rebellion. Listening to the promptings of his Egeria, Madame de Longueville, he resolved to rescue her brother, his old comrade of Freiburg and Nördlingen. It was with Spanish assistance that he hoped to do so; and a powerful army of that nation assembled in Artois under the archduke Leopold, governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands. But the peasants of the country-side rose against the invaders, the royal army in Champagne was in the capable hands of César de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, who counted fifty-two years of age and thirty-six of war experience, and the little fortress of Guise successfully resisted the archduke’s attack. Thereupon, however, Mazarin drew upon Plessis-Praslin’s army
