Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron
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Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron (August 17, 1754 – 1802), was a French politician of the French Revolution.
[edit] As agitator and in the National Convention
The son of Elie-Catherine Fréron, he was born at Paris to a wealthy family, and attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand together with the likes of Maximilien Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins. On the death of his father, he became associated with to L'Année littéraire, which was continued until 1795 and edited successively by the abbé Royou and Julien Louis Geoffroy. During the Revolution, Fréron took part in the storming of the Bastille (July 14, 1789, ran the newspaper L'Orateur du Peuple (with occasional contributions from Jean-Paul Marat), and sat in the Commune. Especially close to Desmoulins, he became one of the Cordeliers, and took part in the attack on Tuileries palace of 1792 (the insurrection of the Paris crowds against the House of Bourbon, and their battle with the Swiss Guards).
In September, Fréron was elected to the National Convention for the département of Seine, and voted in favor of Louis XVI's execution. Fréron served as a Representative on Mission to Provence, Marseilles, and Toulon, between 1793 and 1794, together with Paul Barras; they had been charged with establishing the Convention's authority in the Mediterranean South after such events as the Toulon rebellion, and Fréron remained famous as an enforcer of the Reign of Terror.
[edit] Reaction and the Directory
Nonetheless, both he and Barras joined the Thermidorian Reaction in its clash with Robespierre; L'Orateur du Peuple became the mouthpiece of anti-Jacobins, and Fréron incited the Muscadins to attack the sans-culottes with clubs. He brought about the accusation of Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, and of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, and the arrest of the last Montagnards. 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 ("Historical Dissertation on the Royalist Reaction and the Misfortunes of the South").
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 Bonaparte's sisters, in 1801, he went as commissioner to Saint Domingue and died there from yellow fever in 1802; General Charles Leclerc, who had married Pauline Bonaparte, also received a command in Saint Domingue in 1801 (during the last stage of the Haitian Revolution), and died the same year.
