Fréron, Louis

Louis Fréron, in full Louis-marie-stanislas Fréron, (born Aug. 17, 1754, Paris, France—died July 15, 1802, Santo Domingo, Hispaniola [now in Dominican Republic]), journalist of the French Revolution and leader of the jeunesse dorée (“gilded youth”) who terrorized Jacobins (radical democrats) during the Thermidorian reaction that followed the collapse of the Jacobin regime of 1793–94.

His father, Élie-Catherine Fréron, was the editor of L’Année Littéraire (“The Literary Year”), which combated the ideas of Voltaire and other Philosophes. Louis took over the management of the journal upon his father’s death in 1776, and, soon after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he founded the newspaper L’Orateur du Peuple (“The Spokesman of the People”), which violently attacked the new system of constitutional monarchy.

After King Louis XVI’s abortive flight from Paris in June 1791, Fréron called for the king’s execution. Threatened with arrest, Fréron went into hiding until the monarchy was overthrown on Aug. 10, 1792. He sat with the Montagnards (deputies from the Jacobin Club) in the revolutionary National Convention, which convened in September 1792, and in March 1793 he was sent to suppress counterrevolutionary activity at Marseille and Toulon. In both cities, Fréron ordered mass executions of hundreds of captured insurgents. As a result, Robespierre, chief spokesman for the Jacobin regime, had Fréron recalled in March 1794. Fearing that Robespierre intended to order his execution, Fréron became one of the most active participants in the conspiracy that brought about Robespierre’s downfall on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794). In the ensuing Thermidorian reaction, Fréron vigorously denounced the Jacobins in L’Orateur du Peuple and organized the gangs of fashionably dressed jeunesse dorée who assaulted Jacobin workmen in the streets. He led the raid on the Parisian Jacobin Club that gave the government an excuse to order the club closed in November 1794. In November 1801, two years after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, Fréron was appointed subprefect of Santo Domingo.