Public opinion was now keenly excited; he received an ovation from the Munich students, and the king, to whom he owed his appointment, supported him warmly. A conference of Catholic savants, held in 1863 under the presidency of Döllinger, decided that authority must be supreme in the Church. When, however, Döllinger and his school in their turn started the Old Catholic movement, Frohschammer refused to associate himself with their cause, holding that they did not go far enough, and that their declaration of 1863 had cut the ground from under their feet. Meanwhile he had, in 1862, founded the Athenäum as the organ of Liberal Catholicism. For this he wrote the first adequate account in German of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, which drew a warm letter of appreciation from Darwin himself. Excommunicated in 1871, he replied with three articles, which were reproduced in thousands as pamphlets in the chief European languages: Der Fels Petri in Rom (1873), Der Primat Petri und des Papstes (1875), and Das Christenthum Christi und das Christenthum des Papstes (1876). In Das neue Wissen und der neue Glaube (1873) he showed himself as vigorous an opponent of the materialism of Strauss as of the doctrine of papal infallibility. His later years were occupied with a series of philosophical works, of which the most important were: Die Phantasie als Grundprincip des Weltprocesses (1877), Über die Genesis der Menschheit und deren geistige Entwicklung in Religion, Sittlichkeit und Sprache (1883), and Über die Organisation und Cultur der menschlichen Gesellschaft (1885). His system is based on the unifying principle of imagination (Phantasie), which he extends to the objective creative force of Nature, as well as to the subjective mental phenomena to which the term is usually confined. He died at Bad Kreuth in the Bavarian Highlands on the 14th of June 1893.
In addition to other treatises on theological subjects, Frohschammer was also the author of Monaden und Weltphantasie and Über die Bedeutung der Einbildungskraft in der Philosophie Kants und Spinozas (1879); Über die Principien der Aristotelischen Philosophie und die Bedeutung der Phantasie in derselben (1881); Die Philosophie als Idealwissenschaft und System (1884); Die Philosophie des Thomas von Aquino kritisch gewürdigt (1889); Über das Mysterium Magnum des Daseins (1891); System der Philosophie im Umriss, pt. i. (1892). His autobiography was published in A. Hinrichsen’s Deutsche Denker (1888). See also F. Kirchner, Über das Grundprincip des Weltprocesses (1882), with special reference to F.; E. Reich, Weltanschauung und Menschenleben; Betrachtungen über die Philosophie J. Frohschammers (1894); B. Münz, J. Frohschammer, der Philosoph der Weltphantasie (1894) and Briefe von und über J. Frohschammer (1897); J. Friedrich, Jakob Frohschammer (1896) and Systematische und kritische Darstellung der Psychologie J. Frohschammers (1899); A. Attensperger, J. Frohschammers philosophisches System im Grundriss (1899).
FROISSART, JEAN (1338–1410?), French chronicler and raconteur, historian of his own times. The personal history of Froissart, the circumstances of his birth and education, the incidents of his life, must all be sought in his own verses and chronicles. He possessed in his own lifetime no such fame as that which attended the steps of Petrarch; when he died it did not occur to his successors that a chapter might well be added to his Chronicle setting forth what manner of man he was who wrote it. The village of Lestines, where he was curé, has long forgotten that a great writer ever lived there. They cannot point to any house in Valenciennes as the lodging in which he put together his notes and made history out of personal reminiscences. It is not certain when or where he died, or where he was buried. One church, it is true, doubtfully claims the honour of holding his bones. It is that of St Monegunda of Chimay.
“Gallorum sublimis honos et fama tuorum,
Hic Froissarde, jaces, si modo forte jaces.”
It is fortunate, therefore, that the scattered statements in his writings may be so pieced together as to afford a tolerably connected history of his life year after year. The personality of the man, independently of his adventures, may be arrived at by the same process. It will be found that Froissart, without meaning it, has portrayed himself in clear and well-defined outline. His forefathers were jurés (aldermen) of the little town of Beaumont, lying near the river Sambre, to the west of the forest of Ardennes. Early in the 14th century the castle and seigneurie of Beaumont fell into the hands of Jean, younger son of the count of Hainaut. With this Jean, sire de Beaumont, lived a certain canon of Liège called Jean le Bel, who fortunately was not content simply to enjoy life. Instigated by his seigneur he set himself to write contemporary history, to tell “la pure veriteit de tout li fait entièrement al manire de chroniques.” With this view, he compiled two books of chronicles. And the chronicles of Jean le Bel were not the only literary monuments belonging to the castle of Beaumont. A hundred years before him Baldwin d’Avernes, the then seigneur, had caused to be written a book of chronicles or rather genealogies. It must therefore be remembered that when Froissart undertook his own chronicles he was not conceiving a new idea, but only following along familiar lines.
Some 20 m. from Beaumont stood the prosperous city of Valenciennes, possessed in the 14th century of important privileges and a flourishing trade, second only to places like Bruges or Ghent in influence, population and wealth. Beaumont, once her rival, now regarded Valenciennes as a place where the ambitious might seek for wealth or advancement, and among those who migrated thither was the father of Foissart. He appears from a single passage in his son’s verses to have been a painter of armorial bearings. There was, it may be noted, already what may be called a school of painters at Valenciennes. Among them were Jean and Colin de Valenciennes and Andrè Beau-Neveu, of whom Froissart says that he had not his equal in any country.
The date generally adopted for his birth is 1338. In after years Froissart pleased himself by recalling in verse the scenes and pursuits of his childhood. These are presented in vague generalities. There is nothing to show that he was unlike any other boys, and, unfortunately, it did not occur to him that a photograph of a schoolboy’s life amid bourgeois surroundings would be to posterity quite as interesting as that faithful portraiture of courts and knights which he has drawn up in his Chronicle. As it is, we learn that he loved games of dexterity and skill rather than the sedentary amusements of chess and draughts, that he was beaten when he did not know his lessons, that with his companions he played at tournaments, and that he was always conscious—a statement which must be accepted with suspicion—that he was born
“Loer Dieu et servir le monde.”
In any case he was born in a place, as well as at a time, singularly adapted to fill the brain of an imaginative boy. Valenciennes was then a city extremely rich in romantic associations. Not far from its walls was the western fringe of the great forest of Ardennes, sacred to the memory of Pepin, Charlemagne, Roland and Ogier. Along the banks of the Scheldt stood, one after the other, not then in ruins, but bright with banners, the gleam of armour, and the liveries of the men at arms, castles whose seigneurs, now forgotten, were famous in their day for many a gallant feat of arms. The castle of Valenciennes itself was illustrious in the romance of Perceforest. There was born that most glorious and most luckless hero, Baldwin, first emperor of Constantinople. All the splendour of medieval life was to be seen in Froissart’s native city: on the walls of the Salle le Comte glittered—perhaps painted by his father—the arms and scutcheons beneath the banners and helmets of Luxembourg, Hainaut and Avesnes; the streets were crowded with knights and soldiers, priests, artisans and merchants; the churches were rich with stained glass, delicate tracery and precious carving; there were libraries full of richly illuminated manuscripts on which the boy could gaze with delight; every year there was the fête of the puy d’Amour de Valenciennes, at which he would hear the verses of the competing poets; there were festivals, masques, mummeries and moralities. And, whatever there might be elsewhere, in this happy city there was only the pomp, and not the misery, of war; the fields without were tilled, and the harvests reaped, in security; the workman within plied his craft unmolested for good wage. But the eyes of the boy were turned upon the castle and not upon the town; it was the splendour of the knights which dazzled him, insomuch that he
