FOUILLÉE, ALFRED JULES EMILE (1838- ), French philosopher, was born at La Pouëze on the 18th of October 1838. He held several minor philosophical lectureships, and from 1864 was professor of philosophy at the lycées of Douai, Montpellier and Bordeaux successively. In 1867 and 1868 he was crowned by the Academy of Moral Science for his work on Plato and Socrates. In 1872 he was elected master of conferences at the École Normale, and was made doctor of philosophy in recognition of his two treatises, Platonis Hippias Minor sive Socratica contra liberum arbitrium argumenta and La Liberté et le déterminisme. The strain of the next three years’ continuous work undermined his health and his eyesight, and he was compelled to retire from his professorship. During these years he had published works on Plato and Socrates and a history of philosophy (1875); but after his retirement he further developed his philosophical position, a speculative eclecticism through which he endeavoured to reconcile metaphysical idealism with the naturalistic and mechanical standpoint of science. In L’Évolutionnisme des idées-forces (1890), La Psychologie des idées-forces (1893), and La Morale des idées-forces (1907), is elaborated his doctrine of idées-forces, or of mind as efficient cause through the tendency of ideas to realize themselves in appropriate movement. Ethical and sociological developments of this theory succeed its physical and psychological treatment, the consideration of the antinomy of freedom being especially important. Fouillée’s wife, who by a previous marriage was the mother of the poet and philosopher Jean Marie Guyau (1854-1888), is well known, under the pseudonym of “G. Bruno,” as the author of educational books for children.
His other chief works are: L’Idée moderne du droit en Allemagne, en Angleterre et en France (Paris, 1878); La Science sociale contemporaine (1880); La Propriété sociale et la démocratie (1884); Critique des systèmes de morale contemporains (1883); La Morale, l’art et la religion d’après Guyau (1889); L’Avenir de la métaphysique fondée sur l’expérience (1889); L’Enseignement au point de vue national (1891); Descartes (1893); Tempérament et caractère (2nd ed., 1895); Le Mouvement positiviste et la conception sociologique du monde (1896); Le Mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive (1896); La Psychologie du peuple français (2nd ed., 1898); La France au point de vue moral (1900); L’Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens (1903); Nietzsche et l’ “immoralisme” (1903); Le Moralisme de Kant (1905).
FOULD, ACHILLE (1800-1867), French financier and politician, was born at Paris on the 17th of November 1800. The son of a rich Jewish banker, he was associated with and afterwards succeeded his father in the management of the business. As early as 1842 he entered political life, having been elected in that year as a deputy for the department of the Hautes Pyrénées. From that time to his death he actively busied himself with the affairs of his country. He readily acquiesced in the revolution of February 1848, and is said to have exercised a decided influence in financial matters on the provisional government then formed. He shortly afterwards published two pamphlets against the use of paper money, entitled, Pas d’Assignats! and Observations sur la question financière. During the presidency of Louis Napoleon he was four times minister of finance, and took a leading part in the economical reforms then made in France. His strong conservative tendencies led him to oppose the doctrine of free trade, and disposed him to hail the coup d’état and the new empire. On the 25th of January 1852, in consequence of the decree confiscating the property of the Orleans family, he resigned the office of minister of finance, but was on the same day appointed senator, and soon after rejoined the government as minister of state and of the imperial household. In this capacity he directed the Paris exhibition of 1855. The events of November 1860 led once more to his resignation, but he was recalled to the ministry of finance in November of the following year, and retained office until the publication of the imperial letter of the 19th of January 1867, when Émile Ollivier became the chief adviser of the emperor. During his last tenure of office he had reduced the floating debt, which the Mexican war had considerably increased, by the negotiation of a loan of 300 millions of francs (1863). Fould, besides uncommon financial abilities, had a taste for the fine arts, which he developed and refined during his youth by visiting Italy and the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. In 1857 he was made a member of the Academy of the Fine Arts. He died at Tarbes on the 5th of October 1867.
FOULIS, ANDREW (1712-1775) and ROBERT (1707-1776), Scottish printers and publishers, were the sons of a Glasgow maltman. Robert was apprenticed to a barber; but his ability attracted the attention of Dr Francis Hutcheson, who strongly recommended him to establish a printing press. After spending 1738 and 1739 in England and France in company with his brother Andrew, who had been intended for the church and had received a better education, he started business in 1741 in Glasgow, and in 1743 was appointed printer to the university. In this same year he brought out Demetrius Phalereus de elocutione, in Greek and Latin, the first Greek book ever printed in Glasgow; and this was followed in 1774 by the famous 12mo edition of Horace which was long but erroneously believed to be immaculate: though the successive sheets were exposed in the university and a reward offered for the discovery of any inaccuracy, six errors at least, according to T.F. Dibdin, escaped detection. Soon afterwards the brothers entered into partnership, and they continued for about thirty years to issue carefully corrected and beautifully printed editions of classical works in Latin, Greek, English, French and Italian. They printed more than five hundred separate publications, among them the small editions of Cicero, Tacitus, Cornelius Nepos, Virgil, Tibullus and Propertius, Lucretius and Juvenal; a beautiful edition of the Greek Testament, in small 4to; Homer (4 vols. fol., 1756-1758); Herodotus, Greek and Latin (9 vols. 12mo, 1761); Xenophon, Greek and Latin (12 vols. 12mo, 1762-1767); Gray’s Poems; Pope’s Works; Milton’s Poems. The Homer, for which Flaxman’s designs were executed, is perhaps the most famous production of the Foulis press. The brothers spared no pains, and Robert went to France to procure manuscripts of the classics, and to engage a skilled engraver and a copper-plate printer. Unfortunately it became their ambition to establish an institution for the encouragement of the fine arts; and though one of their chief patrons, the earl of Northumberland, warned them to “print for posterity and prosper,” they spent their money in collecting pictures, pieces of sculpture and models, in paying for the education and travelling of youthful artists, and in copying the masterpieces of foreign art. Their countrymen were not ripe for such an attempt, and the “Academy” not only proved a failure but involved the projectors in ruin. Andrew died on the 18th of September 1775, and his brother went to London, hoping to realize a large sum by the sale of his pictures. They were sold for much less than he anticipated, and Robert returned broken-hearted to Scotland, where he died at Edinburgh on the 2nd of June 1776. Robert was the author of a Catalogue of Paintings with Critical Remarks. The business was afterwards carried on under the same name by Robert’s son Andrew.
See W.J. Duncan, Notices and Documents illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow, printed for the Maitland Club (1831), which inter alia contains a catalogue of the works printed at the Foulis press, and another of the pictures, statues and busts in plaster of Paris produced at the “Academy” in the university of Glasgow.
FOULLON, JOSEPH FRANÇOIS (1717-1789), French administrator, was born at Saumur. During the Seven Years’ War he was intendant-general of the armies, and intendant of the army and navy under Marshal de Belle-Isle. In 1771 he was appointed intendant of finances. In 1789, when Necker was dismissed, Foullon was appointed minister of the king’s household, and was thought of by the reactionary party as a substitute. But he was unpopular on all sides. The farmers-general detested him on account of his severity, the Parisians on account of his wealth accumulated in utter indifference to the sufferings of the poor; he was reported, probably quite without foundation, to have said, “If the people cannot get bread, let them eat hay.” After the taking of the Bastille on the 14th of July, he withdrew to his estate at Vitry and attempted to spread the news of his death; but he was recognized, taken to Paris, carried off with a bundle of hay tied to his back to the hôtel de ville, and, in spite of the intervention of Lafayette, was dragged out by the populace and hanged to a lamp-post on the 22nd of July 1789.
See Eugène Bonnemère, Histoire des paysans (4th ed., 1887), tome iii.; C.L. Chassin, Les Élections et les cahiers de Paris en 1789. (Paris, 1889), tomes iii. and iv.