FROME, a market town in the Frome parliamentary division of Somersetshire, England, 107 m. W. by S. of London by the Great Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 11,057. It is unevenly built on high ground above the river Frome, which is here crossed by a stone bridge of five arches. It was formerly called Frome or Froome Selwood, after the neighbouring forest of Selwood; and the country round is still richly wooded and picturesque. The parish church of St John the Baptist, with its fine tower and spire, was built about the close of the 14th century, and, though largely restored, has a beautiful chancel, Lady chapel and baptistery. Fragments of Norman work are left; the interior is elaborately adorned with sculptures and stained glass. The market-hall, museum, school of art, and a free grammar school, founded under Edward VI., may be noted among buildings and institutions. The chief industries are brewing and art metal-working, also printing, metal-founding, and the manufacture of cloth, silk, tools and cards for wool-dressing. Dairy farming is largely practised in the neighbourhood. Selwood forest was long a favourite haunt of brigands, and even in the 18th century gave shelter to a gang of coiners and highwaymen.
The Saxon occupation of Frome (From) is the earliest of which there is evidence, the settlement being due to the foundation of a monastery by Aldhelm in 705. A witenagemot was held there in 934, so that Frome must already have been a place of some size. At the time of the Domesday Survey the manor was owned by King William. Local tradition asserts that Frome was a medieval borough, and the reeve of Frome is occasionally mentioned in documents after the reign of Edward I., but there is no direct evidence that Frome was a borough and no trace of any charter granted to it. It was not represented in parliament until given one member by the Reform Act of 1832. Separate representation ceased in 1885. Frome was never incorporated. A charter of Henry VII. to Edmund Leversedge, then lord of the manor, granted the right to have fairs on the 22nd of July and the 21st of September. In the 18th century two other fairs on the 24th of February and the 25th of November were held. Cattle fairs are now held on the last Wednesday in February and November, and a cheese fair on the last Wednesday in September. The Wednesday market is held under the charter of Henry VII. There is also a Saturday cattle market. The manufacture of woollen cloth has been established since the 15th century, Frome being the only Somerset town in which this staple industry has flourished continuously.
FROMENTIN, EUGÈNE (1820-1876), French painter, was born at La Rochelle in December 1820. After leaving school he studied for some years under Louis Cabat, the landscape painter. Fromentin was one of the earliest pictorial interpreters of Algeria, having been able, while quite young, to visit the land and people that suggested the subjects of most of his works, and to store his memory as well as his portfolio with the picturesque and characteristic details of North African life. In 1849 he obtained a medal of the second class. In 1852 he paid a second visit to Algeria, accompanying an archaeological mission, and then completed that minute study of the scenery of the country and of the habits of its people which enabled him to give to his after-work the realistic accuracy that comes from intimate knowledge. In a certain sense his works are not more artistic results than contributions to ethnological science. His first great success was produced at the Salon of 1847, by the “Gorges de la Chiffa.” Among his more important works are—“La Place de la brèche à Constantine” (1849); “Enterrement 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); “Centaurs 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.)