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Rh FAUCHET, CLAUDE (1530–1601), French historian and antiquary, was born at Paris on the 3rd of July 1530. Of his early life few particulars are known. He applied himself to the study of the early French chroniclers, and proposed to publish extracts which would throw light on the first periods of the monarchy. During the civil wars he lost a large part of his books and manuscripts in a riot, and was compelled to leave Paris. He then settled at Marseilles. Attaching himself afterwards to Cardinal de Tournon, he accompanied him in 1554 to Italy, whence he was several times sent on embassies to the king, with reports on the siege of Siena. His services at length procured him the post of president of the chambre des monnaies, and thus enabled him to resume his literary studies. Having become embarrassed with debt, he found it necessary, at the age of seventy, to sell his office; but the king, amused with an epigram, gave him a pension, with the title of historiographer of France. Fauchet has the reputation of an impartial and scrupulously accurate writer; and in his works are to be found important facts not easily accessible elsewhere. He was, however, entirely uncritical, and his style is singularly inelegant. His principal works (1579, 1599) treat of Gaulish and French antiquities, of the dignities and magistrates of France, of the origin of the French language and poetry, of the liberties of the Gallican church, &c. A collected edition was published in 1610. Fauchet took part in a translation of the Annals of Tacitus (1582). He died at Paris about the close of 1601.

 FAUCHET, CLAUDE (1744–1793), French revolutionary bishop, was born at Dornes (Nièvre) on the 22nd of September 1744. He was a curate of the church of St Roch, Paris, when he was engaged as tutor to the children of the marquis of Choiseul, brother of Louis XV.’s minister, an appointment which proved to be the first step to fortune. He was successively grand vicar to the archbishop of Bourges, preacher to the king, and abbot of Montfort-Lacarre. The “philosophic” tone of his sermons caused his dismissal from court in 1788 before he became a popular speaker in the Parisian sections. He was one of the leaders of the attack on the Bastille, and on the 5th of August 1789 he delivered an eloquent discourse by way of funeral sermon for the citizens slain on the 14th of July, taking as his text the words of St Paul, “Ye have been called to liberty.” He blessed the tricolour flag for the National Guard, and in September was elected to the Commune, from which he retired in October 1790. During the next winter he organized within the Palais Royal the “Social Club of the Society of the Friends of Truth,” presiding over crowded meetings under the self-assumed title of procureur général de la vérité. Nevertheless, events were marching faster than his opinions, and the last occasion on which he carried his public with him was in a sermon preached at Notre Dame on the 14th of February 1791. In May he became constitutional bishop of Calvados, and was presently returned by the department to the Legislative Assembly, and afterwards to the Convention. At the king’s trial he voted for the appeal to the people and for the penalty of imprisonment. He protested against the execution of Louis XVI. in the Journal des amis (January 26, 1793), and next month was denounced to the Convention for prohibiting married priests from the exercise of the priesthood in his diocese. He remained secretary to the Convention until the accusation of the Girondists in May 1793. In July he was imprisoned on the charge of supporting the federalist movement at Caen, and of complicity with Charlotte Corday, whom he had taken to see a sitting of the Convention on her arrival in Paris. Of the second of these charges he was certainly innocent. With the Girondist deputies he was brought before the revolutionary tribunal on the 30th of October, and was guillotined on the following day.

See ''Mémoires. . . ou Lettres de Claude Fauchet'' (5th ed., 1793); Notes sur Claude Fauchet (Caen, 1842).

 FAUCIT, HELENA SAVILLE (1817–1898), English actress, the daughter of John Saville Faucit, an actor, was born in London. Her first London appearance was made on the 5th of January 1836 at Covent Garden as Julia in The Hunchback. Her success in this was so definitely confirmed by her subsequent acting of Juliet, Lady Teazle, Beatrice, Imogen and Hermione, that within eighteen months she was engaged by Macready as leading lady at Covent Garden. There, besides appearing in several Shakespearian characters, she created the heroine’s part in Lytton’s Duchess de la Vallière (1836), Lady of Lyons (1838), Richelieu (1839), The Sea Captain (1839), Money (1840), and Browning’s Strafford (1837). After a visit to Paris and a short season at the Haymarket, she joined the Drury Lane company under Macready early in 1842. There she played Lady Macbeth, Constance in King John, Desdemona and Imogen, and took part in the first production of Westland Marston’s Patrician’s Daughter (1842) and Browning’s Blot on the Scutcheon (1843). Among her successful tours was included a visit to Paris in 1844–1845, where she acted with Macready in several Shakespearian plays. In 1851 she was married to Mr (afterwards Sir) Theodore Martin, but still acted occasionally for charity. One of her last appearances was as Beatrice, on the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford-on-Avon on the 23rd of April 1879. In 1881 there appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine the first of her Letters on some of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which were published in book form as On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1885). Lady Martin died at her home near Llangollen in Wales on the 31st of October 1898. There is a tablet to her in the Shakespeare Memorial with a portrait figure, and the marble pulpit in the Shakespeare church—with her portrait as Saint Helena—was given in her memory by her husband.

See Sir Theodore Martin’s Helena Faucit (1900).

FAUJAS DE SAINT-FOND, BARTHÉLEMY (1741–1819), French geologist and traveller, was born at Montélimart on the 17th of May 1741. He was educated at the Jesuits’ College at Lyons; afterwards he went to Grenoble, applied himself to the study of law, and was admitted advocate to the parliament. He rose to be president of the seneschal’s court (1765), a post which he honourably filled, but the duties of which became irksome, as he had early developed a love of nature and his favourite relaxation was found in visits to the Alps. There he began to study the forms, structure, composition and superposition of rocks. In 1775 he discovered in the Velay a rich deposit of pozzuolana, which in due course was worked by the government. In 1776 he put himself in communication with Buffon, who was not slow to perceive the value of his labours. Invited by Buffon to Paris, he quitted the law, and was appointed by Louis XVI. assistant naturalist to the museum, to which office was added some years later (1785, 1788) that of royal commissioner for mines. One of the most important of his works was the Recherches sur les volcans éteints du Vivarais et du Velay, which appeared in 1778. In this work, rich in facts and observations, he developed his theory of the origin of volcanoes. In his capacity of commissioner for mines Faujas travelled in almost all the countries of Europe, everywhere devoting attention to the nature and constituents of the rocks. It was he who first recognized the volcanic nature of the basaltic columns of the cave of Fingal (Staffa), although the island was visited in 1772 by Sir Joseph Banks, who remarked that the stone “is a coarse kind of Basaltes, very much resembling the Giants’ Causeway in Ireland” (Pennant’s Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides). Faujas’s Voyage en Angleterre, en Écosse et aux Îles Hébrides (1797) is full of interest—containing anecdotes of Sir Joseph Banks and Dr John Whitehurst, and an amusing account of “The Dinner of an Academic Club” (the Royal Society), and has been translated into English (2 vols., 1799). Having been nominated in 1793 professor at the Jardin des Plantes, he held this post till he was nearly eighty years of age, retiring in 1818 to his estate of Saint-Fond in Dauphiné. Faujas took a warm interest in the balloon experiments of the brothers Montgolfier, and published a very complete Description des expériences de la machine aérostatique de MM. Montgolfier, &c. (1783, 1784). He contributed many scientific memoirs to the Annales and the Mémoires of the museum of natural history. Among his separate works, in addition to those already named are—Histoire naturelle de la province de Dauphiné (1781, 1782); Minéralogie des volcans