  The orientation fluctuations of the director of a liquid crystal are
measured, by a sensitive polarization interferometer, close to the
Fr\'eedericksz transition, which is a second order transition driven by an
electric field. We show that near the critical value of the field the spatially
averaged order parameter has a generalized Gumbel distribution instead of a
Gaussian one. The latter is recovered away from the critical point. The
relevance of slow modes is pointed out. The parameter of generalized Gumbel is
related to the effective number of degrees of freedom.
