We study the Fokker–Planck equation as the many-particle limit of a stochastic particle system on one hand and as a Wasserstein gradient flow on the other. We write the path-space rate functional, which characterises the large deviations from the expected trajectories, in such a way that the free energy appears explicitly. Next we use this formulation via the contraction principle to prove that the discrete time rate functional is asymptotically equivalent in the Gamma-convergence sense to the functional...