Antoine de Rivarol

Antoine de Rivarol (* June 20, 1753 in Bagnols -sur -Cèze, † April 13, 1801 in Berlin) was a French writer.

The once internationally acclaimed writer came from an Italian -born rather small middle class family, but received a decent education because he should become a clergyman. After a brief stint as a tutor in Lyon in 1777, he went with 24 to Paris, where he posed as a noble Chevalier de Parcieux.

He soon became a talented satirist, which opened some magazines, such as the renowned Mercure de France. Above all, he proved himself as a gifted entertainer Salon, which hardly shut a door in the capital. Had he initially had trouble with his false Chevalier title and have to give him even a few years later, encouraged hardly protest when he titled himself aware even as Comte ( Count ).

Famous throughout Europe Rivarol 1784, just 30 years old when he won the prize of the Berlin Academy with his Discours sur l' universalité de la langue française ( = speech about the universality of the French language ) in which he rational with this or that, but especially sought, many pseudo rational arguments to explain the then in Europe generally accepted supremacy of French as a literary, scientific, Court and diplomatic language and legitimize.

During the revolutionary years, Rivarol operated - like so many writers - as a journalist, as a monarchist and defender of the ratios of the Ancien Régime. In 1792, he gave way to the pressure of the revolutionary forces and fled, first to the then Austrian Brussels, then in 1794 to London and 1795 to Hamburg, a stronghold of the French emigration.

In 1800 he visited Berlin and was celebrated there again. He died shortly before his scheduled return to France, where in the meantime Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, and because he needed officers and administrators for the occupied territories of French troops, the emigrants built a golden bridge.

Works

• Memoires de Rivarol. 1824, dt: Political Journal of a Royalist: 5 May to 5 October 1789 / Antoine de Rivarol. Frankfurt am Main, 1989, ISBN 3-610-08521-5.
• From people. Thoughts and maxims - portraits and bon mots, edited and translated by Ulrich Kunzmann. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-88221-740-7.