Rivarol, ANTOINE, French writer, was born at Bagnols in Languedoc, 26th June 1753. Though but the son of an innkeeper, when he appeared in Paris in 1780 he laid dubious claim to rank, and soon worked his way by his wit into the best society of the time. Already he had written his treatise, Sur l'Universalité de la Langue Française (1784), and paraphrased rather than translated the Inferno, when in 1788 he set all Paris laughing at the sarcasms in his Petit Almanach de nos grands Hommes pour 1788. At the Revolution he took his place in the royalist ranks, and saved his head by emigrating in June 1792. Supported by royalist pensions, the 'Tacitus of the Revolution,' as Burke styled him in one of the least happy of hyperboles, employed himself fitfully in writing pamphlets and weaving dreams of books to be written, in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin. He had married an English wife, but she quarrelled with him, and not without reason. Rivarol died at Berlin, 13th April 1801.
His works were collected by Chénedollé and Fayolle (5 vols. 1805), but their terse epigrammatic quality shows better by compression in the Esprit de Rivarol (2 vols. 1808) and the Œuvres Choisies, edited by Lescure (1862; new ed. 1880). See Lescure's Rivarol et la Société Française pendant la Révolution et l'Emigration (1883).