Antoine Jay


Antoine Jay was a French writer, journalist, historian and politician.

Biography

At first an Oratorian at Niort, he studied law at Toulouse then became a lawyer, then briefly worked as the administrator of the district of Libourne. He travelled to Canada and the United States between 1795 and 1802 to escape the French Revolution, making friends with Thomas Jefferson and teaching French to Lemuel Shaw.
From 1803 to 1809, he was tutor to the sons of Joseph Fouché, before serving as a civil servant in the Ministry of Police, where he translated English newspapers. He contributed to the Journal des Voyages and L'Abeille, participated in the foundation of Constitutionnel and La Minerve française, and edited the Journal de Paris. He was an influential opposition journalist, who had supported the French Revolution and First French Empire, opposing the Bourbon Restoration and finally seeing the triumph of his political ideal in the July Revolution. He was mayor of Lagorce, conseiller général for the Gironde and deputy for the Gironde.
He came to note for his Histoire du ministère du cardinal de Richelieu and his elogies of Corneille and Montaigne. He, Antoine-Vincent Arnault, Jacques de Norvins and Étienne de Jouy then collaborated on a Biographie nouvelle des contemporains, for which he notably edited an article on Jean-Baptiste Boyer-Fonfrède which led to his imprisonment for a month in the prison Sainte-Pélagie. However, he is best known for his Conversion d'un romantique, in which he staunchly opposes romanticism, writing:
His opposition to romanticism even went so far as voting against Victor Hugo's election to the Académie française in 1841.

Works

;Online texts