Antoine Jay (Guîtres, 20 October 1770 - Courgeac, 9 April 1854) was a French writer, journalist, historian and politician.
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At first an Oratorian at Niort, he studied law at Toulouse and became a lawyer, then briefly administrator of the district of Libourne. He travelled to Canada and the USA 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 (serving as a deputy in the Chambre of the Hundred Days and favouring the handover of Napoleon to the Allies after Waterloo), opposing the Bourbon Restoration and finally seeing the triumph of his political ideal in the July Revolution. He was mayor of Lagorce (1830–1848), conseiller général for the Gironde (1831–1837) and deputy for the Gironde (1815, 1831, 1834).
He came to note for his Histoire du ministère du cardinal de Richelieu (1815) and his elogies of Corneille and Montaigne (published in his Tableau littéraire de la France pendant le XVIIIe siècle in 1818). 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[1]. However, he is best known for his Conversion d'un romantique (1830), in which he staunchly opposes romanticism, writing:
| “ | But I will abstain from critical remarks on [their] use of language : they would be too numerous ; and indeed our young masters add to the number of rights acquired by romanticism that of distorting the language and making solecisms with impunity. They do not wish to imprison their genius within the rules of grammar : this would be too servile an imitation of fallen classicism. | ” |
His opposition to romanticism even went so far as voting against Victor Hugo's election to the Académie française in 1841 (Jay had been elected to the Académie himself in 1832 and was "one of [its] best sleepers" according to a contemporary[2]).
| Preceded by François-Xavier-Marc-Antoine de Montesquiou-Fézensac |
Seat 15 of the Académie française 1832-1854 |
Succeeded by Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy |