[6] In 1784, his Discours sur l'Universalité de la Langue Française and his translation of Dante's Inferno were favourably noted.

[7][8] The year before the French Revolution broke out, he and Champcenetz published a lampoon, titled Petit Almanach de nos grands hommes pour 1788, that ridiculed without pity a number of writers of proven or future talent, along with a great many nobodies.

[9] Rivarol was the foremost journalist, commentator and epigrammatist among that faction of aristocrats which was most stalwartly conservative: he heaped scorn upon republicanism and defended the Ancien Régime.

[10][11] Rivarol's writing was published in the Journal Politique of Antoine Sabatier de Castres and the Actes des Apotres of Jean Gabriel Peltier.

Rivarol's rivals in France – in sharp conversational sayings – included Alexis Piron and Nicolas Chamfort.