Antoine Rivarol is best known as the author of the Discours sur l’universitalité de la langue française of 1783. In the same year he wrote his Lettre à M. le président de***, Sur le globe aérostatique, sur les Têtes parlantes, et sur l’état présent de l’opinion publique à Paris. In his Lettre, Rivarol was unstinting in his praise of l’abbé Mical’s Têtes parlantes, two Frenchspeaking automatons. He pointed out several problems concerning pronunciation, such as local accents and changes in pronunciation over time, and suggested that the definitive pronunciation of French might best be protected by recording it using the Têtes parlantes. In the Discours the emphasis was on the grammatical clarity of standard French. This work was complemented in the Lettre by his thoughts on pronunciation. At the time, there were various critical reactions to the Têtes parlantes: the importance of gesture in human communications and the limits of art imitating nature, etc. Since the Têtes parlantes reproduced the act of speech, they can be counted as an ‘imitation of human life’. Speaking Heads, however, cannot be categorized simply as developing forms of Vaucanson’s automatons. Speaking Heads imitated human speech but without gestures or body movements. Thus, the philosophical background on which Vaucanson’s automatons were based was renovated.