The Society of the Friends of Truth (Amis de la Verité), also known as the Social Club (French: Cercle social), was a French revolutionary organization founded in 1790. It was "a mixture of revolutionary political club, the Masonic Lodge, and a literary salon". It also published an influential revolutionary newspaper, the Mouth of Iron.
The inception
The Society of the Friends of Truth was established by Nicholas Bonneville and Claude Fauchet, who announced its birth in the popular press on 21 February 1790. The original purpose of the club was to become a "clearing-house" for correspondence between and among scholars from all over Europe. In the spirit of its founders, the club wished to cultivate a "public mandate" under which its activities would be governed. Thus, its newsletter, Mouth of Iron (La Bouche de fer), solicited letters from readers to comment on political affairs and to issue denunciations of counter-revolutionary plots.
The club was actually launched in the month of October 1790, when the sessions "of the Universal Confederation of the Friends of Truth" at the Cirque du Palais-Royal started. Before an audience that ranged from five thousand to eight thousand people every week, Claude Fauchet, self-appointed "attorney of Truth", lectured on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 work The Social Contract. The club also formulated political theories on democratic government, ultimately dismissing direct democracy in favor of a system that resembled a popularly elected dictatorship that could be dismissed by the citizens whenever its actions became insupportable. The Social Club also advocated steps toward a more equitable distribution of wealth, always with an eye to Rousseau's ideals, but the club did not support land reform.
The meetings were described in detail in the "Mouth of Iron", which published the proceedings of the Fauchet lectures and discussions and the mail that arrived following them. This publication is important for understanding the genesis of democratic ideas during the French Revolution. The Social Club was also the first revolutionary group to identify itself clearly as a cosmopolitan organization, meaning that its aims superseded national boundaries. It made appeals to scholars worldwide, and it produced a polyglot edition of the 1791 Constitution for distribution globally. Its goal was to create a universal republic led by scholars.
Membership and adherents
Key figures attending the Social Club included Nicholas Bonneville and Claude Fauchet, as well as Sylvain Maréchal, "Gracchus" Babeuf, Goupil de Préfeln, Camille Desmoulins, Bertrand Barère, and the Marquis de Condorcet. About one-hundred-thirty persons were members and attended meetings regularly.
The meetings were public because the club wanted to show the widest possible audience what discourse in the atmosphere of a literary or philosophical salon might accomplish. (This explains the choice of the Cirque du Palais-Royal as a meeting-place, rather than some smaller venue like a private home.) Spectators were invited to ask questions, and a resolution was passed at the end of each session.
In 1791, the membership of the Social Club openly declared themselves republicans. It then became a meeting place for the Girondists, who would rival more radical Jacobin factions for primacy of republican ideology and action. The club's political orientation was liberal, and it promoted the ideal of a society composed of small and medium economic producers: craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and entrepreneurs.
The members of the Social Club also considered themselves contemporary feminists, and while no remarkable feminist change would come out of the club, the members of the club helped individually to develop the framework for what would become the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Olympe de Gouges, the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, was a member of the club and would often develop her ideas through the liberal conduit of the Social Club. While the members did proclaim themselves supporters of republican ideals publicly, their embrace of feminist ideals was regarded as much more treasonous (and as such, was quite under wraps).
From 1791 on, the club's offices operated a publishing business. It became a center for the dissemination of revolutionary literature, including numerous newspapers, political pamphlets, theatrical works, poetry, posters, etc. A number of seminal authors, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Condorcet, Jacques Pierre Brissot, John Skey Eustace and Jean-Marie Roland, were published under the club's auspices.