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Society of the Friends of Truth


The Society of the Friends of Truth (Amis de la Verité), also known as the Social Club, 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 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was also the first revolutionary group to identify itself clearly as a cosmopolitan organization, meaning that its aims superseded national boundaries.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.


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