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. After the fall of the Girondins, the club dissolved. Fauchet was arrested and executed on 31 October 1793. Bonneville, the printer, resumed activity after
9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). His press tried to resurrect the Social Club, but it never regained its previous audience. In a fragmented state, it continued to exist until
Brumaire of year VIII (November 1800). By then, ideologues like
Daunou,
Volney,
Daubenton, and
Berthollet held center stage. The
Amis de la Verité was fondly remembered, and it became a touchstone for the romantics of the nineteenth century, like
Charles Nodier and
Victor Hugo, but it was also highly esteemed among politicians and social theorists such as
Charles Fourier,
Saint-Simon, and
Karl Marx.The revolutionary movement which began in 1789 in the
Cercle Social, which in the middle of its course had as its chief representatives
Leclerc and
Roux, and which finally with
Babeuf’s conspiracy was temporarily defeated, gave rise to the communist idea which
Babeuf’s friend
Buonarroti re-introduced in France after the Revolution of 1830. This idea, consistently developed, is the
idea of the
new world order. —
Karl Marx,
The Holy Family (German: Die heilige Familie). ==The
Mouth of Iron==