Society of the Friends of Truth
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.
The Social Club was also the first revolutionary group to identify itself clearly as a cosmopolitan organization, meaning that its aims superseded national boundaries.
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.
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.
It became a center for the dissemination of revolutionary literature, including numerous newspapers, political pamphlets, theatrical works, poetry, posters, etc.
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.
The newsletter contained comments on "The Social Contract" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, essays by Claude Fauchet, transcripts of speeches by Condorcet, petitions from the Club of the Cordeliers, etc.
La Bouche de fer was the origin[9] of the famous quote, often attributed to Denis Diderot: "Quand le dernier des rois sera pendu avec les boyaux du dernier prêtre célibataire, le genre humain pourra espérer être heureux."
