The Société des Gens de Lettres and French Socialism: Association as Resistance to the Industrialization and Censorship of the Press

This study emphasizes the importance of the Société des Gens des Lettres's Acte Notarié d'Association, a document that has received no critical attention so far, even though it reveals the names of the SDGL's founding members. Showing that most of them were in fact journalists, I argue that the SDGL was created in an effort to prevent these "gens de lettres" from becoming wage-workers of newspapers. Striking similarities between the SDGL's founding document and the statutes of workers' associations – such as the ones advocated by Philippe Buchez – shed new light on the relation between the SDGL and the French socialist movement in 1838. (M-PLH)