Revolutionary French clubs combined public assemblies with newspapers and inner circles

Evidence

The French Revolution offered two prevalent types. There were the “clubs”—loose organisations of the “popular assembly” type, centralised around individual political figures. Each had its newspaper, by means of which it kept alive the attention and interest of a particular clientele that had no fixed boundaries. This clientele then upheld the theses of the paper in the club’s meetings. Certainly, among those who frequented the clubs, there must have existed tight, select groupings of people who knew each other, who met separately and prepared the climate of the meetings, in order to support one tendency or another—depending on the circumstances and also on the concrete interests in play. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 962

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims