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This contribution studies the call to the “people” as an element of political journalism during the French Revolution, thus avoiding two extreme positions which tend to perceive the people of the journalists like that of Jean-Paul Marat, either as an organic reality or as a rhetorical construct. Conversely, the focus is here placed on the literary and editorial strategy of addressing oneself in person to the up-in-arms political readership. The people of the “friends of the people” are thus presented as an imminent public intermediary structure. Popular writers themselves are accused of misleading their readers instead of enlightening them– and Marat is no exception –, as they refer to this new people-cum-audience in a way that is often ambivalent: it is portrayed as egalitarian, agitated, curious and volatile, and it is at once a great hope and a huge disappointment.