Between 1820 and 1823, French political life was marked by a growing number of plots against the restored Bourbon Monarchy. The organisation leading the conspiracies, the French Charbonnerie, did not survive the failure of its schemes, leaving many unanswered questions about the true extent of its power and the causes of its disappearance. During the July Monarchy, the veil had been partially lifted from this occult organisation: it appeared that the Charbonnerie had spread widely throughout the country. Its decline in power was often attributed to a lack of unified political opinion, with the socialists also believing that the low recruitment of the working class was a factor. This paper successively discusses these hypotheses and then focuses on the paradoxes of the Charbonnerie imaginary: a mix of Liberal and Enlightenment ideals, and fascination for secret societies. It takes into consideration a new source, a copy of the statutes of the association, seized in 1834 during a search at a lawyer’s house from Vienne in Isère and now conserved at the Museum of French History in Paris.