By focusing on the Jeune-France phenomenon, on the « Petit Cénacle », which is to say on the most visible and the most exceptional, French literary history may not have fully rendered the features of the whole generation of 1830. This article focuses on the small journals of the time so as to bring to light a writer’s identity that emerges out of the encounter of the generational positioning and the material support of edition. Such a methodology brings to the foreground a whole new population of twenty-year-old writers. Many of these writers, such as Emmanuel Gonzalès or Eugène Labiche, later made a career in the workshops of the serialized novels and of the light comedy, mostly.