Writer, journalist, polemicist, printer and Unionist deputy after 1908, Ebuzziya Tevfik (1849-1913), a self-taught intellectual embracing both the Ottoman and Western cultures, was for almost five decades at the heart of political, cultural, intellectual and social debates of the capital of the Ottoman Empire. This book retraces his intellectual biography by adopting a socio-historical approach. It reconstructs a professional career from a reflection on the formation and reorganization of the Ottoman elites, identifies and examines a considerable printed work. Through this figure, it retraces the meanders of Ottoman social and political reformism as well as the social condition of intellectuals from a particular angle: that of their autonomy in the face of political power. By going back to the intellectual origins of Ebuzziya Tevfik's ideas and positions, by analyzing the public debates in which this versatile author participated, this book also offers a panorama of the intellectual and political life in the Ottoman Empire, from the 1860s to the 1910s.