Their Paris, Our Paris: A Situationist dérive
Between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, the urban fabric of Paris changed dramatically. The city council and urban planners set about demolishing the officially designated îlots insalubres (insalubrious neighborhoods), which were entirely redeveloped to accommodate tertiary activities or large housing projects of the kind that can be found today around the Gare Montparnasse and in the 13th arrondissement. Meanwhile, a large portion of the population of these neighborhoods was relocated to the outskirts of Paris, to the notorious grands ensembles (housing projects) of the banlieues (suburbs) that have continuously fostered segregation and social violence ever since.1 It has been estimated that a third of Paris’s existing buildings were destroyed in this period, while the number of workers living within the city declined by more than 40 percent.2 The development of public transportation and of highways further accentuated and accelerated this disintegration of the capital’s traditional urban milieu. The modernization of Paris and of the country as a whole is inseparable from the violence that was simultaneously exercised by the French state, which in the same period engaged in postcolonial conflicts (the Indochinese War, the Algerian War), the repression of social movements (the massacres of protesters on October 17, 1961, the violent response to the protests of May 1968), and the expulsion of workers, middle-class employees, and immigrés from the city centers to the grim urban projects of the banlieues.
The brutal modernization of France under the technocratic regime of President Charles de Gaulle is a key contextual element that underlies many of the intellectual, literary and artistic movements that emerged in France, and in particular in Paris, over the period spanning the end of the war in 1945 to the aftermath of May 1968 and the 1973 oil crisis. The Nouveau Roman in literature, Nouveau Réalisme3 in the visual arts, and the Nouvelle Vague in cinema all display an artistic impulse to process this new state of affairs, one embedded in their very names. The writers, artists and directors of these various movements sought to provide their readers or viewers with the aesthetic means to apprehend the changes taking place around them. The two avant-garde movements that French poet, filmmaker, Marxist theorist and revolutionary strategist Guy Debord (1931–1994) successively co-founded, namely the Lettrist International (LI, 1952–1957) and the Situationist International (SI, 1957–1972),4 were no exception to this rule. However, Debord’s engagement with contemporary politics and social changes was far more explicit, radical, and critical than that of his contemporaries.
The Paris of the 1950s is a consistent point of reference, from the Lettrist International that formed there, to the Situationist writings of the 1960s and in Debord’s personal oeuvre after 1972; this chapter will bring together these three different chronological moments of what could be considered a single narrative: the time of experience—the Lettrist International—the time of critical analysis and revolutionary action—the Situationist International—and finally the time of nostalgic recollection—Debord’ s personal œuvre of the 1970s and 1980s with films such as In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978) and texts such as his autobiographic cycle, Panegyric (1989–1991). This chapter will reassess and refine some key aspects of this history by answering a series of questions: How did the Situationist critique of urbanism develop from a direct experience of the urban space? How does it dialogue with the city itself, the people living in it and transformations occurring within the intertwined urban and social bodies? This chapter is also an attempt to show how an early interest in urban space not only developed into a general critique of urbanism, as generally recognized in existing scholarship, but was also redeployed in strategic practice during the crucial month of May 1968. The attached map (Figure 3.1) of Lettrist and Situationist activity is meant as a point of reference to situate in the urban space the various locations and events mentioned throughout this article.
Situating situationism
Though claiming to be “international” in scale, in reality Debord’s two movements were mostly active in Paris. The Parisian context in which they developed is key to understanding Debord’s avant-garde project of reuniting art and life, of combining a critique of modern culture—the development of mass consumption and mass media—and of modern politics—the colonial conflicts and the so-called modernization of the country. Emerging in the field of art and culture in the 1950s, Debord’s avant-garde project grew steadily more political, engaging ever more closely with revolutionary radicalism throughout the 1960s, up until the direct participation of the SI in the May 1968 uprisings in Paris.
Debord’s circle changed frequently throughout this period: the Lettrist International was created in 1952 as a left-wing splinter group of Isidore Isou’s Lettrism,5 and along with Debord included other younger Lettrists, such as Ivan Chtcheglov and collage artist Gil J Wolman. When Debord founded the SI five years later in 1957, his wife Michèle Bernstein was the only member of the LI to join the ranks of this second avant-garde group. The SI counted amongst its early members key figures of the European avant-garde such as Danish painter Asger Jorn or Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, but also lesser-known artists such as Walter Olmo and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio.6 In the early 1960s, however, the membership of the SI underwent a radical change: all artists either resigned or were expelled from the movement, replaced by a younger generations of politicized members such as René Viénet, Raoul Vaneigem or, later on in the mid-1960s, Mustapha Khayati.
The communication strategy of both of Debord’s avant-garde movements consisted of the dissemination of various publications, the Internationale lettriste and Potlatch, followed later by the Internationale situationniste, along with numerous posters, leaflets, and flyers. These publications, along with the various archives recently acquired by institutions such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Yale University Beinecke Library, have constituted key sources for our understanding of the revolutionary project of Guy Debord.
Published in 1958, the poster “Nouveau Théâtre d’Opération dans la Culture” (New Theater of Operations in Culture, Figure 3.2) offers a fairly representative summary of the Situationist project and the group’s arsenal of theories and practices.
The title clearly indicates the group’s avant-garde ambitions and its strategic perspective, as well as their chosen battlefield: the SI stated their intention to operate within “culture,” within the everyday life and representations that reflected the changes occurring at the macro political, economic, and social levels. The aerial photograph of the southeastern area of Paris that illustrates the poster is a reminder of Debord’s fascination with maps and the way in which they could determine or alter the perception of urban space. Aerial photography was indeed a key instrument for both the military and social geographers such as Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who participated in surveying and documenting the rapid changes taking place in postwar Paris and its urban fabric.7 “It is impossible to understand most strategic issues without reference to geography,”8 wrote Debord in 1988, in a letter advocating the inclusion of maps in an edition of Clausewitz’s On War: if you want war, prepare maps. This is just what the SI set about doing, as we will see in this chapter. But in addition to maps, an avant-garde also needs weapons. These weapons, both theoretical and practical, are presented in the diagram that constitutes the lower part of the 1958 poster. “Permanent play” provides the foundation for this seemingly cohesive blueprint for action: when applied to culture, “permanent play” allows for “détournement,” that is, the reusing and repurposing of pre-existing elements to create something new and different; combined with “experimental behavior” in the urban space, “permanent play” fosters the dérive, or urban drift. Finally, this “permanent play” allows for the development of “unitary urbanism” and Situationist architecture via psychogéographie, a new approach to space involving the representation and psychological experience of the city. This ensemble of theories and practices is meant to culminate in the “construction of situations”—a Situationist Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts that can be summarized as a moment of intensively lived life—a wild party or an urban insurrection for instance—that emerges in stark contrast to the stultifying boredom of modern everyday life.
The existing scholarship on Guy Debord, the Lettrist International, and the Situationnist International explores and discusses this project through the lenses of various disciplines: art history, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, architecture theory, and urban history. This historiography has long been divided into three ensembles, which largely correspond to different academic specializations. Art and architecture historians, along with exhibition curators, have focused on the first period of the LI and the SI that spans from the early 1950s to the early 1960s, and hence on the artistic outcomes of an avant-garde group that was essentially composed of artists.9 The SI’s shift towards the field of radical politics and activism from the early 1960s onwards has meanwhile attracted the attention of philosophers and critical theorists, since it was in this latter period that the Situationist critique of modernity and capitalism came to fruition with the publication in 1967 of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s Treatise on Living for the Young Generations.10 Literary studies have tended to take a rather essentialist approach to Debord’s oeuvre,11 decontextualizing his stylistic choices and disregarding their status as strategic choices in a war against society.12 No matter the discipline, one of the challenges that scholars face when approaching the history of the SI is the fact that the movement itself largely contributed to establishing its own history: put simply, the SI was its own historian, and provided its readers and analysts with a convincing readymade narrative whose pull is not easily escaped.13 Finally, and most importantly for the purpose of this chapter, the Situationist project is constituted not only of theories and practices, but also of a style that mediates them, both in textual and visual terms—a style that Debord and his comrades considered as no less than the culmination of the means and ends of their project.14
Given the SI’s interest in and rhetorical approach to style, scholars must take care to avoid neutralizing the group’s radicalism and energy with too heavy an academic discourse, whilst simultaneously resisting the temptation to offer a mimetic response that imitates the group’s taste for irony and Marxist phraseology. This chapter will attempt to navigate this tricky discursive terrain as it seeks to restore Situationist practices to their original Parisian context by considering the nature of the city and the ways in which the Situationists might have experienced it in the years spanning from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. By adopting the format of the dérive to consider Parisian urban space, considering activities and ideas as they developed on the ground and in specific areas of the city, and through extensive reference to the new resources offered by the Debord archives at the Bibliothèque nationale, this chapter aims to offer an alternative to the distance and tone conventionally required by academic scholarship, which has in any case already produced a rich body of work on the topic of Situationist critique of urbanism,15 whilst avoiding the stylistic pitfalls of the mimetic trap.
A street corner as epicenter
At the northern tip of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the rue de Seine and the rue Mazarine join to form a tight bend behind the Institut de France, that hides the river Seine from the passerby.
At this spot, one morning early in 1953, one could read the following graffiti daubed in big white letters on the walls of the Institut: “NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS,” that is, “NEVER WORK” (Figure 3.3). The author of this graffiti was the young Guy Debord, aged 23.
Along with his 1951 film Howlings for Sade, Debord considered this graffiti as the inaugural gesture of his revolutionary life and the most concise summary of the project underlying the two successive avant-garde movements that he would go on to co-found: the absolute refusal to participate in everyday alienation, and the firm will to take down the capitalist system that produces it. Guy Debord’s Paris, and consequently the Situationist Paris, revolves around this section of wall that has blackened with the passage of time.
Just a hundred feet from this spot, a little further away from the River Seine, there is a small passage that looks like a porte cochère.16 You would think you are about to go inside the Institut. It is actually a passageway leading to a dramatically different atmosphere, passing abruptly from the narrow and dark streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés towards the theatrical Place de l’Institut17 that opens up in a semicircle overlooking the Seine and facing the Palais du Louvre on the other bank of the river. This experience, which one can still live today, could be described in Situationist terms as a psychogeographic experience, triggered by the practice of the dérive—or urban drift—that Debord described in his 1956 “Theory of the dérive” as the “technique of swift passage through varied environments.”18
The word dérive evokes a long and adventurous journey with no preset destination, and this is precisely how it was experienced and depicted by Debord and his friends. Nonetheless, the usual territory of the dérive was rather limited. Painter Ralph Rumney (1934–2002) recalls: “My experience of Paris long remained within an enclosed perimeter, between Montparnasse [where many artists had their studios], Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the rue de la Huchette. Every time we would leave it, it was an adventure.”19 Debord marks out a similarly reduced terrain in Panegyric as he recalls how “between the rue du Four and the rue de Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any better.”20
Now, if you go in the other direction, south of the graffiti, and look at the corner of the rue Mazarine from the square Pierné, you will recognize in contemporary colors the setting of a black-and-white photograph inserted by Debord in his movie On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time (1959, Figure 3.4): the photograph shows the film director and his crew filming the movie you’re watching, a movie about the companions, the time, and the places that shaped the Situationist project “to reinvent everything each day; to become the masters of their own lives.”21 The film later shows a barge running up the river, towards the east. In a place where, in the time of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), wine barrels and travelers were once unloaded, the viewers of Debord’s film can see piles of concrete bricks on the Quai Saint Bernard, a reminder of the intense construction work taking place on the site of the former Halle aux Vins (wine market) where the early 1960s saw the erection of Paris Faculty of Sciences by architects Cassan and Albert.
From the birth of the Lettrist International in 1952 to the dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972, the city of Paris underwent many drastic transformations, which were witnessed by the artists, activists, delinquents, agitators, and intellectuals of these groups. One distinction between the International Lettrists and the Situationists lies in the fact that, while both claimed an international ambition, only the second would actually realize it. London, Amsterdam and Venice would eventually become “Situationist” cities thanks to the conferences that the movement organized every two years or so to gather the troops and reflect the internationalization of their composition and activities. The writer and junky Alexander Trocchi(1925–1984) recalls Guy Debord as being an adept psychogeographer as he walked the streets of London; 22 in Amsterdam, an exhibition project at the Stedelijk Museum included the direct experience of the urban space coordinated with walkie-talkies; 23 Ralph Rumney, founder and sole member of an otherwise rather legendary “Psychogeographic Committee of London,” disappeared for a while in Venice, where ten years later the last conference of the group took place. The presence of Belgian, German, Danish and Italian members in the Situationist International evidences the Europeanization of the total critique of capitalist society supported by the movement.
The Situationist theories and practices were thus not limited to the Parisian space; when Paris does feature as their playground and battleground, the locations of choice are often those of the earlier Lettrist period, now reworked into the critical theories and the narratives of the Situationists. This (re)construction of Paris characterizes, up until its revolutionary moment in 1968, the Situationist adventure.
A day on the Left Bank
In many ways, Debord’s oeuvre is a tale of the city, in which the environment or the “milieu” of his youth plays a crucial role. This urban tale also played a crucial part in Debord’s attempts to establish the avant-garde movements he co-founded in stark opposition to the rest of the cultural sphere, which he and his companions copiously taunted in the pages of their periodic publications, namely Potlatch, followed in 1958 by Internationale situationniste.24 Debord’s Saint-Germain is not that of the Café Flore or Les Deux Magots, where the gentrified and compliant intelligentsia—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir above all—would sit next to acclaimed artists, famous writers, and the usual American tourists. Nor does Debord mention Le Tabou or Le Vieux-Colombier, where musicians or singers such as Sydney Bechett, Claude Luter, Catherine Sauvage, or Juliette Greco would perform.
More importantly perhaps, Debord rarely mentions the many galleries of the rue de Seine and the nearby streets. The rue de Seine is precisely located between Chez Moineau, Debord’s headquarters in the early 1950s, and the psychogeographic vortex around the Institut. Between the rue de Buci and the wall of the Institut where Debord scrawled his infamous slogan, the rue de Seine had indeed become a hot spot for the art market since the 1920s. As historian Julie Verlaine has shown, many galleries opened in this neighborhood during the 1950s (their number doubled from 20 to 39), thus renewing the artistic landscape in the area.25 Did Debord close his eyes in disgust when he was passing by these artsy-fartsy addresses? Quite the contrary. His archives leave no doubt as to his precise knowledge of what was going on there: they contain many exhibition flyers from some of the most important galleries of the neighborhood.26 At Studio Facchetti (17 rue de Lille), he may have seen paintings by Jean Dubuffet and drawings by poet Henri Michaux. Iris Clert (3 rue des Beaux-Arts) displayed works by Danish painter Asger Jorn—Debord’s friend since the middle of the 1950s and a founding member of the SI in 1957—and more famously, works by Yves Klein who briefly dialogued with Debord and his comrades.27 The Galerie Stadler, whose flyers frequently appear in the archive, was connected with the crowd Debord probably despised the most: the “avant-garde royalist”28 Georges Mathieu, and “secret agent of the Vatican”29 Michel Tapié, who was what we would call today a curator and critic in residence at the gallery. There is also a photograph of Debord30 at the Galerie Rive Gauche (44 rue de Fleurus) in front of one of Asger Jorn’s Modification paintings. To create these tableaux détournés, Jorn purchased antique canvases at flea markets and “improved”31 them, as he would put it, with serendipitous jets of colors.
The territory occupied by Debord and his companions very much overlapped with this epicenter of Paris’s artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s. But in this urban setting, “social diversity” was still a reality rather than the duplicitous urban branding slogan that it is today. In order to get a sense of a day in the life of a young Lettrist in this area of Paris, you could read the witty “Economic status of the basic Lettrist”32 drafted by Debord in his correspondence, not only as a dark-humored détournement of the “Economic status of the entry-level labourer” published in those years by the bureaucratic-sounding Collective Labour Agreement Committee,33 but also as a kind of spatialized schedule of usual activities: “For a month: 1 hotel room, 10 cinema screenings, 30 couscous (without meat) rue Xavier Privat, 30 cafés-crèmes at the Dupont-Latin [boulevard Saint-Michel], 30 sandwiches at the Tonneau d’Or [32 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève].”34 The hotel room, or “meublé,” was the typical accommodation of students and low-income workers of the city at the time, while the 5th and 6th arrondissement were (and still are) home to dozens of avant-garde and independent cinemas. In the streets around the Saint-Séverin church, rue Xavier-Privas for instance, Kabyle35 bars would serve couscous for cheap; it was also easier for the young Lettrists to find hash there than cigarettes. More importantly, rue Xavier-Privas also harbored the headquarters of Messali Hadj’s Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, that would soon be supplanted by the Algerian National Liberation Front at the start of the Algerian War of Independence. At the end of the 1950s, the Latin Quarter was a long way from the somewhat nightmarish theme park for tourists and students that it is today: homeless people could find shelter in attic rooms for a night or two, depending on their ability to put up with the stench of boarding houses, as vividly recalled by Jean-Paul Clébert who was then living among them.36 On the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, around the now fully renovated Panthéon, furnished rooms in the upper stories still housed numerous workers.
With his historiographer’s style, Debord often returns to those never-forgotten first steps of the Situationists. In his works, literary and cinematic alike, he often recalls the Paris of his youth, Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter; though nominally a student in law at the Sorbonne, he actually spent most of his time wandering around these areas, meeting up with friends, reading and writing on the state of art, culture, and politics. Debord makes frequent references to the Paris of the French Revolution, the Paris of the 1870 Commune, and later the Paris of May 1968—but also to a Paris that had been lost, “assassinated”37 in the great redesigning of the city in the 1960s.
In Debord’s aforementioned short film, On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time—a series of notes about the origins of the movement—the first sequence documents the buildings and decor of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, dedicated to the “wretched dignity of the petite bourgeoisie.”38 The boulevard, the Dubonnet wine and liquor shop; tourists, students, employees coming out of the Saint-Germain metro station, those for whom “duty had already become a habit, and habit a duty”;39 the upper stories inhabited by young intellectuals, the cafés too, le Café de la Poste at the corner of the rue Serpente and the ancient rue Hautefeuille, in front of which a group of Sorbonnards—students from the nearby Sorbonne University—passes by, the rue des Écoles, the rue de la Montagne Saint-Geneviève. These streets and scenes provided the environment in which the small group of Situationist friends gathered around a table littered with empty bottles and an overflowing triangular “Ricard” ashtray; between the zinc of Paris’s bar counters and roofs, Debord’s avant-garde movement took form.
The revolution was fermented, like so much booze, in the bars and cafés scattered around Saint-Germain: Le Mabillon, Le Saint-Claude, rue des Canettes, L’Homme de main, 31 rue de Jussieu, Le Bouquet, La Pergola, Le Old Navy, and most importantly, Chez Moineau, rue du Four. In his colorful Paris insolite, Jean-Paul Clébert, living the life of a vagrant, also depicted some of these bars.40 Chez Moineau, the favorite spot of Debord and his friends, was also captured in those years by Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken, who later published his book Love on the Left Bank.41 In these bars, a mixed crowd of old barflies and lost souls, small-time crooks, idle winos, drop-outs, and unruly girls freshly escaped from the reformatory would play cards or chess, read the news, chat from dawn to dusk, and, of course, drink. This bar is also where Debord frequented Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, the future Nouveaux Réalistes whose art the Situationists would loathe for its ambiguous integration and depiction of modern life and materiality. In 1954, Debord left Chez Moineau behind, allegedly after taking offense at increasingly insistent requests that he settle his tab;42 in reality, it was more likely that Debord felt it was time to have a headquarters of his own, where mail and subscriptions could be sent and where members could receive friends and potential recruits for the group. The Lettrist International settled at Le Tonneau d’Or, further east, at 32 rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviève; this would in turn be the address of the Situationist International up until 1963.
Mapping our Paris
It is between those years, 1951 and 1963, that the Situationists formalized the everyday practice of the urban drift, first into a “Theory of the Dérive” and soon afterwards into the pseudo-scientific discipline of psychogéographie which allowed for the realization of psychogeographic maps and the development of Situationist architecture projects. The dérive certainly inherited the critique of the modern city developed via Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur of the streets of Paris and Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris. The dérive was also an after-the-fact theorization of what began as a way to spend some idle and drunken hours wandering about in the city. But as Debord observed, “the difficulties of the dérive are those of freedom”:43 the urban space is also a space of conflict where power consistently exerts itself over the denizen, from Baron Haussmann in the second half of the nineteenth century to his successors and their postwar urban redevelopment plans. The key aspect of the dérive is not chance, but rather a certain attention to the unités d’ambiance (ambiance clusters) and the resulting relief psychogéographique (psychogeographic relief) that necessitate a familiarity with the historical and social identity of the urban block; of course, maintained the Situationists, no urban planner would ever bother engaging with this identity. This experience of the city would eventually undergo a cartographic translation as psychogeographic maps. Psychogeography is first and foremost about insubordination: in the series of maps that Debord designed together with Asger Jorn in the late 1950s, the apparent objectivity of the cartography is annihilated in favor of subjective narratives of the city (Figure 3.5).
These maps are an example of Situationist détournement in that they reuse and repurpose existing—i.e., official, objective, continuous—maps: Guy Debord cut out maps of Paris into fragments of the city, which he scattered around and interconnected with red arrows, thus inducing a permanent state of movement within the traditionally static cartographic depiction of the urban space. The psychogeographic cartographer makes the map show what it usually serves to obscure: the fragmentation of the urban experience. Both the dérive and its cartographic translations hence reintroduced subjectivity into the very spaces—the city and the map—from which it had been erased by the modernization process.
The assassination of Paris
To a certain extent, the notion of a Situationist Paris can be discussed as a way of experiencing the city, the dérive. But this practice, theory, and tale of the city is also an act of subversion. The SI was not some stuffy heritage association jealously defending old Paris. The war they were waging was not one for the conservation of ancient stones and picturesque street corners. The Situationists thus disapproved of the urban conservation plans drawn up by André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, “whose passion for sanitizing and gentrifying the old as a complement to the new presented an official image of the city just as surely as wholesale reconstruction,”44 as Simon Sadler rightfully points out. The Situationist opposition to changes occurring in the landscape must be considered as an integral part of their general critique of the spectacle and of its consequences: an entire chapter of Debord’s notorious essay of 1967, The Society of the Spectacle, is indeed dedicated to the exploration of “Environmental Planning,” that is to say the spatial embodiment of the contradictory dialectics that characterize the spectacle: “Environmental Planning” both fosters the fragmentation of the social body into atomized forms of life and activity (the individual automobile, the private suburban pavilion, the television), and organizes the unification and the “banalization” of urban life through the infinite duplication of architectural or domestic commodities (from urban projects to house appliances).45 But as Debord reminds his reader in that same chapter, the city has also been the crucible of countless revolutionary movements throughout history.
While the 6th and 7th arrondissements, where political and intellectual power resided, went largely unchanged, other areas of Paris evolved dramatically and attracted the attention of both the Lettrists and later on the Situationists. This is especially true of the Eastern part of the city, home to the city’s workers, immigrants, and working classes. Instances in which entire streets were destroyed make up some of the striking events from which a more comprehensive critique would eventually develop:
One of the most beautiful spontaneously psychogeographical places in Paris is currently in the process of disappearing. Rue Sauvage, in the 13th Arrondissement, which offered one of the most stirring nocturnal views of the capital, located between the train tracks of the Gare d’Austerlitz and an area of empty ground along the Seine (rue Fulton, rue Bellièvre) has—since last winter—been enclosed by several of those debilitating structures that line the suburbs to house unfortunate people. We deplore the disappearance of a little-known street, little-known and nonetheless more alive than the Champs Elysees and all its bright lights. We have no predilection for the charms of ruins. But the civilian barracks that we build in their place are so gratuitously ugly as to be an open invitation to dynamiters.46
The rue Sauvage—literally, “wild street”—had by its very name an undeniable kind of Surrealist cachet, and it was certainly valued for the panorama it then offered, similar to the one still visible today from the “beautiful and tragic rue d’Aubervilliers”47 along the tracks of the Gare de l’Est. But most importantly, Debord identifies in the so-called “modernisation” of the urban space an outgrowth of capitalism by other means—an interpretation still supported today by urban sociologists such as David Harvey.48
The Situationist attack on urbanism naturally extended to a critique of the Parisian banlieue—the outskirts of Paris where large urban projects were cheaply and industrially built throughout the 1950s and 1960s and where the workers and immigrés would be relocated from a less and less affordable city center. For the Situationists, who considered that these grands ensembles were anything but benign, adopted an all-encompassing approach to make their point. They took aim at everything from the actual architectural projects themselves to the ways in which they were promoted by politicians and branded by the media, to the kind of society that could give rise to such developments. Debord saw these projects as the urban expression of the underlying movement of separation that capitalism brought about. The Situationists criticized the grands ensembles as a reflection of a “concentration-camp organization of life”49 in a rare and quite revealing reference by Debord to the horrors of the Second World War.
Sarcelles, one of Paris’s most notorious banlieues, also provides the decor in which young Josyane, the heroine of Christiane Rochefort’s 1961 novel Les petits Enfants du Siècle, leads her idle existence, surrounded by housing projects and a stifling family. Josyane tries to escape, dreams of love, and eventually surrenders to the pathetic happiness provided by mass consumption society. Christiane Rochefort’s concerns are similar to those of Henri Lefebvre and his Research Group on Everyday Life who invited her to discuss her book in their seminar. Debord, who would also be invited as a guest speaker later on, was present at Rochefort’s talk, as indicated by one of the notebooks from his archives.50
Of course the Situationists were not the only ones to develop a critique of contemporary urbanism, and a variety of approaches caught their attention, including Rochefort’s novel; the Situationists were well aware of the fact that fiction could sometimes provide a firmer grasp and a more vivid rendering of reality than any specialized academic discourse. Whatever the approach, the Situationists’ critique was all-encompassing in its scope, and based on a very simple assessment: “Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the national and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar décor.”51 In other words, you get the city you deserve.
Paris is a battleground
Debord’s relationship to the city has often been placed in a lineage that dates back to Baudelaire and the Surrealists,52 but this genealogy should also include military engineer Vauban53 and proto-urban guerrillero Auguste Blanqui.54 Debord’s deep interest in the practice and theory of strategy is visible in his writing, his library and his Jeu de la guerre, a strategic board game he invented in the 1950s and developed throughout his life. This important aspect of his oeuvre has often been left unexplored, and was therefore a central focus of the 2013 exhibition that I co-curated at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, “Guy Debord. Un Art de la guerre” (Guy Debord. An Art of War), which drew on academic research around Debord’s archives and his game of war.55
Debord also saw the streets of Paris as a strategic space of communication and action. Following the Revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the bourgeois regime of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann set about redesigning the streets of Paris, opening up large boulevards that cut swathes through the lattice of small arteries in order to better enforce social order. According to the Situationists, the new conditions of urban production tended to simply eradicate the street altogether. Paragraph 172 of The Society of the spectacle sums up this process: “The effort of all established powers, since the experience of the French Revolution, to augment their means of keeping order in the street has eventually culminated in the suppression of the street itself.”56
If the streets themselves were the critical playground of the dérive, the walls of the city were also used by the Situationists as a key battleground in a war of communication that dated back to Debord’s 1952 graffiti. The reader of Potlatch, the periodical of the Lettrist International, is thus encouraged to use paint or chalk to “write in the vicinity of the Renault factory and in some banlieues … the sentence of Louis Scutenaire: you’re sleeping for your boss.”57 “Ne travaillez jamais” was far from a one-off event. Both the LI and the SI produced numerous posters, leaflets, flyers, and even stickers, which we can admire today between sheets of archival paper in libraries and museum collections, but which were then “pasted on the walls of Paris, primarily in psychogeographically favorable places.”58 This technique proved to be quite fruitful, judging by the numerous subscription requests sent to the group after a large communication campaign in 196759 that consisted of posters announcing the simultaneous publication of The Society of the Spectacle by Debord and the Treatise on Living for the Young Generations by Raoul Vaneigem, along with issue n°11 of the Internationale situationniste. These posters, visible here and there across the city, would bring Situationist activity to the attention of those who had yet to notice the appealing aluminum-coated cover of the journal glinting among the somewhat dour covers of other leftist publications at the Cluny kiosk, or in more specialized bookshops of the Latin Quarter such as La Vieille Taupe (1 rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques).
The traditional historiography of the Situationist movement usually divides its history between an artistic period that lasted until the exclusion of most artists in 1961, and a political one in the run-up to May 1968. Nonetheless, the so-called “artistic” phase of the movement is reflected less in its rather sparse artistic production than in the group’s admittedly artistic membership and its specific approach to culture as a vantage point from which all aspects of society can be embraced. What’s more, when the Situationist International later engaged in more traditional political activities, this earlier artistic phase proved its worth: the Situationists’ aura and effectiveness stemmed not only from the content of their critique but from the way in which this was delivered and communicated. We have seen how psychogeography differed from the aestheticized wanderings of the Surrealists; this former approach remained part of the Situationist arsenal even after the group took on a more explicitly and actively political character. Pyschogeography—the sensory, experiential, strategic, and political practice of the urban space—would indeed prove to be one of the central weapons of the Situationist struggle. The agenda of the seventh conference of the Situationist International in Paris, in 1966, mentions the necessity to define “a general blueprint for an insurrectional psychogeography of Paris,”60 though if such a definition was reached, its details went undocumented. Two years later, however, May 1968 would provide the opportunity to put this psychogeographical project into practice. The strategic dimension of the insurrection and the war-like ambiance of the Latin Quarter can be experienced today by listening to radio programs recorded at the time, and especially to those of Pierre Lantenac, a journalist reporting from the streets of the Latin Quarter for France Inter Radio: interrupted by explosions, sirens, and slogans, as Lantenac describes the movements of both sides in the area, one feels immersed in the atmosphere of a civil war.61
While the Situationists fought on the barricades of the rue Gay-Lussac, their participation in the events encompassed wider tactical and strategic considerations, such as how to promote the insurrection without becoming its “leaders” and how to prevent particular groups and political parties recuperating the spontaneity of the uprisings. On the evening of May 13, the “Comité Enragés-Situationnistes” participated in the occupation of the Sorbonne, and took over one of the rooms of the university, changing its name to “Salle Jules Bonnot” in memory of the famous anarchist gangster from the 1910s. Because of their absolute refusal to be recuperated by any sort of official organizations, the Situationists soon found themselves isolated from the many other leftist groups, the majority of which were linked more or less closely to the main student union, the UNEF, that was also involved in the occupation of the Sorbonne. As a result, on May 19, the Situationists moved to the National Pedagogic Institute, across the street from the École Normale Supérieure on the other side of the Panthéon. This building became the real headquarters from which their revolutionary action would continue under the name “Comité pour le Maintien des Occupations” (CMDO). The committee brought together about forty people, taking turns to occupy the building and developing communications with other groups. Posters were designed in situ and printed in Malakoff, just to the south of Paris, by the striking employees of a printing works, before being pasted overnight in the streets of the city (Figure 3.6).62
There are some fascinating archival documents testifying to this guerrilla war of propaganda, such as lists of materials, “2 boxes of 100 posters each, bucket, glue, brush,”63 and a schedule indicating where and when each group was to paste the posters or replenish their supplies. Each member worked under a pseudonym: Debord is Gondi, in a reference to the Cardinal de Retz, a central figure of “La Fronde,” a seventeenth-century uprising against the monarchy led by a fringe of the French aristocracy. The blueprint also assigns each group a specific area to cover on the Left Bank, from the Sully bridge, westward to the rue Dauphine, or eastward to the rue Censier. These areas were represented by fragments of maps that looked exactly like the “unités d’ambiance” depicted on Debord’s psychogeographic maps ten years previous. Far from being consigned to their youth as a forgotten passe-temps, the dérive now emerged as a preliminary training step for the Situationists, preparing them for the war of communication integral to any urban insurrection: the playground of the city had always been a battleground.
Conclusion: Towards a strategic approach in avant-garde history
From a scholarly point of view, the writing of the history of the avant-garde in general, and of the French avant-garde in particular, has been made both possible and difficult by the tendencies of such movements to be their own historiographers. Indeed, this phenomenon consequently has too often fostered an almost hagiographic approach to avant-garde activities, one which provided little more than a simple narrative. In reaction to this, recent years have seen the development of more critical approaches that have drawn on sociology, quantitative history, and related fields in the social sciences, disciplines now considered better guarantors of historic accuracy and scholarly soundness.
Yet both approaches risk leaving unexamined or unmediated certain aspects of avant-garde practice: the poetics and the politics of their practice, what we might call their strategy, if we consider strategy as the discipline in which a theoretical project meets its practical conditions of realization and is affected by them in return. Strategy for Debord was a question of dialectics, that is to say a matter of the relationship between form and content, means and ends, theory and practice. For the avant-garde historian, these dialectics translate into questions around the best methods and styles to adopt in order to mediate findings. This chapter constitutes an attempt to bring together a critical perspective on the traditional narrative of avant-garde history—a perspective that is rooted in so-called scientific approaches—with a stylistic concern—a concern that stems from a more formalist and poetic attention to the very medium of academic language.
1 See especially the series of riots that occurred in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in October and November 2005. See Alèssi Dell’Umbria, La Rage et la révolte (Marseille: Agone, 2010).
2 Claude Eveno and Pascale de Mezamat, eds., Paris perdu: quarante ans de bouleversements de la ville (Paris: Éditions Carré, 1991), 159, cited in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, and Clean Bodies, Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 151.
3 On the Nouveau Réalisme, see Déborah Lack’s essay in this volume, “Nouveau Réalisme in its ‘Longue Durée’: From the Nineteenth-Century Chiffonnier to the Remembrance of the Second World War.”
4 The reason underlying the replacement of Lettrist International by the Situationist International lies in Debord’s project to free its first avant-garde from its Lettrist origins and to integrate within a single avant-garde his own ideas and network with those of another group, namely the Imaginist Bauhaus that Danish painter Asger Jorn founded in reaction against the reenactment of the functionalist Bauhaus under the leadership of Max Bill in the 1950s.
5 On Lettrism, see Marin Sarvé-Tarr’s essay in this volume, “The Art of Community in Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (1951).”
6 On Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, see Sophie Cras’s essay in this volume: “Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern: Re-Excavating Postwar Paris.”
7 Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).
8 Guy Debord, “Lettre à Floriana Lebovici, 19 mars 1988,” in Guy Debord, Correspondance, Vol. 7, (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2008), 22.
9 In Art History see, Mirella Bandini, L’Estetico, il Politico. Da Cobra all’Internazionale Situazionista 1948–1957 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1977); Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde: eine Geschichte der Situationistischen Internationale und der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Nautilus Verlag, 1990); Evgenia Theodoropoulou, “L’‘Internationale Situationniste’: Un Projet d’ Art Total,” Doctoral dissertation, adv. P. Dagen (Paris: Université Paris 1, 2008) ; In Architecture History, Jean-Louis Violeau, Situations construites: “était situationniste celui qui s’employait à construire des situations dans la ville …” (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1998); Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Two major exhibitions dedicated to the Situationist International: Elisabeth Sussman, On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, exh. cat., Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, February 21 to April 9, 1989; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, June 23 to August 13, 1989; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, MA, October 20, 1989 to January 7, 1990. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Stefan Zweifel, ed., L’Internationale Situationniste: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni: 1957–1972, exh. cat., Centraal Museum, Utrecht, December 14, 2006 to March 11, 2007; Musée Tinguely, Basel, April 4 to August 5, 2007 (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2006).
10 Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (Oakland: University of California Press, 1999).
11 Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: la Révolution au service de la poésie (Paris: Fayard, 2001); Cécile Guilbert, Pour Guy Debord (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
12 In addition to these now well-established approaches, the recontextualization of the Situationist adventure within a dialogue with other groups has finally been recently undertaken, allowing for a better integration of the group activities within the cultural, artistic, and political history of these two decades. See Miquel Amorós, Los Situationistas y la Anarquía (Bilbao: Muturreko Burutazioak, 2008), Patrick Marcolini, Le Mouvement situationniste, une histoire intellectuelle (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2012). Frédéric Thomas and François Coadou have respectively researched the relationships between the SI and Marxist group Socialisme et Barbarie and Belgian Surrealist group Les Lèvres Nues; this research has been published in the proceedings of the “Lire Debord” 2013 symposium which took place in conjunction with the “Guy Debord. Un Art de la Guerre” exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, see Emmanuel Guy, and Laurence Le Bras, eds., Lire Debord (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2016). Another key aspect of the recent scholarship on Guy Debord and the Situationist International has been developed by English-speaking scholars. In art history, Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International, October, vol. 79 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), Tom McDonough, The Beautiful Language of My Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City (London, New York: Verso, 2009), and McKenzie Wark, Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); McKenzie Wark authored a series of three books which aim at taking into account the collective dimension of the Situationist International—see Wark, Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso Books, 2011), and McKenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situation Passages out of the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 2013). For a collective approach to the Situationist International and other avant-groups of the postwar period, see also Jacopo Galimberti, Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017).
13 Art historian Fabien Danesi explores this issue in Fabien Danesi, Le mythe brisé de l’Internationale situationniste: l’aventure d’une avant-garde au cœur de la culture de masse (1945–2008) (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2008).
14 I have extensively studied this aspect of the Situationist project in Emmanuel Guy, “‘Par tous les moyens, même artistiques’ Guy Debord stratège. Modélisation, pratique et rhétorique stratégiques,” Ph.D. dissertation, dir. Anne Larue and Fabrice Flahutez (Paris: Université Paris-Nord, 2015).
15 In English language, McDonough, The Situationists and the City ; Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space,” October vol. 67 (1994): 58–77; Sadler, The Situationist City; Libero Andreotti, “Play-Tactics of the ‘Internationale Situationniste’,” October vol. 91 (2000): 37–45; Anthony Vidler, “Terres Inconnues: Cartographies of a Landscape to Be Invented,” October vol. 115 (2006): 13–30.
16 The aforementioned wall and this porte cochère can be seen on Google Street View by searching for “3 rue de Seine, 75006 Paris.”
17 The Institut de France is a learning society gathering five acedémies, the most famous of which being the Académie Française. Established in 1635 by Cardinal de Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, the Académie Française is the official authority on French language. It consists of forty members, known as les Immortels (the Immortals), most of them being well-established writers. Their main mission is to publish and update an official dictionary of the French language. Unsurprisingly, the Académie Française has often been criticized for its rather conservative approach towards the evolution of French language and its mostly masculine and pro-establishment body of members.
18 Guy Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les Lèvres nues no. 9 (November 1956): 6–10. Translated in McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 78.
19 Ralph Rumney, Le Consul. Entretiens avec Gérard Berréby, ed. Gérard Berréby (Paris: Allia, 1999), 71.
20 Guy Debord, Panegyric. Volumes 1 & 2, trans. James Brook and John McHale (London, New York: Verso, 2004), 26.
21 “Ils voulaient tout réinventer chaque jour; se rendre maîtres et possesseurs de leur propre vie,” Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez coute unité de temps (1959), in Œuvres (Paris : Gallimard, 2006), 471.
22 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 387.
23 “Die Welt als Labyrinth,” Internationale Situationniste no. 4, (June 1960): 5.
24 A long list of those who had the dubious honor of being insulted in the pages of Internationale situationniste has been compiled in Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer, L’Internationale situationniste; chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés) (Paris: Champ libre, 1972).
25 Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944–1970, Histoire contemporaine 8 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012).
26 Guy Debord Archive, “Invitations + Presse sur l’IS (Générale) de 1957 jusqu’en 1964 environ, ” NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
27 See Guy Debord, “Letter to Ralph Rumney, January 16th, 1957,” in Correspondance, Vol. 0 (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 2010).
28 “Pour ne pas comprendre l’IS,” Internationale Situationniste no. 10 (March 1966): 68.
29 “L’Absence et ses habilleurs,” Internationale Situationniste no. 2 (December 1958): 7.
30 In Debord, Œuvres, 494.
31 Asger Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” in Vingt peintures modifiées par Asger Jorn, exh. cat (Paris: Galerie Rive Gauche, 1959).
32 Guy Debord, Letter to Ivan Chtcheglov, November 23, 1953, published in Le Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille, de beaux yeux pour faire sauter les ponts (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 142.
33 This committee brings together representatives of both employers and employees to regularly redefine the legislative framework of employment and working conditions in their respective sectors of activity. A key feature of the French labor system, the Conventions Collectives were founded in 1919, and mostly developed under the left-wing government of the Front Populaire in 1936, and in the decade following the Second World War, due to the influence of the Communist Party in French politics at the time.
34 Ibid.
35 The “Kabyles” are an ethnic group originally from southern Algeria. They constitute an important part of the Algerian diaspora in France. On the distinction between Kabyles and Arabs, and its importance for French colonial and postcolonial history, see Paul Silverstein, Algeria in France; Transpolitics, Race and Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) and Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonical Algeria (London: I.B.Tauris, 1995), and Patricia Lorcin, Kabyles, Arabes, Français: Identités Coloniales (Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2005).
36 Jean-Paul Clébert, Paris insolite (Paris: Denoël, 1952). A partial English translation appears in a book prefaced by Marcel Aymé, with a contribution by Antoine Blondin and photographs by Patrice Molinard. Jean-Paul Clébert, The Paris I Love (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1956).
37 See Louis Chevalier, L’Assassinat de Paris, Archives des sciences sociales (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977). Debord had this book in his library.
38 “Ce quartier était fait pour la dignité malheureuse de la petite bourgeoisie … ” in Debord, Œuvres, 470. The “petite bourgeoisie” refers to the upper middle class, a growing social group in the decade after the Second World War in France, both distinct from the middle class by its aspirations to tertiary and intellectual work, and distinct from the bourgeoisie per se, by its lack of actual cultural or financial capital.
39 “Pour eux déjà le devoir était devenu une habitude, et l’habitude un devoir,” in Debord, Œuvres, 478.
40 Clébert, Paris insolite.
41 Ed Van Der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank (Amsterdam, Hamburg, London: Bezige Bij, Rowohlt Verlag, André Deutsch, 1956).
42 Christophe Bourseiller, Vie et Mort de Guy Debord: 1931–1994 (Paris: Plon, 1999), 74.
43 “Les difficultés de la dérive sont celles de la liberté,” in Debord, “Théorie de la Dérive,” 6, translated in the excellent anthology of Situationist texts: McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 78.
44 Sadler, The Situationist City, 62.
45 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. David Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 119–128.
46 “On détruit la rue sauvage,” Potlatch no.7 (August 3, 1954). Republished in Guy Debord and Internationale lettriste, Guy Debord Présente Potlatch : 1954–1957 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 54–55.
47 Guy Debord, “Deux compte rendus de dérive,” Les Lèvres nues no. 9 (November 1956): 12.
48 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003).
49 “Critique de l’urbanisme,” Internationale situationniste no. 6 (August 1961): 9. Translated in McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 154.
50 Guy Debord, Notebook on Henri Lefebvre’s Research Group on Everyday Life, 1961. NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
51 Debord, The Society of the spectacle, 121.
52 Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006).
53 Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) was a Marshal of France and a foremost military engineer, especially well known for designing fortifications throughout the French kingdom. See Daniel Halévy, Cecil J. C. Street, Vauban, Builder of Fortresses (New York: Lincoln MacVeagh, 1925), and Paddy Griffith, Peter Dennis, eds., The Vauban fortifications of France (Oxford: Osprey, 2006).
54 Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was a French socialist and political activist, especially known for his theory of revolutionary strategy. See Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes (Grenoble: Cent Pages, [1866] 2003) and Samuel Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971).
55 See Laurence Le Bras, Emmanuel Guy, eds., Guy Debord. Un Art de la Guerre (Paris: BnF/Gallimard, 2013) and Guy, “‘Par tous les moyens, même artistiques,’ Guy Debord stratège. Modélisation, pratique et rhétorique stratégiques.”
56 Ibid., 121–122.
57 “Du rôle de l’écriture,” Potlatch no. 23 (October 13, 1955). Republished in Debord and Internationale lettriste, Guy Debord Présente Potlatch: 1954–1957, 203.
58 “Rédaction de nuit,” Potlatch no. 20 (May 30, 1955). Republished in ibid., 155.
59 These documents, along with others by Raoul Vaneigem, are currently held in a private collection.
60 Guy Debord Archive, “CV 87, Ordre du jour de la 7ème conférence de l’IS à Paris,” Choix de documents autour de l’Internationale lettriste et de l’Internationale situationniste, NAF 28603, Département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
61 “Nuit d’émeutes au Quartier Latin, entre minuit et 3h45,” Édition spéciale (May 11, 1968), France Inter, ORTF.
62 It should be noted here that the Situationists did not take part in the printing workshops of the Ateliers Populaires of the Beaux-Arts School of Paris. This can be considered as proof of their disinterest for and disconnection from the artistic circles in the late 1960s.
63 “Fragments de plans de Paris et plan d’action pour une campagne de collage d’affiches du CMDO, Mai 68,” Bibliothèque Paul Destribats, Paris.
