Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War
Introduction
In 1960, on July 14, when France celebrates its Republican values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel initiated and orchestrated what came to be known as Europe’s first happening, L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely (Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely), in Venice, Italy, a collaboratively planned event.1 For this work, actions were set amidst an audience that included artists, poets, and musicians, to make them aware of themselves as participants, rather than simply observers. In the Renaissance Palazzo Contarini-Corfù, Lebel presented a ritual, entailing the symbolic torture, execution, and mourning of La Chose (The Thing, c. 1960), an assemblage by Nouveau Réaliste sculptor Jean Tinguely, and its burial in the Grand Canal (Figure 10.1).
Lebel dedicated the happening to Nina Thoeren, a Venetian-American artist and student who had been sexually assaulted and murdered two days earlier by a door-to-door Bible salesman in Los Angeles, California.2 In Paris, an Algerian friend had been recently murdered. Lebel understood these events as related: resulting from a repressive religious-rational morality and the exploitative divisiveness of colonialism and market capitalism.
This chapter explores Funeral of the Thing as an experiment in art as action, designed to make multiple, often contradictory, references, and as a translational adaptation of the legacies of the historical avant-gardes of Dada and Surrealism, fused with faith in sexuality as a liberatory force, and a utopian vision of collective revolution. In form and substance, Funeral of the Thing displayed a Nietzschean rejection of bourgeois-Christian values and its morality, which censored sexuality and its expression in art, yet accepted torture as a “necessary evil.” Funeral of the Thing concluded Anti-Procès II, a group exhibition co-organized by Lebel with poet, critic, and writer Alain Jouffroy. Their manifesto called for artists to participate: “The Christian-rational civilization (look at the slaughterhouses which have resulted) [has produced] something that it uses to justify, defend, and glorify itself: morality, culture, religion.”3 The question was how artists, writers, and intellectuals could collectively resist without constraining their individuality. The solution would be a common front of dissent.
In initiating and orchestrating Funeral of the Thing, independently of developments abroad, Lebel presented the first iteration of the happening in Europe in a period overshadowed by France’s undeclared war in Algeria and brutal refusal of Algerian independence (1954–1962), especially revelations that its military had institutionalized torture to maintain the empire that defined national identity. For Simone de Beauvoir, writing in Le Monde (June 6, 1960), France’s army had gone amok, and its people were “indifferent to the tortures being meted out in [their] name.”4 The repercussions of this “war without a name,” and of a history that the French and the Algerians still refuse to fully acknowledge and confront, haunt the present.5 For historian Benjamin Stora this is a “war without end” because “on each side of the Mediterranean, it has not been sufficiently named, analyzed, or dealt with in and by collective memory.”6 Mechanisms for “forgetting,” he argues, have “profoundly structured contemporary French political culture,” an assertion supported by postcolonial theorists.7
I propose that Lebel’s first happening (and the analysis it invokes) was an expressive refusal of a larger “forgetting” enacted by a social system of different but related repressions and suppressions, cultural and political.8 Lebel’s art was neither univocal nor direct political protest: its structure was alogical and associational, designed to provoke others to creatively undermine the silencing of dissent. As provocateur, Lebel encouraged others to defy taboo to make art a mode of healing of psyche and society through experiments in transgression.9
L’Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely
Though Lebel initiated and orchestrated Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely, his collaborators determined their own actions: Beat poet Allen Ansen, art patron Peggy Guggenheim, composer Frank Amey, artist Nina Amey, Mexican actress Pilar Pellicer, writer and aesthete Sir Harold Acton, and Venetian art collectors Paolo Barozzi and Adriano Montin (pseudonym for Adriano Carrettin). Formal invitations announced funeral services for Tinguely’s sculptural assemblage the Thing in the grand hall of the Palazzo Contarini-Corfù. The event was inspired by Tinguely’s stipulation, on agreeing to exhibit in Anti-Procès II, that should the Thing not sell, it be “buried with all honors in the Grand Canal.”10
In the darkened hall, guests, or “congregants” as Lebel considered them, at a satanic ritual, heard him dedicate the event to Nina Thoeren: “We had [determined] the date and the content of this closing mortuary ceremony [when] we received the appalling news that gave it the importance of an omen [showing us] the risks, in this rotten world where eroticism and death are fatally associated.”11 As he concluded, blackclad mourners, faces veiled by lace mantillas—Guggenheim, Amey, and Pellicer—lit candles to reveal the Thing on an antique stretcher under an embroidered cloth (Figure 10.2). To those familiar with the anthropomorphic assemblage, welded from wheels and metal, that had been displayed outside the Galleria Il Canale during Anti-Procès II, it may have suggested a corpse, whose final rites precede its final disposition.
Actions—simultaneous and consecutive—ensued: an executioner in black raised a butcher knife and ritually violated and murdered the Thing. Shock at this attack on art was intensified by the news of Thoeren’s sexually motivated murder, eliciting horrified grief. (Thoeren was tied up and strangled with her stockings.) The mourners recited erotic prayers: texts by the Marquis de Sade. They moaned and cried, confusing pleasure and pain. In the cacophony attendees also distinguished sounds of leaves falling and of the city, gongs, and Amey’s electroacoustic dirge. Odors of decay, evoking nature as understood by Sade, intensified the visceral experience. Mimicking jazz call and response, through megaphones Lebel and Ansen read from blasphemous and banned novels: Lebel from Sade’s Histoire de Justine (History of Justine, 1801) and Ansen from J. K. Huysmans’ symbolist novel Là-bas (Down There, 1891), supplanting the scriptural and sacred with the literary and profane.
In the selection from Justine, an aging, debauched man proclaims how to prepare children to service male libertines:
Instead of morality and religion [the] pure and unadulterated principles of nature will be taught. Christianity will be banished—libertine rites and feasts celebrated—murder in debauch, incest, rape, sodomy will never be punished.12
Ansen’s passage from Huysmans described an act of gruesome sexual violence: the ritual disembowelment of a boy to pleasure a medieval satanist, a maréchal (general) of royal birth. Steeping “himself in [the] mess of filth and lukewarm entrails [the maréchal] looks over his shoulders [to] contemplate his victim’s final convulsions: ‘happier indulging in torture, tears, fear and blood, than in any other pleasure.’”13 Such passages set the tone.
When final rites concluded, pallbearers carried the Thing, an object of art and its symbol, to gondolas on the canal (Figure 10.3). In exiting, they passed a man ostensibly masturbating behind a curtain, a natural act judged mortal sin by the church. Ritually processing along the Grand Canal, gondolas and boats with congregants formed a cortège leading to the basin near the Basilica of San Marco and the Palace of the Doges (Figure 10.4).
With boats gathered in a circle, Lebel cast Tinguely’s Thing into the water; and participants tossed white flower petals in its wake. Reporters from Venetian newspapers, La Notte and Lo Speccio, wrote about the event: one praising Funeral of the Thing as a “beautiful and moving ceremony.”14
Dada, Surrealism, Sade
Just as the aesthetics, theories, and politics of Lebel’s forebears in Dada and Surrealism were shaped by their historical moments, so too did Funeral of the Thing respond to the exigencies of Lebel’s historical moment, shaped by his mentors and personal experience. During the Second World War, Lebel lived in New York City as a refugee with his parents, Nina and Robert Lebel. They joined a French community in exile that included his future mentors: André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, and Patrick and Isabelle Waldberg.15 At age seventeen, Lebel published an essay attacking the popular lyrical abstraction as art for the market, and Breton invited him to join the surrealist movement.16
Dada and Surrealism, movements (sketched largely) that envisioned freedom of the imagination and nonconformity, influenced Lebel and his art: especially Dada’s aesthetics of negation and travesty of conventions of content and skill.17 The notion of the artist, defined by Richard Shiff as “countercultural deviator of a tradition or as social deviant,”18 and a revolutionary who defies authority, was a critical model.19 Kurt Schwitters’ Merz collages and assemblages informed Lebel’s strategy of juxtaposing contradictory elements, as did his Dadaist emphasis on the alogical and associational. To his action-based art, Lebel also adapted the strategy of staging different actions simultaneously, of cacophony.20 Most importantly perhaps, he assumed as his own a Dada insubordination to familial, state, religious, and military authority, an example being his evading the draft to avoid deployment to Algeria.21
Surrealism’s faith in the revelatory power of dreams and the unconscious was crucial, as was the utopian vision of a liberated and liberatory imagination that furthers revolution.22 In Beat- and mescaline-inspired works such as his gestural painting Homage à Billie Holiday (1959), a hallucination of desire, Lebel exceeded the Surrealists’ compulsive obsession with “Woman” as muse and object, as he did in collage-paintings whose elements he appropriated from mass media and soft porn, making female nudity a trope for sexual liberation. The notion that experimental form and process, and multiplicity of reference obstruct the repressive control of the categorical owed something to another mentor, poet Benjamin Péret, for whom the “praxis of revolution and of poetry itself, and the impossibility of living otherwise,” was a maxim reflected in recognition that a politics of dissent is implicit to art unfettered by custom.23
Like the Surrealists, Lebel admired Sade’s writing for exemplifying freedom of the imagination and signifying the libido’s “affirmative nature [in the face of the] power of the censors and bourgeois defenders of state and family.”24 In Funeral of the Thing, when reading from Sade and Huysmans, the megaphones he and Ansen used not only magnified their voices but alluded to how police dispersed demonstrators, and Sade’s appropriation of the “pissing tube” from his prison cell in 1789 to more loudly agitate the crowd, gathering outside La Bastille. The storming of this monument of monarchic despotism two days later inaugurated a revolution to whose radical promise Lebel and his mentors adhered.
Anti-Procès
Funeral of the Thing concluded the second of three Anti-Procès exhibitions and event cycles that Lebel organized with Jouffroy. The title (anti-judgment or anti-trial) repudiated Surrealist authority, especially that of Breton, as well as other authorities: economic, juridical, and colonial. The poster and manifesto for the Anti-Procès I (Paris, April 1960) juxtaposed an image of a guillotine with Duchamp’s refutation of aesthetic judgment (or the optical). In participating, the manifesto pronounced, artists declared common dissent against the war in Algeria, censorship, art’s devolution to commodity, and torture, to “the morality that governments, churches, and right-thinkers [bien-pensants] inflict upon us … We affirm here our positive solidarity with individual or social movements of revolt.”25 Anti-Procès I took place at Pierre Prévert’s Cabaret des Quatres Saisons in Paris (April 29 to May 9, 1960), where to an exhibition of art by Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Erró, Henri Michaux, and Victor Brauner, Lebel and Jouffroy added works by some thirty others.26 The cycle of events included sessions of simultaneous poetry and jazz, “lecture-debates,” the cris-rhymes of sound poet François Dufrêne, and actions by German architect-artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser and sculptor and designer Philippe Hiquily.27 The format of a group exhibition with films, readings, performances, and lectures was modeled on Opere esposte alla Mostra Surrealista Internazionale at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan (April 27 to May 6, 1959).28 In eliciting audience involvement through a design by Duchamp, it anticipated Lebel’s happening.
The poster for Anti-Procès announced a play by Lebel, with a mise en scene by [Allan] Zion and D’Idée, with the participation of actors Erika Denzler, François Marié, and Roger Blin, a former understudy for Antonin Artaud, with music by Max Harstein’s jazz orchestra.29 Like Funeral of the Thing, the event began in darkness. Militantly, Blin demanded: “And your sister?” Another answered: “She pisses blue.” Blin responded: “Very well! When she pisses in the tricolor, you should cry: Long Live France!” This statement illogically equated the nationalistic patriotism spurring France’s efforts to forestall the dissolution of its empire with the “erotic” image of a woman urinating in the colors of the flag. Lights went on as jazz played. A woman, nude, passed through the space, and Hundertwasser prepared nettle soup. Lebel concluded with a “collage poem,” proclaiming his insubordination—leaving without permission—to the draft and Breton. The insubordination animating this event would stimulate his contrivance of a new art of direct action: the happening.
The Anti-procès Manifesto (Paris, April 29, 1960) repudiated separating art and politics, the speculative art market, and bourgeois-rational morality:
Of what does our insubordination consist?
In a refusal to disassociate the means of expression at our disposal.
In a refusal to subordinate the activity of the spirit to commerce and propaganda.
In a refusal to respect the idols and the rules of the intellectual game.
In a refusal to consider moral judgment as other than an anachronistic and sterile practice.
In a refusal to separate the liberty of the spirit from liberty itself.
Every creative act is, first and foremost, an anti-trial. Every creator is, until there is a new order, an insubordinate.30
The final line seems a decree that an avant-garde eschewal of aesthetic convention and cultural authority necessarily produces art with a socially radical potential, and that insubordination is a creative act, as is refusal of illegitimate judgment.
The manifesto denounced bourgeois-Christian morality as a coercive form of judgment that justifies the arbitrary in social and cultural realms, and aesthetes (critics) and merchants (gallerists) who embalm art “in the coffin of the banks, museums, and schools.”31 Art might be politically radical only when detached from political parties, even those of the left, whose nationalism rivaled that of the right: nothing “is more repugnant to us than France, its supposed genius and its ‘liberal traditions.’ We reject with all our strength the chauvinistic and slave-loving Flame, which hides behind the tricolor dishrag.”32 After comparing flag to discolored rag, the authors insisted: “We emphasize our total insubordination as artists to the exigencies of colonialism, fascism, and their prolongation in cultural life.”33
To have placed the phrase “continuations in cultural life,” after “exigencies of colonialism, fascism” seems a harsh accusation of Breton as being colonialist and fascist, forces he had contested since the 1920s.34 This drew counterattacks in letters published in the journal Arts from March 30 to April 14, 1960. Surrealists lambasted Lebel for bragging in “Sept Jours à l’heure de Paris” (Arts March 30, 1960), of talking on a radio panel about Duchamp, attending elite social events, lunching with Mexican poet-statesman Octavio Paz, and fraudulently posing as a spokesman for the movement, and judged him deceitful and exploitative.35
Breton’s dressing-down of Lebel was skillfully savage (and Surrealist):
With the mien of the bastard of a weasel and a traveling salesman, mental confusion heightened to the level of a raison d’être, unscrupulous, cosmopolitan striving for success misinterpreted as desire to abolish frontiers, the lack of culture hidden behind the veil of fog of wrong references, the unexpected quoting of private remarks, interspersed with smarmy flatteries to the most varied important people, all these have already exhausted the indulgence [we could show] Jean-Jacques Lebel … a character whose ambulatory fever and verbal incontinence only serve to commercialize a less and less defensible painting and poetry.36
Surrealists further censured Lebel for flitting from soirée to revolutionary meeting via the offices of Paris-Presse and France Observateur in order, they accused, to enhance the marketability of his art.37 These criticisms, though cruelly couched, do not seem totally off the mark: like Breton in the 1920s and 1930s, Lebel exploited the media of his time to promote his interests, political and personal.
On May 28, 1960, Surrealists published “Tir de barrage” (Barrage of Artillery Fire), illustrated with a drawing by Alfred Kubin of two monkeys, which charged Jouffroy with calculated opportunism and dismissed the younger Lebel as “impressionable,” suggesting that he was less than responsible.38 It charged Anti-procès with insulting artists and writers as “game players” and naively characterizing morality as sterile and anachronistic: “Is it necessary to bring back to one’s attention that it is moral judgment that permits us in the present hour to condemn Carryl Chessmann’s torturers, as it permitted us not long ago to condemn the Soviet massacres in Budapest.”39 Surrealists also objected to a reference to a trial in the Transvaal, when black South Africans refused to plead guilty or not guilty before a colonial tribunal they judged illegitimate, as an abuse of confidence, masquerading as anti-racist, because the reference did not contextualize, only appropriate: a cynical exploitation of anticolonial struggles.40
Breton was equally incensed at being called a juridical policeman of culture, and for the conjoining on the Anti-Procès poster of a guillotine with Duchamp’s statement, “One must abolish the idea of judgment,” a juxtaposition that oversimplified its meaning.41 The column in Arts that announced Lebel’s expulsion from Surrealism (illogically) called it proof of the movement’s vitality:
Surrealism not dead. André Breton, with the help of four of his friends lets us know that he excommunicates Jean-Jacques Lebel, guilty of having claimed to belong to a movement of which he is no longer a part. [We] agreed with this pronouncement which is proof of the vitality of Surrealism more and more concerned with adventure.42
Arts also published Lebel’s response—carefully delineating between the movement and its leadership, caustically dismissed as dried up old men:
I agree totally with the Surrealist bureaucrats, not be confused with the movement of the same name, we have nothing more in common. Their total lack of critical and creative spirit, their judgmental vanity isolates them from everything. [To] these dried fruit, I answer: small simplifications lead to big dictatorships.43
Like Breton, Lebel made valid points. Breton did compare to a dictator, a “pope” who excommunicated those who displeased him from the movement. That said, Lebel learned from his mentor how to attract attention to himself, his art, and his political causes.
Lebel claimed that anti-war activism and his decision to evade the draft prepared him for revolt: “I was a deserter from the French army, I had an almost suicidal need for action. They couldn’t stand that I was autonomous [They] did me a favor by kicking me out—that really liberated me.”44 On July 28, two weeks after Funeral of the Thing, Lebel audaciously boasted to France Observateur that his practice was revolutionary, aimed at destroying the morality of master and slave, and the cultural and psychological forces that sustain social exploitation.45 He again cited Duchamp: “If we wish that someday man will have the right and the power to dispose of himself, one must sooner or later ‘abolish the idea of judgment.’” This use of quotation typified Lebel’s collagist approach to art and writing: juxtaposing images and texts in collages, and intermixing quotes from different sources in texts—an appropriative strategy.
Lebel and Jouffroy scheduled Anti-Procès II—from June 18 to July 8—to coincide with the 30th Venice Biennale (June 18 to October 16, 1960) to oppose the nationalist and commercial orientation of this international exhibition.46 Their Anti-Procès manifesto announced that the Biennale demonstrated that artists and viewers [a reference to Duchamp] no longer created art, it was critics and buyers. They called on artists to exhibit in Anti-Procès II, to accelerate a rupture with official art: “The Venice Biennale has opened its doors: it satisfies no one, except the Laureates and their merchants.”47 By exhibiting in the anti-biennale, artists would demonstrate their eschewal of convention, and how they experimented with art to change life, “by all means which seem to us poetic.”48 Art’s function exceeded monetary transaction: “We believe in the absolute necessity for an art which makes of painting, of poetry, of music, a single ‘organic cry of man’ … [the] only revolutionary art is that which challenges the world in favor of true freedom.”49 The Anti-Procès exhibition was to be such a unified cry.
The exhibition, wrote Lebel and Jouffroy, disputed the values of the Biennale: organized by national pavilion and emphasizing individual artists’ signature styles and gestures. The internationalism and eclecticism of Anti-Procès superseded cultural and political frontiers.50 Deriding curatorial distinctions between genres and styles as anachronistic, they urged distrust of “all imperatives and aesthetic exclusives.”51 Art historian Laurence Bertrand Dorléac has called the anarchic organization of Anti-Procès—demonstrated by the avoidance of categorization by nationality, movement, style, media, or gender—unprecedented.52 A painting by Manina could hang next to one by Hundertwasser. For Lebel, an exhibition accompanied by readings, lectures, debates, and performances, subverted the Biennale’s reduction of art to commodity.53 As Lebel recalled, Anti-Procès linked artists without standardizing them:
Everyone was completely free to do whatever he or she wanted. They were just supposed to proclaim their opposition to the Algerian War together. [We] all said no together … [we] were not doing social realism or even politically committed art.54
Lebel made clear his wish to maintain art’s liberty from doctrinal aesthetic dictates, while providing a forum for collective dissent.
As counter to the Biennale, Anti-Procès was preceded in 1903 by Esposizione di alcuni artisti rifiutati alla Biennale veneziana [Exhibition of some artists who declined the Venice Biennale] in 1914, and a “protest exhibition” at the Galleria Geria Borovalia in 1920.55 In 1945, the writers, journalists, and artists of L’ARCO presented debates and theatrical pieces, demonstrating “a radical anti-fascist political commitment,” and painter Giorgio di Chirico mounted a counter-exhibition.56 As Nico Stringa wrote, Anti-Procès in 1960 “instituted a clear parallel between revolutionary action of the historical avant-garde and the necessity for an art that was neither painting nor poetry, but an organic human scream,” quoting in part from the Anti-Procès manifesto.57 The exhibition and action event linked the values and strategies of Lebel’s forebears to those of his contemporaries.
Colonialism and (De)colonialism
Lebel’s move to art as action in Funeral of the Thing must be considered in relation to the Algerian War of liberation and postwar anticolonial movements. An unpublished list of actions in the event, including a poem by Ansen, indicates its interplay of the poetic and the political:
IV. Execution with or without drum roll. Scream.
V. Angelic music con attegiamenti di preghiera [with an attitude of prayer].
VI. Poem read by Allan Ansen:
“Words and notes can be burned or forgotten
But as for stone, canvas, wood, metal,
To rid oneself of the intolerable created act
Means Congo spasms of violence
Hewings and rubbings and heavings,
Ere the wrought and tiresome thing
Plops into the massive night afternoon.”58
Ansen’s ambiguous likening of the Thing—wrought and tiresome thing—to the institution of art as object and commodity: the “intolerable created act,” followed by “Congo spasms of violence,” implied that to cast off this intolerable creation was akin to anticolonial revolution. The reference was topical: two weeks earlier, on June 30, Patrice Lumumba became the first democratically elected prime minister of the Republic of Congo, ending Belgian rule. Months of violence preceded his inauguration, and his polemical speech referred to these struggles, to the displeasure of the Belgians.59
Such audacious refusal to placate the erstwhile colonizing power proved a compelling model of insubordination, just as anticolonial struggles stimulated Lebel and his peers to take action, in part to heal their own cultures. Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Aimé Césaire (who dedicated Discours sur le colonialisme to Lebel) wrote how the Manichean divisions of colonialism perverted the culture and psyches of oppressors and oppressed.60 They rejected compromise, especially Césaire, a Surrealist poet, who, like Lebel, abjured any presumption that the convergence of art and politics would cause the imagination to lose its independence.61
French brutality in Algeria made such positions moot. For some the war for independence began on VE Day, May 8, 1945, when, while in France people danced in the streets to celebrate the “victory of democratic and universalist republican values,” Algerians protested the colonial presence.62 In Sétif, a town in Constantine, native Algerians who had fought for France were permitted to assemble and celebrate if they did not “articulate an overt political platform.”63 When a few among the thousands chanted for the release of anticolonialist Messali Hadj, after years of prison, and seeing a nationalist flag, police shot into the crowd. The ensuing retaliation by Algerian tribesmen ended in the death of one hundred settlers.64 Settlers and militias stationed in Guelma, authorized by General de Gaulle to “restore peace,” attacked Sétif and nearby villages: “A veritable war of reprisals, a massacre organized against the civil population, provoking the death of 10,000 to 15,000 in the weeks that followed.”65 This reveals, art historian Hannah Feldman argues, the problem of the periodization “post-war,” for as France celebrated “liberation from Fascism [its] forces were already being deployed [against, not for] a population [ostensibly] governed under France’s authority and flag,” accorded only partial rights of citizenship.66 As historian Roger Celestin writes, “Colonial ideology could allow only for a selective application of the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity that lay at the very roots of the French Republic; the result was a paradox: freedom at home and domination abroad.”67 A “virulent racism” made change “unthinkable” for most European settlers.68 That Lebel denounced these massacres is demonstrated by his painting the words Sétif, Guelma, and Constantine on the collaborative painting Grand Tableau antifasciste, collectif (1961), which he instigated for Anti-Procès 3.69
Earlier, on November 1, 1954, with Lebel near the age of conscription, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) set off coordinated attacks on settlers and sabotage, launching an anticolonial war.70 For Stora, this explosion of violence resulted from “the profound inequality of the colonial system that reigned in Algeria: on the one side a minority of a million settlers of European origin, and on the other the ‘indigenous’ or Muslim Arab majority of nine million.”71 “Politically, they were like false citizens of a Republic that proclaimed, however, the equality of all men.”72 Lacking arms and facing “complete annihilation” in what postcolonial feminist Ranjana Khanna judges a “war against civilians,” the only means to fight were “terrorism, ambushes, and harassing the enemy.”73 As Fanon had understood, the logic of colonialism itself called forth the “unifying violence of revolution” in order for the colonized to return themselves to history.74
The massacre of 123 settlers, near the town of Phillippeville in 1955, incited an “orgy of killing by army personnel, the police, and by civilian vigilante groups.”75 Estimates of the dead range from 1,000 to 12,000; the war intensified.76 In 1956 the socialistled parliament passed the “special powers” decree, permitting the military to use any means “necessary” to “keep Algeria French,” and licensing censorship of texts deemed dangerous to public order: those which inscribed “‘events’ within a logic of war.”77 This included La Question (1958), the prison journal of Henri Alleg, the French-Algerian editor of the newspaper Alger Républicain, which he wrote during the period when he was repeatedly tortured by army officers. Having read such publications, smuggled page by page to publishers in Paris, and experiencing the shock, horror, and nausea that descriptions contained therein provoke, Lebel responded with art as action.
In this context, Huysmans’ reading in Funeral of the Thing about sexual murder perpetrated to pleasure a general implicated the generals who oversaw the “pacification” of Algeria, who institutionalized torture78 and authorized summary executions and “disappearances,” and the internship of 2 million civilians in camps by 1959.79 From the Battle of Algiers of 1956–1957, the military systematically used such means to “unmask an unidentifiable adversary,” able to melt “into the population.”80 The threat of torture engendered greater terror than the Algerian adversary, who killed those suspected of aiding France.81 French career military officers, determined to restore France’s honor after the “humiliating” loss of Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu,82 led an inexperienced army of draftees and recalled reservists, whom they taught to treat the colonized as uncivilized and barbaric, meriting violent discipline.83 When reports reached France in 1957, the scandal, declared historian Robert Gildea, exposed “the cult of the French liberating and civilizing mission for the sham that it was and precipitated a painful reconsideration of French national identity [for] the French were using the same tactics as the Gestapo.”84
The excerpt by Huysmans that was read by Ansen in Funeral of the Thing brought in other generals. Huysmans based his general on an actual maréchal, Gilles de Rais (Barbe bleu), who led Joan of Arc’s guard in battles with the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Returned to his chateau, he killed some 140 peasant children in satanic sexual rituals, yet remained a devout Catholic. Fittingly, Lebel read from Sade, for whom Christian taboo called forth transgression. As Georges Bataille speculated about the case of Gilles de Rais, “Perhaps Christianity [has a] pressing demand for crime [for] the horror that [it] needs in order to forgive [and] bound to an archaic human nature [is] open to violence?”85 Gilles’ crimes fascinate, Bataille asserted, because they touch the extremes of human behavior.86 In a manner not unlike Sade, “Gilles de Rais wanted to be dazzling, to the point of ruinous expenditure”; his crimes were those of a “sacred monster unbound to the limits of ordinary life.”87 Gilles compares to the rapacious libertines in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodomy, delighted by the spectacle of sexual violence against children. It is possible that French officers who observed (or participated) in the violation and torture of Algerian children and women found such abuse arousing.88 It is just as likely that the soldiers were traumatized by witnessing and taking part in such acts.89
The choice to read about the satanic maréchal may also have alluded to General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Army, and Maréchal Pétain, leader of the Vichy régime, each of whom adopted the nationalist symbol of Saint Joan of Arc.90 For Lebel, Breton, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Paul Sartre, de Gaulle came to power illegitimately. In May 1958, Colonel Massu threatened to order his parachutists to drop into Paris and take over government buildings if de Gaulle were not made president.91 For a new constitution and a new republic (the Fifth), with greatly augmented presidential powers, de Gaulle agreed.92 After the war, he used this privilege to rapidly transform France into a society of mass production and consumerism, and a nuclear power, through administrative methods developed under colonialism.93
One can take the metaphor of the general further. In 1799, General Napoléon Bonaparte overthrew the First Republic, as the military in 1958 made de Gaulle president and overthrew the Fourth. In 1801, Napoléon imprisoned Sade for immorality and signed the concordat that revoked the separation of church and state. In 1966, under order of Maurice Papon, who de Gaulle had appointed Paris prefect of police in 1958, Lebel was arrested for “outrage to good morals” for a happening. Lebel saw the Gaullist régime as theocratic, whose repressive social policies were aligned to bourgeois and Catholic morality.
In such a situation, resistance through “treasonous” action presented, as existentialist Francis Jeanson stated, but one choice: “To be with them, against what my country was doing in a sense against itself.”94 He and others formed groups to assist the FLN: procuring identity papers, and smuggling arms, funds, publications, and deserters across borders. (Lebel joined this underground: Jeune Resistance and “anarchist groups,” but gives no details.95) The title Anti-Procès (anti-trial or anti-judgment) gains added meaning if understood in part as a reference to the eighteen activists from Jeanson’s “network” who were arrested in February 1960, awaiting trial in a military court to begin on September 1. When Lebel and Jouffroy presented the Anti-Procès I and II exhibitions, Surrealists and existentialists were collaborating on “Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria,” which they asked Blanchot to write.96 The declaration declared desertion and anti-war actions to be ethical and legal in the face of an illegal and immoral war.97 Citizens had the right to refuse to serve in the military and to assist the independence struggle: for the “cause of the Algerian people, which contributes in a decisive way to the downfall of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.”98 Having deserted and assisted the FLN, Lebel took more risk by garnering additional signatures for the declaration in Italy, after September 1, when it was published and banned, and he defied censorship by printing it in full in Front unique 2 (1960).99 He risked arrest for treason, had he been repatriated to France. (In 1955, Lebel went to Florence, Italy to study art, and evade the draft.)
In “Avis,” his introduction to Front unique 2 the journal of art, poetry, and politics, edited and produced by Lebel from 1959 to 1960, he called on Italian youth, artists, and intellectuals to act, and alluded to the anti-war underground. “Avis” condemned the parties of the left for inaction, de Gaulle for exploiting the crisis of 1958 to reestablish theocracy,100 and André Malraux’s cultural policies, as well as art’s commercialization, and pretentions of national grandeur for having “gangrened” France.101 Justice had lost its meaning in a country based on “the rights of man and of the citizen” fighting a colonial war: “We are ashamed.”102 At such a moment, as art fairs such as the Venice Biennale were escalating art’s devolution to commodity, Lebel declared art a mode of investigation and “intuitive way of knowing.”103 Experimental practices offered ways of knowing, alternative to the rationalism and suspect morality that legitimized the colonial state and brought art into market circulation.
The final essay in Front unique, 2 “Le Futur,” conveys how Lebel’s views anticipated those held more broadly in the 1960s. He denounced work, the family, patriotism, religion, and the media for imposing the moral servitude of slaves on the French, and called on revolutionaries to use art to demoralize and demystify.104 (In its juxtaposition of quotes from the likes of Bakunin, Nietzsche, Sartre, Breton, and Trotsky, the structure of the essay compares to a happening or a collage.) Lebel cited Breton and Trotsky’s manifesto of 1938 to condemn conventional morality as an ideological socializing force and, with a quote from Bakunin, called artists and writers to action: it was time to interconnect emancipation of spirit and world, and recognize the indissociability of “Love, Poetry, Liberty.”105
Concluding thoughts
By beginning to integrate viewers as participants, Funeral of the Thing began to rob them of the “objective” distance of critic or colonizer, using varied means to confuse and obstruct the ordering by logic, which instills a sense of control over emotion and political events. Such affective address aimed, I suggest, to undermine the psychic hold of socioreligious taboos and a technocratic rationalism that makes “judgment a function of specialized or ‘expert’ knowledge.”106 For Lebel, as he learned from Duchamp, the artist does not complete the artwork, it is the viewer, and it is also the viewer who brings the art into posterity. It is also in the viewer, as postcolonialist Achille Mbembe observes, that “stereotypes and inferiorizing practices” shape perceptions of “others” as “Other,” through fantasizing “irreducible alterity” to justify coercive exploitation.107 Lebel and his collaborators took up arms through art in 1960: making it a weapon to attack entrenched psychological structures and social norms that promote and accept the barbarity of colonialism and its relations.
Drawing on the avant-garde strategies of disruption and disorientation that he had been taught by Duchamp, Breton, and Péret, Lebel began to create situations for collective experimental action, framed as art: free spaces in which to invent new modes of perception and behavior. Though not yet fully a happening, Funeral of the Thing instigated a process that involved artists and audiences as collaborators to release the social (collective) psyche from what a contemporary, Michel Foucault, theorized as a power that “reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”108 Though the war in Algeria was only one factor that motivated Lebel to experiment with art as event, and begin the transition from Surrealist theater to happenings, imagine the impact of learning what the French, whose revolution initiated an enlightened social order, would do in the name of a “civilizing mission.”
To understand Lebel’s art, it seems essential to consider taboos affective forms of censorship, silencing debate that is integral to forging collectivities. To suppress free expression in art, such as Sade’s excessive but fictive forays into the violently coprophagic, impedes explorations of what might be but is not yet (or even should not be), stimulating creativity that propels change. As Stora observed about the paucity of images from the Algerian War, as compared to the many from the US war in Vietnam: “It is a matter here of the major mechanisms of concealing the reality of the war, put into place very early by censorship, self-censorship and fabricating images for propaganda.”109 To such silencing, Lebel made art collaborative, and breached taboo to engage the forbidden. As he put it in 1968:
To this mercantile, state-controlled conception of culture, we oppose a combative art, fully conscious of its prerogatives: an art that does not shrink from stating its position, from direct action, from transmutation. The happening interpolates actual experience directly into a mythical context … [It] is avant-garde art that liberates latent myths; it transfigures and changes our conception of life.110
It is indeed our conception of life that determines our perception and treatment of others, something that is increasingly clear.
Acknowledgements
I must first express my gratitude to Jean-Jacques Lebel for access to his archives and interviews.
There are many people to thank for their help during the long process of bringing this chapter to fruition: the editor of this volume, Catherine Dossin and the anonymous readers; those who read drafts, especially Jacob Haubenreich and Hélène Fredrickson, and members of two writing groups Natasha Zaretsky, Joseph Shapiro, and Sarah Schroth, Marianne Wardle, and Margaret Wu. This study would not have been possible without the guidance and mentorship of my dissertation advisor at Duke University, Kristine Stiles, and the guidance of Michael Hardt, Fredric Jameson, Patricia Leighten, and Richard J. Powell, as well as Hannah Higgins, at the University of Illinois Chicago, who introduced me to Fluxus and happenings and changed my life. Research at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Palais de la Porte Dorée—Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, and the Archives nationale d’outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence was made possible by support from the Graduate School at Duke, start-up funds from Southern Illinois University, travel support from the School of Art and Design and the Art History Fund, and the Research, Scholarly, Creative Activity Joint Award for a Woman Assistant Professor, from the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the University Women’s Professional Advancement. Finally, I thank my son Carl for inspiring me to persevere. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. Jean-Jacques Lebel’s Archives are referred to as JJLA.
1 Allan Kaprow, based on Lebel’s description, would identify it as a happening and include it in Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1966. It might be better understood as transitional: leading from Surrealist theater into a new medium, the happening.
2 Nina Thoeren’s (divorced) parents were Surrealist artist Manina (Tischler) and screenwriter Robert Thoeren, who settled in the United States after fleeing Germany in 1933. Manina later married Surrealist poet, novelist, and critic Alain Jouffroy and lived in Venice. See Alain Jouffroy, “La Révolution est femme,” XXe Siècle 36, no. 42 (1974). Thoeren’s screenplays included Singapore (1947), starring Ava Gardner, and the co-written Some Like It Hot (1959), directed by Billy Wilder.
3 Lebel and Jouffroy co-organized three Anti-Procès group exhibitions/event cycles from 1960 to 1961. Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Venice Anti-Procès Manifesto, June 18, 1960,” in Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale, ed. Jean-Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël (Paris: Hazan, 2009), 266–267.
4 Quoted in Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women & Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 83.
5 The total of European and non-European casualties remains contested, varying according to source, Khanna notes: from 500,000 to 1,500,000 Algerians, and 50,000 to 150,000 French. Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 10. According to Benjamin Stora, official French histories minimize the number of Algerians killed and tortured, while Algerian histories exaggerate them. His estimates of the Algerian civilian dead reach into the hundreds of thousands. Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1998.) Nicholas Atkins numbers French troop casualties as 17,456, with 64,985 wounded and 1,000 missing in action. His count for Algerians is lower, though upwards of 10,000, with 500 disappeared. Nicholas Atkins, The Fifth French Republic (Basingstoke, UK: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 50–51.
6 Benjamin Stora, “Préface à l’édition de 1998: les saignements de la mémoire,” in La Gangrène et l’ oubli (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), I.
7 Stora, “Préface,” I. For postcolonial perspectives, see essays in Public Culture 23 (2011).
8 For analyses of the negative social effects of the repression of sexuality, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946).
9 For an exploration of transgression as socially necessary, see Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966).
10 Lebel, conversation with the author, June 13, 2015.
11 Emphasis mine. Lebel and Androula Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” in Happenings de Jean-Jacques Lebel ou l’insoumission radicale (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2009): 38
12 Lebel omitted “etc., will be reprehensible only if committed by a member of the slave castes,” but added “will never be punished.” See Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 38.
13 Quoted in Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 39–40. Translation from J. K. Huysmans, Là-bas: A Journey into the Self, trans. Brendan King (Gardena, CA: Sawtry, 2001), 165.
14 Anonymous “Strano funerale in Canal Grande, Hanno sepolto una ‘cosa,’” La Notte (July 17, 1960), reprinted in Jean-Jacques Lebel (Milano: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1999), 135–136; and Anonymous “‘La Chose’ nella laguna,” Lo Speccio (July 1960), 36.
15 An art expert and appraiser, Robert Lebel wrote about such artists as Leonardo da Vinci, and co-organized and contributed to Surrealist publications. Working with Duchamp, he authored the first monograph on the artist. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard Hamilton (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
16 Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Manifeste d’un adolescent optimiste,” in Premier bilan de l’art actuel, 1937–1953, ed. Robert Lebel (Paris: Le Soleil noir; Positions, 1953), 274.
17 Richard Shiff, “Originality,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 145.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 151.
20 For Dada texts, see Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989). For histories by Surrealists, see Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans . Richard Howard (New York: Macmillan, 1965); José Pierre, Surrealism (London: Heron, 1970); and Louis Janover, Le Surréalisme de jadis à naguère (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 2002).
21 Though this essay lacks space to engage anarchism, its politics of direct action was a key influence.
22 For an analysis of Surrealism in terms of “political agency and possibility,” see Simon Baker and Peter Lang, Surrealism, History and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and for its politics, Helena Lewis, “Surrealists, Stalinists, and Trotskyists: Theories of Art and Revolution in France between the Wars,” Art Journal 5, Political Journals and Art, 1919–40 (Spring 1993): 61–68; and Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005).
23 Lebel, “Le Jeu du cadavre exquis et la révolution surréaliste,” lecture, Centre Georges Pompidou, June 1, 2002.
24 Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 152.
25 Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès? Milan October 1960,” reprinted in Jean-Jacques Lebel, “Archives des happenings: L’Enterrement de la Chose,” in Happenings (Vanves: Hazan, 2009), 264. Original publication: Front Unique, 2 (1960) ed. Arturo Schwarz (Jean-Jacques Lebel) (Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1960): 38.
26 Invitation card and poster, in JJLA. In a prior simultaneous poetry and jazz concert at La Galerie (Paris, February 1960) Gregory Corso, Robert Cordier, Jouffroy, and Lebel read their own writings, and poems by Péret, Michaux, Artaud, Desnos, and Césaire, accompanied by Max Harstein on contrebass. Radio de la France d’outre-mer transmitted the event to the colonies to support anticolonial struggles. Exhibiting artists included Manina, Phillipe Hiquily, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Jacques Prévert, Guy Harloff, and Lebel. François Dufrêne performed poésie sonore and Surrealists Jackie Farley, Max-Pol Fouchet, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Anne Leanor, and Octavio Paz read from their works.
27 Lebel, “Archives des happenings: L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 264.
28 For analyses of Surrealist exhibitions, see Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, and Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
29 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’ Anti-Procès,” 36. Zion later worked with Lebel in 1967 on the first staging of Picasso’s play Desir attrapé par le queue (1944). Blin began his career as Antonin Artaud’s understudy and assistant. He starred in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, and directed Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), and Jean Genet’s Les Nègres (1959).
30 Signatories included Bona, Roland Bouvier, Jean Duvignaud, Bernard Dufour, Dufrêne, Jacques Gambier de la Forterie, Max-Pol Fouchet, Hiquily, Jouffroy, Lebel, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Manina, André-Poujet, and René de Solier. See Lebel and Jouffroy, “Anti-Procès 29 April 1960,” in Happenings, 286.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Lebel, in Patrick Schindler, “Le Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif,” Monde Libertaire, January 4, 2001: 4–5.
34 See notes to “[Mise au Point],” in Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives. Compléments au tome 2 (1940–1969), ed. José Pierre (Paris: Champs des activités surréalistes, 1983), 385.
35 [Mise au point] Letter to André Parinaud, Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922–1939, 195.
36 Ibid.
37 Pierre, [Mise au point] “Mise en garde,” 196.
38 Alyce Mahon, “Outrage aux bonnes mœurs : Jean-Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,” in Jean-Jacques Lebel : Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen (Vienna : Museum Moderner Kuntst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1998), 99.
39 “Tir de barrage,” in Pierre, Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922–1939, 198. Chessman, whose confession was forced through torture, was executed for a non-lethal crime in 1960, after writing a series of books that brought California’s death penalty laws into question and aroused international outrage.
40 Ibid., 199.
41 Mahon, “Outrages au bonne mœurs,” 100.
42 “Les Surréalistes s’écrivent,” Arts (May 26, 1960). JJLA
43 Ibid.
44 Mahon, “Lebel and the Marquis de Sade,” 97.
45 Lebel, “Letter to the Editor,” France Observateur, July 28, 1960.
46 Participants ranged from Brauner to Hundertwasser, Lam, and Lebel, to Enrico Baj, Miriam Bat-Josef, Roberto Crippa, Meret Oppenheim, and Tinguely. Anti-Procès III followed at the Arturo Schwarz Gallery and Galleria Brera in Milan, in June 1961 (June 5 to 30). On June 14 police seized several works for “blasphemy” and “obscenity.” Schwarz was the primary dealer of Dada and Surrealist art in Italy, and a publisher, of, for instance, the first catalog raisonné of art by Duchamp and reproductions of his readymades.
47 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès” and “Statement.” Also, “Jean-Jacques Lebel and Alain Jouffroy, “Statement.” Front unique, 2 (1960), 38, JJLA.
48 Ibid.
49 Lebel and Jouffroy, “Qu’est-ce que l’Anti-Procès,” 38.
50 Lebel and Michaël, “L’Enterrement de la Chose,” 36.
51 Poster for Anti-Procès, JJLA.
52 She defines Anti-Procès II as a counter-exhibition because it was not organized by nationality, movement, or medium, and included [some] art by women and artists of non-European origin, thereby challenging the Biennale that was legitimizing art for the market. Her claim of the originality of the form of Anti-Procès seems exaggerated. The Surrealist EROS exhibition (1959) included works by seventy-five artists with differing styles, nationalities, and genders. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Un Tableau,” in Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif, ed. Laurent Chollet (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 45.
53 Lebel, “Letter to the Editor.”
54 Schindler, “Le Grand Tableau antifasciste collectif,” 5.
55 See Nico Stringa, “Venezia ‘900: Il secolo delle mostre’” [20th Century Venice expositions], Laboratoire Italien: Politique et Société 15 (2014): 167–178. [Reprinted online: http:/laboratoireitalien.revuew.org. Accessed: December 3, 2015].
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Lebel, unpublished notes, JJLA.
59 Lumumba spoke about the anticolonial struggles of the Congolese and their suffering. The Guardian (Friday July 1, 1960), http://www.theguardian.com/. Accessed July 14, 2015.
60 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote prefaces for Alfred Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé (1957) and Franz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (1961). On anticolonialism and existentialism, see Winifred Woodhull, “Mohammed Dib and the French Question,” Yale French Studies, no. 98 (2000): 67.
61 For histories, see Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Making of the Modern World) (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Eric Savares, Algérie, la guerre des mémoires (Paris: Non Lieu, 2007); Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Alistair Horne, Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006); and Benjamin Stora, Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1994).
62 Roger Celestin, “(De)colonization,” in France from 1851 to the Present, ed. Roger Celestin and Eliane DalMolin (Basingstoke, UK: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 261.
63 Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962. Objects/Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 4.
64 Celestin, “(De)colonization,” 261.
65 Algerians claim 45,000 victims. Benjamin Stora, “(Special Algérie): La Guerre d’Algérie expliquée à tous,” 3. http://www.grands-reporters.com. Accessed: June 4, 2015.
66 Feldman, From a Nation Torn, 4. She argues that 1954 did not mark the end of the war in Vietnam, but consolidated a “pattern of intervention,” often repeated to maintain France’s empire.
67 Celestin, “(De)colonization,” 261, 262. The inferior status of Algerians dispossessed of lands and rights was codified in 1881 with the passage of the Code de l’Indigénat (Native Code), whose laws made “them colonial ‘subjects’ with no formal representation. while those of European descent were full-fledged ‘citizens,’ with representatives in Paris.”
68 Ibid., 262.
69 Dorléac discusses this work in “Un Tableau.”
70 Celestin, France, 264.
71 Stora, “Guerre d’Algérie,” 3.
72 Ibid.
73 Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 84.
74 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
75 Celestin, France, 264.
76 The French gave the lower estimate, the FLN the higher. Ibid, 264.
77 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 26.
78 General Jacques Massu had “free ren” to fight FLN urban guerrillas in Algiers, using “methods similar to those he was fighting against and against what he had fought in the war against Nazi Germany: intimidation, terror, torture, including the use of electroshock and rape.” Celestin, France, 265. Celestin quotes historian Tyler Stovall: “The prospect of a Socialist government permitting a military reign of terror on what was technically French soil showed how little relevance Resistance notions of liberty had in France’s colonies. Clearly the selective application of republican principles did not apply in Algeria.”
79 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 34. French officials at the highest levels were fully aware of these developments.
80 Ibid., 30.
81 Ibid.
82 John E. Talbott, The War without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: Knopf: 1980), 86–87.
83 Phillip Chiviges Naylor, France and Algeria: A History of Decolonization and Transformation (Gainesville, FL.: University Press of Florida, 2000), 18.
84 Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24.
85 Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais: Documents Presented by Georges Bataille, trans . Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1991), 16.
86 Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, 13.
87 Ibid., 14, 18.
88 For analyses of rape as a weapon of war, see Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, ed., Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide (New York: Paragon House, 2012).
89 A woman in Aix-en-Provence told me how since returning from Algeria, her brother has screamed each night as he sleeps.
90 Marine le Pen, leader of the extreme right-wing National Front has adopted the Saint, now symbolic of her party’s xenophobic anti-immigrant social policies.
91 Atkins, Fifth French Republic, 34, 37.
92 Ibid., 35–36.
93 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
94 Original emphasis. Francis Jeanson, “Francis Jeanson,” in Les Porteurs d’éspoir: les réseaux de soutien au FLN pendant la guerre d’Algérie: les acteurs parlent, ed. Jacques Charby (Paris: Découverte, 2004), 34. See also Jeanson and Colette Tzanck (Jeanson), L’Algérie hors la loi (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955).
95 Ibid., 204. He states that to do so might jeopardize others. There seems little reason to doubt, given his public dissent to the war. Lebel, interview with the author, June 13, 2015.
96 Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, ed. Alison Anderson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 593–594. It is also called “The Manifesto of the 121” for the original number of signatories. They included Breton, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Leiris, Alain Resnais, and Simone Signoret.
97 Maurice Blanchot, “Dossier 7.3: ‘Manifesto of the 121’ against the Algerian War” (September 6, 1960),” in Celestin and DalMolin, France from 1851 to the Present, 270–271.
98 Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings (French Voices), trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 15–17.
99 Situationist International members Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein signed the Declaration. Like Lebel and other militants, they rejected the organized left. The SI platform of 1956 called for “a new sensibility and a new culture, a struggle which is itself part of the general revolutionary resurgence.” They differed from Lebel in acting outside the realm of art, while Lebel remained allied to the art world, though disputing its values. See Situationist International, Situationist Chronology (Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech, 2005 [cited November 4, 2005]); The Lettrist International, “The Alba Platform,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 15; and (Guy Debord), “Editorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of Presence,” October, no. 79 (1997): 136.
100 Front unique, 2 (1960), 1–2. De Gaulle named Malraux Minister of Culture in 1958. For contemporary texts that reveal the prescience of Lebel’s critique of Malraux, who fabricated a mythology of himself with little basis in reality, see Stefan Collier, “Grand Illusion,” The Nation (February 28, 2005); and Olivier Todd, Malraux: A Life, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, 2005).
101 Lebel, “Avis,” Front Unique 2 (1960): 4.
102 Ibid.
103 Lebel and Edouard Jaguer, “Albatros et pigeons,” Direzioni, rassegna d’arte e di poesia d’avanguardia (1959): n.p., in JJLA.
104 Lebel, “Devenir,” Front unique 2, 34.
105 Ibid., 34.
106 I adapt this formulation from Dana Villa, “Oakeshott and the Cold War Critique of Political Rationalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott, ed. Ephraim Podoksik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 321.
107 Achille Mbembe, “Provincializing France?” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 94.
108 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon. 1980), 30.
109 Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli, 37.
110 Lebel, “On the Necessity of Violation,” The Drama Review: TDR 13 (1968): 92–93, 101.