22 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in Atelier Populaire, May 20-26 1968, Poster, Workers
“(French & Immigrant) Workers All United – Equal Pay for Equal Work”
(22 May 1968 – Atelier Populaire)
Brown screenprint on newspaper (ENSBA stamp)
71 x 85cm
Documented in:
Mesa p32; Dobson #154; UUU p29; Peters #62; Beaubourg #128; Camard #94b; Wlassikoff p62, Beauty #66; Gasquet p161; Murs #106; Chartres #7
Online References:
BNF
ENSBA #10813
21 Monday May 2018
Posted in Action, Cartoon, Enragés, May 6-12 1968, PCF, Siné, Waldeck Rochet
Study for cartoon – Siné
Pen on tracing paper
9.5 x 13.3cm
In it’s final form this cartoon was published in issue 3 of the journal Action – on 21 May 1968, as below:
The text translates as: ”Take the photos of those two Enragés away from me!”.
The speaker is Waldeck Rochet – the General Secretary of the French Communist Party. “Enragé” was used a designation for ultra-leftists during May 1968, in reference to a radical leftist group from the French Revolution.
20 Sunday May 2018
Posted in CMDO, Internationale Situationniste, Tract
This is the first of many detourned (altered) comic strips issued as tracts by the CMDO (a group mostly made up of members of the Situationist International and the Nanterre Énrages).
Comic Strip #1
1. All power to the Workers’ Councils! The Unions are only a tool for integration into capitalist society.
(Signature) The Striking Workers.
2. – Something has changed, Mr. President!
– Yes. The workers want to run their own affairs!
3. – The best thing we can do is to bugger off!
Comic Strip #2
1. (Caption) The “leftist” minister picks up the phone.
– Whore! Hijacker!
2. – I’ve been EXPOSED! The scheme won’t work any more!
3. (Caption) Meanwhile…
– I should never have married a minister! I’m off to a factory that’s on strike!
19 Saturday May 2018
Posted in Cartoon, de Gaulle, May 20-26 1968, Tract
“The Pain in the Arse General Reads”
“No matter how lofty is one’s place, he always sits on his bottom” – Montaigne
Cartoon in pencil – signed YB
21 x 32.5cm
I received this original cartoon in a selection of tracts which also included a few photocopies of it, implying that it was used as a tract at the time.
The cartoon refers to de Gaulle’s infamous speech of 19 May where he used the phrase “La réforme oui, la chienlit non!”. Taken on face value the phrase means “Reform yes, chaos no!”. But de Gaulle also intended a scatological pun here, where “chienlit” is “chie-en-lit” – shit-in-the-bed.
The phrase in important enough to have its own article on wikipedia which explains the allusions.
This cartoon piles the puns on to breaking point. The title takes “chienlit” as “chiant lit”. So here the General reads (“lit”) – with “chiant” describing him as boring, annoying or most likely “a pain in the arse”.
The drawing leaves little to the imagination – showing the general “chie” (shitting) while “lit” (reading) the “Gazette de la Chienlit”.
Finally the quote from Montaigne underscores the meaning once more.
18 Friday May 2018
Posted in Booklet, Dali, May 13-19 1968, Surrealist, Tract
(Click on image to view PDF of full document)
MY CULTURAL REVOLUTION
by Salvador DALI
MY CULTURAL REVOLUTION
I, Salvador Dalí, an apostolic Roman Catholic, apolitical to the highest degree and spiritually monarchist, I note with modesty and jubilation that all the enthusiasms of today’s creative youth are united around a single virtue: opposition to the bourgeois culture.
The most beautiful and the most profound cultural revolutions were made without barricades, with the insurrectional violence animating solely the spirit, the master of space and time. It is by an excavating process, quite the opposite of barricades, that we can give to the past a means of getting round into the future. It was a rediscovery of fragments of “antique” sculpture that brought about, in the 16th century, the cultural revolution rightly called the Renaissance. All real cultural revolutions must be in contact with the evolution of a new style. The Louis 14th style, which was the apotheosis of the Renaissance, was ruined by the revolution, which was to give a vilifying power to the bourgeoisie. The spherical architectures of Ledoux, intended for the workers in a lyrical vision of the city, came to be abandoned by the skeptical, rational and functional bourgeoisie.
I bring to the new revolution what is mine: that is, my paranoid method of criticism, uniquely adapted, it seems to me, to the felicitously irrational nature of the events unfolding. In the light of this method, I offer the following suggestions:
COLOUR
The colour of modern cultural revolutions is no longer red, but an amethyst colour, evoking the air, the sky, fluidity. This is the colour that corresponds to a change in era. The age of Aquarius, which will determine the next millennium, will see the disappearance of bloodshed. For the time being, we have just assassinated The Fish [“God is dead!”], and the blue sea is tinted by his blood, giving the waves this amethyst colour.
STRUCTURE
Bourgeois culture can only be replaced vertically. Culture will be disembourgeoised only by deproletarising society and turning the functions of the mind upward, by redirecting them toward their transcendent and legitimate divine origin. An aristocracy of the mind must emerge . . .
Practically, it is a matter of quantifying the monuments of bourgeois culture. Not destroying them but, by filling them up with new information, modifying their intention. For example, add to the feet of the Auguste Comte statue a shrine to his St. Clothilde, patron saint of humanity according to positivist folly. This shrine would be an amethyst cradle filled with helium, in which would float, by
rote, the most beautiful naked girls in a state of hibernation for the morose delight of voyeur students, providing a respite from their severely and scientifically controlled hallucinogenic experiences.
For the same price l propose to drape public monuments in certain towns with panoplies created by artists who, like Paco Rabane, are capable of celebrating the coming of the Aquarian millennium.
QUANTIFIED INSTITUTIONS
Add a quantum of libido to anti-pleasure organisations such as UNESCO. Make UNESCO a ministry of public Cretinization, so that we will not lose what has already been done. Blend in some laudable folkloric prostitution, but add to it a strong dose of libidinal and spiritual energy. Thus transform this centre of superboredom into a genuine erogenous zone under the auspices of Saint Louis, chief legislator of venal love.
JUSTICE
Activation of cybernetic-research commissions for the resurrection and glorification of great thoughts that have fallen victim to materialism. Examples: the combinative wheels of Raymond Lulle, the natural theology of Raymond de Sebonde, the treatise of Paracelsus, Guadí’s architecture of Mediterranean Gothic inspiration, Francesco Pyiols’ hyperaxiology, Raymond Roussels’ anti-Jules Verne poetics, the theoreticians of traditional mystical thought, all those who are genuinely inspired. Do not desecrate their unworthy tombs. Dig them up and bury them anew, but in the most sumptuous of futuristic mausoleums, imagined by Nicolas Ledoux.
NOTE
Where the cultural revolution takes place, the fantastic should sprout up.
Paris, Saturday, May 18, 1968.
17 Thursday May 2018
Posted in May 13-19 1968, Mouvement du 22 Mars, Students, Tract
LET’S CONTINUE THE BATTLE IN THE STREET
After Pompidou’s speech, it is clear that our aims and those of the bourgeois state are not the same:
– The police repression of recent demonstrations shows that the state cannot tolerate direct confrontation with the authorities in the streets.
– Appeals for co-operation and to the good sense of the mandarins and various bureaucratic apparatuses, plus the reopening of the Sorbonne, show that the state wants to smother and direct the stream of discontent which has been sparked off by the use of repression by tolerating only the traditional forms of opposition: parliamentarianism, discussion round the fireside of the same type as the Grégoire and Tourée commissions, etc. This form of opposition has already shown its sterility.
– Students, school pupils, the young unemployed, lecturers and workers were not fighting side by side in the barricades last Friday night to save the university for the sake of bourgeois interests: there is a whole generation of future managerial staffs who refuse to be the planners of bourgeois needs or the agents of exploitation and continued repression of the workers.
– The state has presumed to represent the general interest and to play the role of arbiter between the classes: the law (400 arrests) and order (more than 1,000 wounded) apparatus has shown clearly that it represents the interests of only one class and defends only bourgeois order.
– Those in power are biding their time today, they tremble for their future. The spontaneous new forms of confrontation which occurred on Friday are. intolerable to the bourgeoisie: the barricades in the Latin Quarter are not simply an expression of students defending their interests as students, their real point is to encourage others to enter into direct confrontation with the state and its police force. This is why young workers were fighting side by side with students, school pupils and lecturers on the barricades: the battle against the police apparatus is the struggle of every worker.
FROM NOW ON
IT IS IN THE STREET
IN THE FACTORIES
THAT THE STRUGGLE AGAINST BOURGEOIS OPPRESSION AND REPRESSION CONTINUES!
16 Wednesday May 2018
Posted in Agence France Presse, Jacques Sauvageot, May 13-19 1968, Photograph, Students, UNEF
POLITICAL STATEMENT BY MR. SAUVAGEOT
During a press conference Mr. Jacques Sauvageot, deputy President of the UNEF, made a political statement, that can be summarised under four points:
1. Institution of “student power” with a right of veto.
2. The autonomy of universities and faculties.
3. The expansion of the current protest movement to the news, the press, and to cultural and artistic activities.
4. A united movement with factory and agricultural workers.
Photographic print
(17 May 1968 – AFP)
17.7 x 13.5cm
15 Tuesday May 2018
(Click on image to view PDF of full document)
From rear cover of journal:
This is a reprint of a cartoon magazine put out by the Paris students belonging to the Committee of Action – which organised the resistance activities against the authorities.
It is a non-profit edition, published in solidarity with the revolutionary students of France by the revolutionary students of Berkeley, California.
Translated (freely and roughly, in the spirit of the original) by Ruth Porter.
15 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in CMDO, Internationale Situationniste, Poster
“Down with the Spectacular-Market Society”
(May 1968 – CMDO)
Black & white offset
36.5 x 49.5 cm
Documented In:
Gasquet p.15; Mesa p.72
Online Resources:
14 Monday May 2018
Posted in Comites d'Action, May 13-19 1968, Students, Tract
EVERYONE TO THE FACULTIES
Action won’t cease after a demonstration, even if it brings together more than a million people. We are all agreed that the crumbs thrown by the Gaullist regime can’t resolve the crisis in the University.
After the use of deadly gas, incendiary bombs and attack grenades by the CRS (estimated to have injured a thousand) it’s necessary to add to the three demands of the UNEF:
– THE DEMAND FOR THE RESIGNATIONS OF GRIMAUD AND FOUCHET, already common to the UNEF, SNESup and MVT 22 March.
Until this condition is met, the CAL calls for the continuation of the multifaceted strike (in particular the formation of Study Groups to examine the demands of high-school students)
– THE RIGHT TO STRIKE ARISING FROM THE RIGHT OF UNION AND POLITICAL ACTION
Starting last night the students have reached a new stage in their struggle by occupying the Faculties and setting up Action Committees that gather together: high-school and university students with workers.
The CAL commits us to go en masse to the Faculties to discuss demands together with the blue-collar and white-collar workers.
COME IN GREAT NUMBERS!
