Starting tomorrow, and continuing through the months of May and June, I will be attempting to add a new post every day.

As you may know the May 68 événements actually began on the night of Friday 3 May, 1968. Unsurprisingly there was  no documentation (posters or tracts) from before that day. So over the next 3 days, in a prelude of sorts,  I will be featuring posters from the other side of the conflict, produced by the pro-Gaullist Comites pour la Defense de la Republique.

From 4 May onwards, my plan is to post a tract (and the occasional poster) from the corresponding day – 48 years ago. In this way hopefully you can get some sense of the events as they unfolded. 

If all goes according to plan, by the end of  June there will 3 times as much content on the blog than at present. As I said in my last post my hope is that by the 50th Anniversary in a few years time my entire collection of posters and tracts will documented and translated into English on this blog.

It’s been almost a year since the last flurry of posts on this blog. It’s definitely well past time to make up for the lack of activity. 

Well – with the 48th Anniversary of May 68 coming up next week I’ve decided that I will attempt to post an item a day for May & June. So for the next 2 months expect to see many tracts, posters and other material appearing on a (hopefully) daily basis.

I’ve also set myself the goal of having my entire collection documented in this blog by the time of the 50th Anniversary of the événements. So hopefully the next year will see a new lease of life for this project.

I’m very chuffed to be able to work with Alliance Française in Brisbane to put together an exhibition of posters from Mai 68. It will feature about 20 of the most significant posters from my collection. I hope it can function as  both a memory aide, and as a prompt to future thought and action. 

I definitely recognise (and feel) the contradictions inherent in collecting and exhibiting objects that were made for purely political and revolutionary ends – and the potential fetishisation that could be the result. 

The Atelier Populaire put it best themselves:

“The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. 

Their rightful place is in the centres of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. 

To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the ATELIER POPULAIRE has always refused to put them on sale. 

Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an “outside” observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class.

That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political plane.”