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Political Graffiti - Paris in the Late 1960s

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Political Graffiti - Paris in the Late 1960s
22/09/2008

‘Boredom is counter-revolutionary!’, ‘Barricades close the streets but open up the way’, ‘They are buying your freedom. Steal it!’, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’, ‘Take your desires for realities!’, Don’t negotiate with the bosses, get rid of them!’, ‘Under the paving stones, the beach!’. What do such graffiti as these tell you about the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – in France in the late 1960s?

The graffiti of Paris in May, 1968, such as the slogans above, articulated the revolutionary zeitgeist: a profound disaffection with the delimited offerings and exclusionary, authoritarian nature of society under The Fifth Republic. Slogans interweaved new revolutionary ideals of action, individuality and festivity with traditional revolutionary intentions. It was, after all, “the first revolution that demanded roses as well as bread.” The extent of the graffiti alone indicates the desire for rejuvenation and popular empowerment. Yet the Parisian revolutionary impulse such graffiti conveys, though certainly expressed outside of Paris, did not encompass the opposition to de Gaulle’s régime in the late 1960s. What graffiti clearly misses of the zeitgeist of France in the late 1960s is the overwhelmingly conservative nature of French political culture. May ’68 is but another example of the sad fate of Paris, its collective imagination shackled to a national culture at best timid and hesitant and at worst violently reactionary.

A prominent trope of the graffiti of May ’68 was hostility to the priorities of consumerist society. It represented the belief that wealth had become the system’s imperative in place of things like time or individual initiative. Whoever wrote ‘They are buying your freedom. Steal it!’ encapsulated the belief that material prosperity was displacing ‘freedom’. Economic growth was accompanied by what Ross called “the withdrawal of the new middle-classes to their newly comfortable domestic interiors.” The number of cafés was



Bibliography: Situationist International, 1967). Quattrochi, A Panther Books, 1968). Rohan, M., Paris ’68: Graffiti, Posters, Newspapers and Poems of the Events of May 1968 (London: Impact Books, 1988). Secondary Sources: Ali, T., 1968 and after: Inside the Revolution (London: Blond & Briggs, 1978). Blum, W., Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2004) Caute, D., Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988). Ehrenreich, B., Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006) Gilcher-Holtley, I., ‘France’ in Klimke, M. and Scharloth (eds.), J., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Harman, C., The Fire Last Time: 1968 and after (London: Bookmarks, 1988) Hecken, T 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Horn, G-H., The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-76 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Jappe, A., Guy Debord (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Klimke, M Scharloth (eds.), J., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956- 1977 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Kurlansky, M., 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004) McDonough, T., The Beautiful Language of my Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007). Ross, K., Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995). Seidman, M., The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (Oxford: Berg Books, 2004). Scriven, M., Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) Sowerwine, C., France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001) Thomas, N., Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (Oxford: Berg Books, 2003).

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