Political Graffiti – Paris in the Late 1960s Essay Example

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 cafes was declining, while by 1968, sixty-two per cent of French homes had televisions.

One graffitist wrote, “We do not want a world where the price of being certain of not dying of hunger is the risk of dying of boredom. ” By writing that ‘boredom is counter-revolutionary’, revolutionaries identified the state with the repetition and alienation of consumerist society. They defined themselves against this, as with the artists who worked constantly but refused to sell their posters, later printing a poster that read, ‘The Revolution Is Not For Sale. In this, May ’68 was Paris’s part in what Ehrenreich termed the worldwide “uprising of the postwar generation, bored by affluence and stifled by the prevailing demands for conformity in lifestyle, opinion and appearance.

”Consequently, opposition to the status quo was often expressed in festivity rather than more traditional forms. This was especially clear in Paris. A vast array of primary sources illustrate that the revolution was a fun time. ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’ suggests this. In general, the proliferation of graffiti is indicative of an outpouring of creative novelty.Marc Rohan described the Sorbonne during the occupation as a “fairground” ; Kurlansky called May “part carnival, part anarchist spree” ; McDonough notes one observer’s description of Paris as the site of “a big booming festival”, and also that “elegant Parisian dinner parties [would] adjourn to the Sorbonne and mingle with the teenagers.

”This is not to suggest that May ’68 was not profoundly political: Lenin described revolutions as “festivals

of the oppressed and the exploited. ” Indeed, the fact that May ’68 did not take the form of an ideological power struggle accounts for the enormous potential it had. Take your desires for realities’ captures this spirit of hope and empowerment. It gave the activists great integrity that their actions stemmed from direct, immediate grievances.

It must be noted that the ideological 22 March Movement, which was to claim vanguard status, only attracted 142 protesters on that day. The 3 May battle erupted spontaneously. According to Rohan, those students typically: Were not involved in any political organizations, nor did they share the beliefs of those arrested, or even know what had led to the arrests. Their reaction was simply…a pontaneous show of solidarity with other young people who they saw as victims of brutal repression.

Their anger was born of…the thousand and one repressive ways of a society all too given to humiliating its youth. Over the following weeks, it was a dialectical dynamic of protests/strikes against police repression that caused the conflict to escalate almost to the point of the state’s collapse. This disaffection with the culture of The Fifth Republic, or lack thereof, was inextricably linked with discontent at the regime’s authoritarian and exclusionary nature.For example, television represented boredom, but especially so in that it was known to be heavily censored. Thus, one poster depicting a roof with a TV antenna read, ‘Propaganda comes to your home. ’ The Situationist movement captured this aspect of the zeitgeist.

To a large extent the revolutionary spirit was a rejection of la societe du spectacle. Essential to the nature of the spectacle, according to an analyst of Guy

Debord, is that “it be the only voice, and sure of no response whatsoever. Consequently, this new media struck many as profoundly undemocratic. Interestingly, Situationist analysis of spectacle, non-intervention and isolation attached “central importance to the problem of alienation”; this was a clear unifying element between the typically non-ideological students and the non-PCF Marxists. The dismissal or violent repression of these views only confirmed them. By 6 May, twenty thousand protesters were ironically chanting, ‘We are a groupuscule’ in response to one of de Gaulle’s ministers.

As another example, when students sympathetic with Situationist thought were elected to control of the student union at the University of Strasbourg in November 1966, the union was closed by a court order the following month; the judge declared that “in view of their basic anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. ” The invocation of anarchy was to become a rallying call for the state, used, according to Tariq Ali, “to conceal its impotence and rally support. ” The state attempted to portray revolutionaries as dangerous criminals.De Gaulle himself referred to “these abusive students [who] terrorise the others: one per cent enrages to ninety-nine per cent sheep who are waiting for the government to protect them. ” The hypocrisy was clear enough to those who faced the CRS.

To one activist, the confrontations conjured up “forgotten nightmares. Mask of blindness. Lines of fear. ” The importance of individual action to the revolutionary spirit was the logical consequence of an authoritarian, exclusionary society that acted dismissively or with violent repression.

As Nairn argues, “because The Fifth Republic was very much a vacuum…any resolute effort to grab some kind of ‘participation’

was more inherently explosive than elsewhere. ” The invocations ‘They are buying your freedom. Steal it! ’ and ‘Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Get rid of them! ’ are noticeable for their focus on action and the absence of a desire to mobilise political debates or campaigns. So, the extent to which the graffiti of 1968 carries Marxist connotations is probably misleading.

Even in the most directly anti-capitalist slogans phrases there is an evident emphasis on dreams and action. It is revealing that Sowerwine argues that “the May spirit bubbled on [afterwards]” in newspapers that were “mostly Maoist,” for Maoism is closer to ‘revolution by any means necessary’ than other strands of Marxism. In this sense the Situationist movement was much closer to capturing the spirit of May ’68: they argued “that capitalism suppressed individual creativity”; and they argued that “the realizations of ones own desires and revolutionary action had to be one and the same. Existentialist thought also captures the zeitgeist along the same lines as that of Situationists. It is at the core of existential thought that most important est ce que l’on fait. Sartre himself continually agitated against “the illusion that the individual was somehow separate from the historical process.

” He himself embodied this: on 20 May, he interviewed Cohn-Bendit, published under the title, ‘Put Imagination in Power;’ the next day in the Sorbonne’s grand amphitheatre, he was urging students “to reinvent tradition” and “devise liberty in action. Graffiti, by its very nature, proves the resonance of such ideas within the May ’68 movement as a whole. Examples are abundant: at Nanterre was written, “There are no revolutionary thoughts, only revolutionary actions;” at

the Odeon Theatre was written, “L’avenir est a prendre…Inventer – c’est prendre le pouvoir de demain;” and of course, the graffiti ‘Barricades close the streets but open up the way,’ which is especially pertinent in its emphasis on the means (‘barricades’) over an unspecific end (‘the way’).Even saying, ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’ is perhaps a reference to revolutionary action, the ubiquitous hurling of paves, in order to create a more humane society. Such graffiti represents the importance of spontaneous action, desires and direct context on the revolutionary spirit, while hinting at the broader intellectual context from which it grew.

While the uprising has been linked to international popular movements – protesting the Vietnam War and the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rudi Dutschke – disaffection with the culture of The Fifth Republic seems much more important.Although such movements all drew strength from capitalist power structures, which are inherently undemocratic because of huge economic inequality, consciousness of this bond was of minor importance in comparison with local factors. Marxist historian Chris Harman notes that in Paris only two thousand protested the shooting of ‘Red Rudy’ Dutschke; Germans’ protests were large, sustained, violent and widespread. Their barricades were erected outside the offices and the plants of Axel Springer’s media empire, which had incited violence against protesters.

Meanwhile, American students protested the Vietnam War, unaware that millions of dollars were being funneled by their government to Axel Springer. Thus, historians’ arguments that “the transnational dimension of 1960s protest perceived by contemporaries was one of its key motors” seem to me to be misplaced, based on an overly academic understanding of people’s motives. Similarly, Gilcher-Holtley has argued

that the ‘New Left’ “attempted to open the theoretical interpretation by combining Marxism with existentialism and psychoanalysis. Again, the tendency to ascribe ones own ideological grasp of the scenario onto its participants is evident. The revolutionary spirit of spontaneous action, empowerment and festivity in response to a deep disaffection with The Fifth Republic defined the late 1960s in France.

This spirit was by no means limited to students: Rohan describes middle-aged, well-off Parisians coming down from their apartments into the streets on The Night of the Barricades to offer food and drink to the protesters. However, not all opposition to de Gaulle’s regime took this form.Like students, French workers suffered under isolating and disempowering structures. In a Citroen factory, workers were arranged: “a Portuguese, a Frenchman, a North African, a Yugoslav and a Portuguese again.

So that they cannot talk to each other. ” However, probably a stronger mobilising factor on workers’ opposition in the late 1960s was awareness that economic growth had not been distributed fairly. In that year, forty-five per cent of national wealth belonged to the richest five per cent.In contrast, half of all homes had no bathroom, shower or toilet inside and only ten per cent of working-class homes owned telephones.

Consequently, “most strikers considered their opponent not to be le pouvoir patronat but the Gaullist regime itself. ” Ultimately, many workers were all too happy to ‘negotiate with the bosses. ’ This was to fracture the revolution, for when elections and economic concessions to workers were announced by the state, the CGT, the largest union, broke off revolutionary activity and prepared for political campaigning.While many revolutionaries felt betrayed, this fracture was the logical

outcome of the fact that their differing revolutionary motives no longer coincided.

The May movement was united by socialist preferences and opposition to capitalism; it divided over the question of authoritarianism or libertarianism. During the student occupation of the Sorbonne, ‘it is forbidden to forbid’ was written at its entrance. This graffiti encapsulates, probably as succinctly as is possible, that any government, democratic or otherwise, can be authoritarian.The zeitgeist of disillusionment with a prosperous, consumer society and a new sense of individual empowerment through action took on revolutionary significance when channeled into libertarian politics. Students developed these political structures: their Comites d’Action had “certainly no formal leadership or hierarchy;” Parisian graffiti proclaimed that “You must storm all ivory towers. ” The city of Nantes also represented the enormous libertarian potential of the zeitgeist.

Factory occupation began by 13 May. The Hotel de Ville was then taken over and a city-wide strike committee was established.According to Horn, the city’s university was dominated by a “curious” alliance of Trotskyists, anarchists and Situationists. When viewed in terms of a desire for libertarian rather than authoritarian politics, the alliance is not curious at all. Trotskyists and the workers of Nantes in general had socialist goals of economic equality, yet they were united with non-Marxist groups like students and farmers on the basis of local, popular empowerment.

In this sense, the events of 1968 illuminate a recurrent dynamic of French political culture.Since 1789, France has been a model of the centralised state grappling with how best to realise democracy. French theorists had denounced the ‘tyranny of the majority,’ yet their way of embodying the ‘popular will,’ via an elected Constituent Assembly, suffers the

same problems. Paris, the dominant European cultural hub, the birthplace of avant-garde movements of all forms, has always been the flashpoint. It is a cruel irony that this city is tied to an overwhelmingly conservative nation, easily impassioned by politicians, before and after de Gaulle, who have invoked the spectre of revolution to justify repression.

For its 1871 effort at self-determination Parisians suffered la semaine sanglante, in which approximately ten times more people were killed than in the original Jacobin reign of terror that so horrified the Catholic, conservative nation. There is no better example of what Sartre called “the violence of the other [which] is not an objective reality except that it exists in all men as the universal motivation of counter-violence. ” France has continually projected “the violence of the other” onto Parisian movements.Quattrochi saw this in the eyes of the CRS counter-revolutionary foot-soldiers, “peasants made watchdogs” who “scream when unleashed, realising their fear of what they do not know and do not understand.

”In 1968 Charles de Gaulle personified this conservative idealisation of the present, which through its stagnation inevitably identifies with the past. He appropriated the mantel of republican democracy while placing himself above the nation, speaking of cultural grandeur while his supporters attacked some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.According to Kurlansky, three hundred times during de Gaulle’s Presidency an 1881 law against ‘attacks on the honour’ of the President was invoked. Thus, one 1968 poster satirized de Gaulle as a monarch, reminiscent of Caesar, holding a crucifix-topped sceptre, with cherubs flying overhead holding a banner that read La Cinquieme Republique.

The perversion of the Republic’s ideals is exemplified by de

Gaulle’s secret flight de visit General Massu in Baden-Baden on 29 May.When he returned, he threatened violence, confident in his authority; the reason became clear on Bastille Day, 1968, when de Gaulle pardoned all those responsible for the OAS horrors. This act was a despicable manipulation of the Republic’s legacy, on the very day that celebrates the overthrow of unchallengeable executive authority. This authoritarian/libertarian conflict was borne out in the late 1960s and illustrates the conservative fetish for monarchs or military leaders.The graffiti of Paris in 1968 illustrates the revolutionary zeitgeist of the late 1960s. To say that ‘Boredom is counter-revolutionary! ’ and that ‘They are buying your freedom.

Steal it! ’ represents the disaffection with the delimited opportunities and consumerist (lack of) culture under The Fifth Republic. The imperatives of spontaneous action, empowerment and the festivity borne from acting out desires were natural responses. ‘Under the paving stones, the beach’ and ‘Take your desires for realities! convey in part the widespread festive atmosphere. All of the graffiti here represents the focus on individual action, which demonstrates the influence of Situationist and existential ideas, as well as the Marxist desire to end ‘alienation. ’ Perhaps because it did not adopt the form of political ideology, the movement was profoundly revolutionary in this context.

Unwilling to incorporate the opinions of its people, The Fifth Republic acted dismissively or repressively in a way that continually escalated the violence.This represents the perpetual conflict in French political culture between libertarian and authoritarian tendencies. The Parisians who said, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ clearly will struggle to be at peace with a conservative society that turns to authoritarian figures to impose a

consensus that does not exist, and which thus is permanently mired in the past and tradition.

Bibliography:

1. Primary Sources: Internationale Situationniste, Ten Days that Shook the University (London: BCM/ Situationist International, 1967).
2. Quattrochi, A. and Nairn, T. The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 (London: Panther Books, 1968).
3. Rohan, M. , Paris ’68: Graffiti, Posters, Newspapers and Poems of the Events of May 1968 (London: Impact Books, 1988).
4. Secondary Sources: Ali, T. , 1968 and after: Inside the Revolution (London: Blond & Briggs, 1978).
5. Blum, W. , Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London: Zed Books, 2004).
6. Caute, D., Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).
7. Ehrenreich, B. , Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York:Metropolitan Books, 2006).
8. 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)
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Cape, 2004).