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
‘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
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