The Walls - Joe

Without access to mainstream media – television, radio, and newspapers – students spread their ideas with graffiti, pamphlets, and posters. We’ve been looking at each of these, including original copies of L’Enrage, a proto “zine” of provocative cartoons.

At the Ecole des Beaux Arts, students turned the school into a “poster factory,” cranking out dozens, probably hundreds, of designs. These consisted of simple powerful graphics and pithy saying or slogans. A silhouette of a figure in a kepi, a symbol of DeGaulle, covers the mouth of a person and the saying is “Sois Jeune and Shut Up” (Be Young and Shut Up). The students plastered these posters throughout the area and city, and we’ve seen footage of them stopping buses (using a huge paper machie figure of DeGaulle) then covering the sides of them with posters.

Most of these posters have leftist political slogans, such as “Students and Workers Unite.” Several of them make use of graphics comparing De Gaulle and the older generation to Hitler and Nazis and turning the symbol of the Free French into a swastika. And there are many that warn against trusting the media, calling television and the press poison. The irony is that several of the main figures in the student movement, especially Daniel Cohn-Bendit were media savvy. They were composed, confident, articulate, intelligent, and photogenic. Cohn-Bendit would call press conferences, and even acknowledged that he was a “media darling.” When he is deported to Germany, where he held citizenship, posters appear with an image of his face with the sentiments “Nous sommes tous des Juifs et des Allemands” and “Nous sommes tous indesirables’.” (We are all German Jews; We are all undesirables).

Some of the posters make use of 1950s ads, appropriating slogans and images of well-known campaigns. Interestingly, the reverse dynamic then happens. Searching the database catalogue at the Musee de La Publicite, we discovered an ad campaign by the retailer E. LeClerc in 2005. It uses some of the iconic images of May 68, including one of a police shield, placing a bar code across it. One of the slogans of ’68 was “It is forbidden to forbid.” The LeClerc ad insists, “It is forbidden to forbid . . . low prices.”