Left was perhaps most clearly identified with Students for a Democratic Society, although liberal, radical, and countercultural thought was fragmented and widespread in and beyond SDS. Berkeley, a center of political action through the decade, was not reducible to SDS, according to contemporary and later accounts. The SDS itself went through rapid change throughout the period. In addition to the diverse political atmosphere in and accessible to Berkeley, the musical and cultural revolutions of the 1960s were everywhere visible and audible, with the nearby, iconic Haight-Ashbury counterculture and the strong Bay Area presence of rock concerts and psychedelic art. And yet with all the sources that the Berkeley graphic artists had available to them, the overriding tone in May 1970 seems to appeal to fundamentally liberal and democratic values—though of course this might be because as a rhetorical matter the discourse was addressed and not simply expressed. By May 1970, Students for a Democratic Society had become radicalized to the threshold of self-destruction, although SDS leaders were still active at Berkeley. In fact, Tom Hayden, who had helped found SDS and who was the author of its founding manifesto, The Port Huron Statement, addressed an audience at the outdoor theater on campus in May 1970.31
The Paris posters, and the entire Paris ’68 movement, were on the whole much more militant than the Berkeley posters.32 The Paris posters denounced President de Gaulle and the French police, whose brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations at the Sorbonne and among workers led to waves of protest and the near destruction of the government itself (see fig. 6). At one point, in the face of continued demonstrations and a general strike in all segments of the economy, and fearing that his government could collapse within forty-eight hours, de Gaulle secretly left Paris to consult with a French general stationed in Germany to bargain for army support. The student posters in Paris celebrated a unity and common interest between workers and students in a way that never applied in the United States, where the Nixon administration retained the support of a large segment of the white working class. But for all its militancy, the poster campaign of the Atelier Populaire was deliberately not sectarian. In 2012, William Bostwick interviewed Philippe Vermés, one of the Atelier Populaire artists, on the occasion of the publication of a new book on the Paris posters. Vermés recalls that “when we were occupying the Beaux-Arts, we’d have a meeting every night at 7 P.M. to decide on a slogan. We said, We have to not be Trotskyites, Situationists, anarchists. We have to get the right slogan that hits people the strongest. We’d vote. . . . One time, we made a flag, blue, white, and red. And the red overlapped the other colors, and—no, no, no, we said. Because maybe it’s a Communist red. Everyone had to put their ideologies behind them.”33
FIGURE 6 “La beauté est dans la rue” (Beauty is in the street). Atelier Populaire. Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The Paris posters were almost certainly known to at least some of the Berkeley artists. The first published versions, together with an account of how they were created, in Atelier Populaire: Présenté par lui-meme (Paris, 1968) were succeeded the next year by a large-format English translation copublished by Dobson Books in London and Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis as Posters from the Revolution, Paris, May, 1968: Texts and Posters (1969). On the copyright page of both books, here using the English version of 1969, is this statement:
To the reader:
The posters reproduced 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 of 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 this book 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.34
The Atelier Populaire posters may themselves have been inspired by posters from Berkeley in the mid-1960s, when artists were experimenting with silk screen and photo-offset techniques for creating psychedelic poster art and political protest posters. John Barnicoat, author of a standard history of the poster, in an article in Grove Art Online, traces Berkeley psychedelic posters of 1965 back to the late nineteenth century. Rather than suggesting that the earlier Berkeley posters directly influenced the Atelier Populaire posters of 1968, Barnicoat appears to argue that similar political and material circumstances were the occasion of a parallel movement.
The events of May 1968 in Paris also produced posters that were evidence of a new generation asserting itself. A more serious political aim provided the background to the crude, screen-printed images generated by the Atelier Populaire, established in May 1968. Here cooperation between amateur and professional talent resulted in a series of small posters such as the caricature of General de Gaulle in La Chienlit—c’est lui (1968; Paris, Lesley Hamilton priv. col.), which restored the poster to its original function as a fly-posted handbill. Such had been the poster’s development as a sophisticated vehicle, expensive to produce and dependent on the support of the social and business establishments and their technical resources, that when such support was removed, poster design reverted to its origin as a hand-printed sheet. Inevitably, the situation affected both image and form, and helped restore the poster to its original function as a “noisy” street announcement.35
Historian Michael Seidman notes that the Paris posters were “the most striking and enduring cultural legacy” of May 1968.36 He argues that the practical effects of May 1968 in Paris were limited, but that they have achieved a place in collective memory, perhaps in large part because of the afterlife of the posters, and have “become a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer France.”37 Marc Rohan, who as a student participated in the Paris demonstrations, recalls that the posters and graffiti “covered the walls” and that they “were to become the most imaginative art form of the period.”38
In an oral history interview, artist Rupert Garcia testifies to a direct link between the Atelier Populaire and posters in the Bay Area. Garcia, then an art student at San Francisco State, recalls that in late 1968 or early 1969,
well, in the art department we did eventually respond, in terms of faculty. . . . We had a big meeting of art students and faculty about how to address the campus strike. And one faculty—I guess, a faculty from England, who had just come back from visiting France and Paris—mentioned to us what he saw some students doing there—which was to make posters. And so we—some faculty and students—organized a poster brigade. And we used Dennis Beall’s print studios and his instruction on how to do silk screen and so we learned this technique, like on-the-job training. There was no course, no class. And I was a liaison between the art department and the other members of the Third World Liberation Front organizations. I would go talk to them and come back, and this kind of thing. And so we began to make posters dealing with the issues—issues from racism to better education to police brutality, anti-war, and much more. I mean, all the issues that were being addressed at that time made for a heady experience. Many of those issues were being dealt with in our poster brigade. And the posters were used in the demonstrations on campus, and some were used outside of campus, and some were sold to raise money to get people out on bail, people who had been arrested. And it was going very well. We had really wonderful teamwork.39
Peace Is Patriotic
