| In May and June 1968 artists, students, workers, and others came together in collectives in art and professional schools all over Paris and produced some 500,000 silk-screen posters with over seven hundred different designs. These posters, which were created to support the general strike that was quickly gathering momentum all over France, were pasted up throughout the Latin Quarter before eventually being painted over, torn down, and finally cleared away by the authorities at the end of June.;Until now the posters have been framed as an unprecedented example of spontaneous creative expression, a manifestation of the prise de parole (capture of speech) with which the revolutionary situation is regularly associated. By reconnecting the posters to the growing popularity of Maoism in France and the sweeping transformation of mass communications that took place in Europe and elsewhere in the Sixties, this dissertation demonstrates that the French poster movement was modeled on an earlier poster campaign, which took place in conjunction with the Chinese Cultural Revolution two years earlier in Beijing, and furthermore, that their handmade aesthetic, which notably rejected photography, was ideologically motivated rather than merely expedient. |
