1968 and all that | 12 July 2018

Unless you have been sleeping under a barricade or a pile of Molotov cocktails it will not have escaped your attention that we — that is, a few broadsheets and BBC4 — have been having a good old think about the events of 1968. When student rioting brought France to its knees and the revolution didn’t quite happen. The Independent helpfully reminded us that Sgt. Pepper’s was released ‘around about then’, and that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned (also ‘round about then’). It is highly probable that Philip Larkin was mentioned. Over on BBC4, Joan Bakewell did a slightly better job of framing the whole caper. Daniel Cohn-Bendit got his props, as did the enragés. Of course the BBC dug out that footage of the hippies holding hands and dancing around
a tree, which has been used only slightly more than its footage of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Joan didn’t make too bad a fist of it really — that is, if you like your soixante-huitard insurrectionary slogans dished out to you in the voice of a jolly hockey sticks head girl, whose every intonation purrs ‘I invented the middlebrow’. What all the coverage missed was the most interesting and perhaps most prescient ‘presence’ throughout the Paris riots — that of the situationists.

The Situationist International (SI) was formed in Switzerland in 1957 and led by the fabulously chippy, overtly intellectual, and very French Guy Debord. Two avant-garde groups, the International Movement Towards An Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Society, pooled their not inconsiderable avant-garde chops, and before you could say ‘Constant Nieuwenhuys’ (briefly a situationist) the SI was born.

The Situationist International was one of the most important art movements of the 20th century, and Debord was as much of a scryer of the future as Warhol.