Provo (movement) - Beginnings

Beginnings

The Provos are thought to have evolved out of the artist Robert Jasper Grootveld's anti-smoking happenings in June 1964. The following year other groups appeared as a fusion of small groups of youths around the pacifist Ban-the-bomb movement. Roel van Duijn is thought to have been the group's theorist, influenced by anarchism, Dadaism, Herbert Marcuse, and the Marquis de Sade.

The Provos borrowed their name from Wouter Buikhuisen, who, in a 1965 doctoral dissertation, talked about “young trouble-makers” as ‘provos’, from the Dutch word "provoceren", to provoke.

Bernhard de Vries states that the Provos comprised four groups of people:

• "The happeners": those managing happenings in Amsterdam and Antwerp, combining non-violence with absurd humour to provoke the police. The police were regarded as “essential non-creative elements for a successful happening” and “co-happeners”.
• "The beatniks and hipsters".
• "The thinkers": those publishing Provo ideas in magazines and pamphlets, including Provo, Revo, Eindelijk and UvA student weekly Propria Cures.
• "The activists" or the “street Provos” who engaged in direct action with the intent to influence public opinion.

Harry Mulisch's book, Bericht aan de rattenkoning (Message to the Rat King, 1966), reflects upon the riots following the Telegraaf’s coverage on a worker’s death in a protest:

"While their parents, seated on refrigerators and washing machines, watched TV with their left eyes, and their cars with their right eyes, a mixer in one hand and the Telegraaf in the other, the kids left Saturday evening for the Spui square."