Letterist International

The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group. Letterist International had almost no ideas in common with Isou's Lettrism, of which used the name only ironically; instead, it was more a draft version of the Situationist International, many of the core ideas of which it anticipated.

The spelling 'Lettrist' is also common in English, but 'Letterist' was the form the French group (Internationale Lettriste) themselves preferred, and used in their 1955 sticker: 'If you believe you have genius, or if you think you have only a brilliant intelligence, write the letterist internationale.' With regard to that second word, however, most scholars prefer 'International' to 'Internationale'. Such authors and translators as Donald Nicholson-Smith, Simon Ford, Sadie Plant and Andrew Hussey all agree on the 'Letterist International' spelling.

The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures. In the Summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years old, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved any real fame, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.