Letterist International - Adventures

Adventures

Besides the Charlie Chaplin protest, some of the more noteworthy/startling activities of the LI include:

• Ivan Chtcheglov's plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower, on no other grounds than that its lights were shining through his bedroom window and keeping him awake at night. He was subsequently confined to a mental institution.
• Debord's legendary 1953 graffito, "Ne travaillez jamais!" ("Never work!"), inscribed on a wall at the corner of the Rue de Mazarine and Rue de Seine. The slogan would later reappear in May 1968, and summed up the ethos of both the LI and the Situationist International after them.

Although pre-dating the formation of the LI (but directly involving Serge Berna, and inspiring the others), one might also mention:

• A 1950 letterist attempt at the liberation of a Catholic orphanage at Auteuil, causing a small-scale riot in protest at how "youth suffers in slavery, or is super-exploited by the seniority system."
• The Notre-Dame Affair of Easter Sunday, 1950, where Michel Mourre, dressed in a Dominican's habit, took to the pulpit and began to address the congregation, informing them, before anyone realised that anything was amiss, that God was dead, and that the Catholic Church was "appropriating our life force in the name of an empty heaven", and "infecting the world with its morality of death".

An extract from a letter of Gil Wolman to Jean-Louis Brau, of 20 July 1953, gives a clear impression of what the group and their associates tended to get up to from day to day:

I am back!... Where were things when you left? Joël has been out for a long time, on probation. Jean-Michel and Fred are now free, too (for stealing from parked cars -- and under the influence, naturally). Little Eliane got out of police custody last week after a dramatic arrest in a maid's room somewhere in Vincennes with Joël and Jean-Michel; they were drunk, needless to say, and refused to open up to the police, who left and came back with reinforcements. In the confusion they lost the seal of the Letterist International. Linda not sentenced yet. Sarah still in the reformatory -- but her sister, sixteen and a half, has taken her place. There have been other arrests, for narcotics, for who knows what else. It's getting very tiresome. There is G-E, who has just spent ten days in a nursing home where his parents sent him following a failed attempt to gas himself. He's back in the neighbourhood now. Serge is due out on 12 May. The day before yesterday I threw up royally outside Moineau's. The latest diversion in the neighbourhood is spending the night in the Catacombs -- another of Joël's bright ideas. I have a good many projects which are liable to remain just that -- projects....

Decades later, Debord would nostalgically (though also somewhat ambiguously) sum up the spirit of the times in his Panegyric (1989): "Between the rue du Four and the rue de Buci, where our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk, one could feel certain that we would never do any better."