May 1968 Protests in France - Slogans and Graffiti

Slogans and Graffiti

It is difficult to identify precisely the politics of the students who sparked the events of May 1968, much less of the hundreds of thousands who participated in them. There was, however, a strong strain of anarchism, particularly in the students at Nanterre. While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the millenarian and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers (the anti-work graffiti shows the considerable influence of the Situationist movement).

• All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.
• The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.
• Je suis Marxiste — tendance Groucho. (I’m a Marxist — of the Groucho variety.)
• Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!
• Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner. He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.
• A single non-revolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.
• Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.
• A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him. Drive the cop out of your head.
• We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.
• “The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.” (St. Augustine)
• Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .
• Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life has been a drag. Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.
• The future will only contain what we put into it now.
• The more you consume, the less you live. Commodities are the opium of the people.
• Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.
• This concerns everyone.
• L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire. (Boredom is counter-revolutionary.)
• L'imagination prend le pouvoir! (Imagination takes power!)
• Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible. (Be realistic, ask the impossible.)
• Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité. (Take your desires for reality.)
• On achète ton bonheur. Vole-le. (They are buying your happiness. Steal it.)
• Presse: ne pas avaler. (On a poster with a bottle of poison labelled: "Press: Do not swallow.")
• Même si Dieu existait, il faudrait le supprimer. (Even if God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.)
• Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n'as pas besoin de lui. (The boss needs you, you don't need him.)
• L'été sera chaud! (Summer will be hot!)
• On ne revendiquera rien, on ne demandera rien. On prendra, on occupera. (We will beg for nothing. We will ask for nothing. We will take, we will occupy.)
• Travailleur : tu as 25 ans mais ton syndicat est de l'autre siècle. (Worker: You are 25, but your union is from another century.)
• Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui. (We don't want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.)
• In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.
• Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié ne font que se creuser un tombeau. (Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.)
• Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!
• Sous les pavés, la plage. (Under the paving stones, the beach.)
• Vivre sans temps mort et jouir sans entrave. (Live without wasted time and enjoy without hindrance.)
• La barricade ferme la rue mais ouvre la voie. (Barricades close the street but open the way.)
• When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies. (Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater)
• Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”
• Stalinists, your children are with us!
• Be cruel.
• I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!
• Under 21? Here is your ballot!
• Read Reich and act accordingly! (University of Frankfurt; similar Reichian slogans were scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne, and in Berlin students threw copies of Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) at the police).