Texts and posters by Atelier Populaire: posters from the revolution: Paris, May 1968. Folio, [31], 96 pages, chiefly colour illustrations, 41cm, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969.
Text in English. Captions also in Italian, Spanish and German. Printed in black, green, red, purple, blue. Photographic endpapers showing striking workers, May 1968. Limp canvas covers, titled in red and black. Slight rubbing to foot of spine. A very good copy.
The American edition bound from the British sheets. Originally published at Atelier populaire presente par lui-meme, 87 affiches de mai-juin 1968. Paris, Uisnes, Universites, Union, 1968.
In May 1968, students at the faculty of L'ecole des Beaux-Arts took over the lithography studio and established the Atelier Populaire (the Popular Workshop). Their collective produced hundreds of famous posters.
'To the reader: The posters produced by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centres of conflict, that is to say in the streets and on the walls of the factories. to use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. That is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused ro put them on sale.'
The political consequences of May 1968 were surprisingly small, despite eleven million on strike, street battles with police, de Gaulle fleeing the country and the government collapsing. There was a snap election, unions were reconciled with a wage increase, students returned to the universities and in due course became bourgeois themselves. The social and cultural consequences remain to this day. These graphics capture that brief moment when everything was going to change.
