Jean-Michel Mension
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Jean-Michel Mension
Jean-Michel Mension (24 September 1934 – 6 May 2006) was a French radical active in the Lettrist International, from which he was expelled as "merely decorative", and the Ligue Communiste. Mension was the son of Paris-born Communist Party activists who were active in the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Mension described the life of the Lettrist group and their associates in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 1952–1954, in a book-length collection of conversations with Gerard Berreby and Francesco Milo, ''The Tribe''. For a period, he was a close associate of Guy Debord, founder of the Lettrist International and later of the Situationist International, and wrote several texts for the Lettrist International journal '' Potlatch''. Mension appears in photographs taken by the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken and published in his book ''Een liefdesgeschiedenis in Saint Germain des Prés'' (1956): "(He) turned himself into a living poster and paraded through ...
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Lettrist
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism. Isou viewed his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s. In French, the movement is called ''Lettrisme'', from the French word for ''letter'', arising from the fact that many of their early works centred on letters and other visual or spoken symbols. The ''Lettristes'' themselves prefer the spelling 'Letter ...
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1934 Births
Events January–February * January 1 – The International Telecommunication Union, a specialist agency of the League of Nations, is established. * January 15 – The 8.0 Nepal–Bihar earthquake strikes Nepal and Bihar with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''), killing an estimated 6,000–10,700 people. * January 26 – A 10-year German–Polish declaration of non-aggression is signed by Nazi Germany and the Second Polish Republic. * January 30 ** In Nazi Germany, the political power of federal states such as Prussia is substantially abolished, by the "Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich" (''Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reiches''). ** Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, signs the Gold Reserve Act: all gold held in the Federal Reserve is to be surrendered to the United States Department of the Treasury; immediately following, the President raises the statutory gold price from US$20.67 per ounce to $35. * February 6 – F ...
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Punk Subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse and widely known array of ideologies, fashion, and other forms of expression, visual art, dance, literature, and film. Largely characterised by anti-establishment views, the promotion of individual freedom, and the DIY ethics, the culture originated from punk rock. The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action, and not "selling out". There is a wide range of punk fashion, including T-shirts, leather jackets, Dr. Martens boots, hairstyles such as brightly coloured hair and spiked mohawks, cosmetics, tattoos, jewellery, and body modification. Women in the hardcore scene typically wore masculine clothing. Punk aesthetics determine the type of art punks enjoy, which typically has underground, minimalist, iconoclastic, and satirical sensibilities. Punk has generated a considerable amount of poetry a ...
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Ed Van Der Elsken
Eduard van der Elsken (10 March 1925 – 28 December 1990) was a Dutch photographer and filmmaker. His imagery provides quotidian, intimate and autobiographic perspectives on the European zeitgeist spanning the period of the Second World War into the nineteen-seventies in the realms of love, sex, art, music (particularly jazz), and alternative culture. He described his camera as 'infatuated', and said: "I'm not a journalist, an objective reporter, I'm a man with likes and dislikes".Aletti, Vince. Cafe noir (biography). rticle. Biography''Artforum International''. v. 38 no7, Mar. 2000, pp. 98-103, 105-7. His style is subjective and emphases the seer over the seen; a photographic equivalent of first-person speech. Early life Ed van der Elsken was born on March 10, 1925, in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In 1937, wanting to become a sculptor, he learned stone-cutting at Amsterdam's Van Tetterode Steenhouwerij. After completing preliminary studies at the Instituut voor Kunstnijverhe ...
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Situationist International
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism. Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly li ...
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Guy Debord
Guy-Ernest Debord (; ; 28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of ''Socialisme ou Barbarie''. Biography Early life Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Debord's father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died when Debord was young. Debord's mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Guy to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. During World War II, the Rossis left the villa and began to travel from town to town. As a result, Debord attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism. The family lived in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques for a period where he attended Lycée Louis-Barthou. As a young man, Debord actively opposed the French war in Algeria and joined in demonstrations in Paris against it. Debord studied law at the Uni ...
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Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Saint-Germain-des-Prés () is one of the four administrative quarters of the 6th arrondissement of Paris, France, located around the church of the former Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Its official borders are the River Seine on the north, the ' on the west, between the ' and ' on the east, and the ' on the south. Residents of the quarter are known as '. The quarter's cafés include Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, le Procope, and the Brasserie Lipp, as well as many bookstores and publishing houses. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was the centre of the existentialist movement (associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). It is also home to the École des Beaux-Arts, Sciences Po, the Saints-Pères biomedical university center of the University of Paris, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and the Musée national Eugène Delacroix, in the former apartment and studio of painter Eugène Delacroix. History The Middle Ages Until the 17th century the ...
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Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism (german: Hitlerfaschismus). The later related term " neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War. Nazism is a form of fascism, with disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. It incorporates a dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist '' Völkisch'' movement which had been a prominent aspect of German nationalism since the late 19th century, and it was strongly influenced by the paramilitary groups that ...
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French People
The French people (french: Français) are an ethnic group and nation primarily located in Western Europe that share a common French culture, history, and language, identified with the country of France. The French people, especially the native speakers of langues d'oïl from northern and central France, are primarily the descendants of Gauls (including the Belgae) and Romans (or Gallo-Romans, western European Celtic and Italic peoples), as well as Germanic peoples such as the Franks, the Visigoths, the Suebi and the Burgundians who settled in Gaul from east of the Rhine after the fall of the Roman Empire, as well as various later waves of lower-level irregular migration that have continued to the present day. The Norse also settled in Normandy in the 10th century and contributed significantly to the ancestry of the Normans. Furthermore, regional ethnic minorities also exist within France that have distinct lineages, languages and cultures such as Bretons in Brittany, Occi ...
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French Resistance
The French Resistance (french: La Résistance) was a collection of organisations that fought the German occupation of France during World War II, Nazi occupation of France and the Collaborationism, collaborationist Vichy France, Vichy régime during the World War II, Second World War. Resistance Clandestine cell system, cells were small groups of armed men and women (called the Maquis (World War II), Maquis in rural areas) who, in addition to their guerrilla warfare activities, were also publishers of underground newspapers, providers of first-hand intelligence information, and maintainers of escape networks that helped Allies of World War II, Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind enemy lines. The Resistance's men and women came from all economic levels and political leanings of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, Aristocratic family, aristocrats, conservative Catholic Church, Roman Catholics (including priests and Yvonne Beauvais, nuns), Protestantis ...
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French Communist Party
The French Communist Party (french: Parti communiste français, ''PCF'' ; ) is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism. The PCF is a member of the Party of the European Left, and its MEPs sit in the European United Left–Nordic Green Left group. Founded in 1920, it participated in three governments: the provisional government of the Liberation (1944–1947), at the beginning of François Mitterrand's presidency (1981–1984), and in the Plural Left cabinet led by Lionel Jospin (1997–2002). It was also the largest party on the left in France in a number of national elections, from 1945 to 1960, before falling behind the Socialist Party in the 1970s. The PCF has lost further ground to the Socialists since that time. From 2009, the PCF was a leading member of the Left Front (''Front de gauche''), alongside Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Left Party (PG). During the 2017 presidential election, the PCF supported Mélenchon's candidature; however, tensio ...
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