The thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth. Submitted August 2010. Manus McGrogan Tout! in context 1968-1973: French radical press at the crossroads of far left, new movements and counterculture i Abstract With this thesis on the aftermath of 1968 in France, I have recreated the moment and environment of the libertarian paper Tout! Usually associated in historiography with the birth of the gay liberation movement in France, my initial research revealed its influence as more penetrative and revealing of the diverse left and new, countercultural movements of the early 1970s. I sought the testimony of former militants, writers and artists to uncover historical detail and motivations, and consulted relevant textual archives, aiming to situate and examine the paper within a number of interrelated contexts. Results showed the paper‟s historical touchstones of scurrilous Revolutionary papers and 19th/20th caricature typified by L’Assiette au Beurre. The parallel paths of Dada, surrealism and situationism, and the Marxisant legacy of the Russian Revolution, foreshadowed the blend of cultural and political in Tout! May „68 was the crucible of militant, festive currents and speech, a time of rupture and reorientation for the various activists later at Tout!, the paper Action and posters of the Beaux-Arts inspiring new forms of agit-prop. In the aftermath of 1968, mao-libertarian current Vive La Révolution converged with an ex-Trotskyist, faculty-based group seeking cultural revolution. Figureheads Roland Castro and Guy Hocquenghem oversaw the merger of these groups and outlooks, coinciding with the launch of Tout! as a „mass‟ paper. With a new look and „new political attitude‟, influenced by Italian radicals and the US underground, Tout! challenged all forms of authority in Pompidou‟s France, climaxing with the eruption of gay liberation in no.12. It was Tout!‟s role in promoting „autonomous‟ gender, sexual and youth movements that led to the disaggregation of Vive la Révolution, and despite successful sales the paper came to a sudden end in the summer of 1971. Like the rest of the far left, Vive La Révolution and Tout! suffered State repression, but evolved from a „proletarian‟ Marxist critique of capitalism to attack the life routine of work, school and the family, judging the political Right and the Parti Communiste Français as equally reactionary. The paper testified to the importance of international, indeed transnational activities of the far left in the early 1970s. It provided a formidable impulse for the gay liberation movement FHAR, and foreshadowed the first feminist paper Le Torchon Brûle. As such it was a crucial press conduit for American radical left forms and practices, spearheading a shift from gauchisme to the growing counterculture. Tout! exemplified a brief, intense and fast-changing moment in French subcultural history and set new trends in left political journalism for the 1970s. ii Contents Introduction: Tout!, a project of reconstitution ............................................................ 1 Why Tout! ? ................................................................................................................... 2 Historiography and gaps ................................................................................................ 4 Methodology: context and analysis ................................................................................ 8 Oral history: the alternative press through the words of its creators............................ 10 1. Press traditions in the making of Tout! ................................................................... 13 Early Revolutionary, utopian examples and the profusion of nineteenth century caricature ...................................................................................................................... 14 Turn of the century insult and caricature in Le Père Peinard and L’Assiette au Beurre ...................................................................................................................................... 18 Dada, surrealism and the early Communist movements in Tout! ................................ 21 Resistance as inspiration, Vichy‟s „family‟ the enemy ................................................ 25 The Algerian War, clandestine press and Clarté ......................................................... 27 Melp! and the pop art sensibility .................................................................................. 32 The Maoist, Marxisant origins of Tout! ....................................................................... 33 2. May ‘68 in Tout! ........................................................................................................ 40 Readings of May in Tout! ............................................................................................ 41 Recollections and interpretations of May .................................................................... 44 May „68 and the press of the far left ............................................................................ 53 The posters of May....................................................................................................... 61 3. Prelude to Tout!: from VLC to VLR ....................................................................... 65 Nanterre and Vive le Communisme ............................................................................. 65 Mao-spontex: the spontaneity and the sponge ............................................................. 66 VLR takes over ............................................................................................................ 71 The highpoint of VLR .................................................................................................. 75 The shift to Tout! .......................................................................................................... 82 4. Tout!, the leftist France-Soir? .................................................................................. 87 Enter the France-Soir rouge ........................................................................................ 87 The workings of Tout! .................................................................................................. 91 New attitudes, new directions ...................................................................................... 95 Tout!, „autonomous‟ movements and the crisis of VLR .............................................. 98 Tout!-VLR surpassed by the women‟s liberation movement .................................... 101 Tout!, the paper of the FHAR? ................................................................................... 104 A terrorist dérive? ...................................................................................................... 107 Tout! loses its organisational anchor .......................................................................... 109 Endgame: the disaggregation, drift and demise of Tout! ........................................... 113 5. Tout! in the France of Pompidou ........................................................................... 120 Tout! and the break from far left traditions ................................................................ 121 Pompidou‟s France .................................................................................................... 129 „Surveillez la police!‟ Repression of the press in the aftermath of May .................... 134 Parti Communiste Français: „L‟ennemi officiel‟ ....................................................... 140 iii The workers movement .............................................................................................. 145 Students and lycéens: the rupture from institutional education ................................. 150 6. Tout! and the press of the early ‘70s ‘new movements’ ....................................... 162 From L’Idiot to Le Torchon Brûle: Tout! as a vector of feminist change .................. 163 Gay liberation and the new press ............................................................................... 170 Tout!, the FLJ and the question of youth ................................................................... 179 New immigrant movements ....................................................................................... 184 The first stirrings of political ecology ........................................................................ 190 Anti-psychiatry, anti-prison and anti-military impulses in Tout! .............................. 193 7. International and transational ties ........................................................................ 200 VLR and Lotta Continua: the circulation of militant ideas and practices in France and Italy following 1968 ................................................................................................... 201 European resistance, South and East .......................................................................... 206 Militant and „new press‟ representations of China, Vietnam and third world liberation struggles ..................................................................................................................... 208 Palestine: „Nous sommes tous des fedayin!‟ rhetoric and reality .............................. 213 VLR, Tout! and the symbolic power of the Black Panthers ...................................... 217