« Le pouvoir aux travailleurs. Vietnam. Tchécoslovaquie. Mai 68 ? »

In the days following the student uprising in the Latin Quarter, which began on 3 May 1968 with the occupation of the Sorbonne, students at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts, assisted by artists, began producing posters intended to spread revolutionary slogans. “To make these posters, the workshops initially used stencils and lithography, before adopting screen printing, notably at the instigation of the printer Éric Seydoux and the artist Guy de Rougemont, who had discovered the technique in New York. This monochrome printing process, fast and easy to implement, greatly increased the students’ creativity. Every day, images and slogans were debated at general assemblies held in the popular workshops. Once a project was accepted by the majority of participants, it was produced, printed, and then handed over to teams of poster-stickers, neighborhood action committees or strike committees of occupied factories, who took turns putting them up” (Mélanie Leroy-Terquem, Chroniques de la BnF, no. 100, 2024).

May 1968 is often remembered as a purely French affair, and one might too quickly conclude that international relations had nothing to do with this libertarian, Parisian movement. Yet 1968 remains the year of student uprisings worldwide: a movement that began on American campuses, spread to Europe in the spring, and ended in Czechoslovakia, until Russian tanks put an end to the Prague Spring in August. It is often forgotten that the “22 March Movement,” born during the occupation of the administrative tower at the Nanterre faculty, began as a mobilization in support of activists arrested two days earlier as part of the Comités Vietnam national (CVN, close to the JCR), “for the victory of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism.”

This is one of the rare posters of the May 1968 movement to bear an explicitly national and international reference: “Le pouvoir aux travailleurs. Vietnam. Tchécoslovaquie. Mai 68.”

Very rare, especially in this complete condition.

This poster was missing from the Laurent Storch collection, Mai 68 en 500 affiches (Artcurial, 13 March 2018); it is also absent from the collection of some 700 posters from May 1968 held at the BnF’s Département des Estampes et de la Photographie; and it is likewise absent from the collection of 300 May 1968 posters at the Musée des Mondes contemporains in Nanterre.