In his Lettrist memoir The Tribe, Jean-Michel Mension remembers drinking vin ordinaire with Debord on the terrace outside the Mabillon café on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Debord had money, Mension said: ‘he got living expenses from his family, because officially he was a student’. It was Mension’s eighteenth birthday and he ended up dead drunk. ‘That was the beginning of our friendship; we sealed it that day, so to speak. After that we went drinking together every day for several months. We would go drinking, just the two of us, Guy and his bottle and I with mine. He was usually the one to pay.’
They’d often go to cour de Rohan, a little courtyard off rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie, ‘and settle down in the passageway – there are some steps there, and we would sit on the bottom step, holding forth. In other words, we would set the whole world to rights while polishing off a litre or perhaps two litres of wine. That was our aperitif, in a manner of speaking, before we went over to Moineau’s.’5Debord was highly cultivated, had a lot of finesse, and, of course, was enormously well read. ‘Guy had obviously read and studied Marx’, Mension recalled, ‘and he was trying to transcend Marx; the Marxist starting point in Debord is plain to see’.6 He ‘dealt with Marxism at length, he read it all, but in my time we never discussed Marx’. ‘This was really the first time I had met a guy who gave me the feeling he was beginning to answer the questions I had been asking myself about a world that was not my world, either East or West, either the Stalinist side or the bourgeois side. And an answer had to be found.’7
He was ‘on a quest’, Mension said, always ‘goal-oriented’, having big ideas about how to destroy society, on paper and in practice. And he was as methodical about drinking as he was about thought: ‘Guy always drank in an amazing way, taking little sips from morning till night. You didn’t notice him drinking.’ You never saw him drunk. ‘I remember a few occasions when he got close, but he never took that fatal glass that would have put him over the edge.’8 At Moineau’s, alcohol flowed in ‘a perpetual stream’, and everybody was at it. Sometimes they drank the place dry. Most of the clientele were flat broke, or near it; and the patronne, Madame Moineau herself, wasn’t much better off. By all accounts, she was a Bretonne and used to wear an old blue apron, looking more like a cleaning lady than a café owner. She was there every day and night, cooked and scrubbed floors ‘and loved us all like a grandmother’. ‘She was a saint, she was our mother during that period.’ In the 1950s Moineau’s was a little zone of free play, a home away from home, where young people supped, sang, played chess, talked books and fell in and out of love. ‘No one really had any secrets from anyone else.’9
Debord adored Paris: it was his stomping ground, his laboratory. He bore the burden of its travails, taking them very personally, very politically. He was what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would have labelled an ‘organic intellectual’: he belonged to a place and to a people, and he felt their ‘elemental passions’. And yet, more and more, this belonging and Debord’s kind were being threatened, were being displaced, torn down and torn apart, as neighbourhoods began to get readjusted and reordered. Henri Lefebvre, who didn’t live far away from Debord and Michèle Bernstein, remembered their inhabiting ‘a kind of studio on rue Saint Martin, in a dark room, no lights at all’. It was ‘a miserable place, but at the same time a place where there was a great deal of strength and radiance in the thinking and the research’.10 Nobody knew how Debord got by. He had no job, didn’t want a job, opting instead to reside in a rich and happy poverty, a privilege long gone for most big city dwellers.
Debord and Bernstein lived together at 180 rue Saint Martin in the 3rd arrondissement in an apartment of barely 30 square metres, with a toilet outside along the corridor, which Michèle acquired with her father’s aid. They’d met in 1952 and married two years later, a marriage that was to last eight years. Bernstein gave her own artful glimpse of their libertine nocturnal life in 1960 in a thinly disguised novel, Tous les chevaux du roi (‘All the King’s Horses’). The protagonists Gilles and Geneviève are dead ringers for Guy and Michèle. ‘If Gilles no longer loved the same young women as me’, the narrator Geneviève muses to herself, ‘that introduced an element of separation between us’.11 ‘I know Gilles’ taste for spending whole nights wandering’, she says elsewhere,
when an open café becomes a precious port of call in streets where night-birds aren’t abundant. After 2 a.m., the rue Mouffetard is empty. You need to go back up to the Panthéon to find a bar, rue Cujas. The next stop is near to the Sénat, then rue du Bac, if you have the good taste to avoid what we still call the neighborhood … And, at daybreak, to Les Halles, which is a ritual.12
Gilles, we hear, seemed to be at once too young and too old for these times. ‘What do you work as?’ somebody asks him. ‘How do you occupy your time?’ ‘With reification’, answers Gilles. ‘That’s very serious work, I imagine, with a lot of thick books and a lot of papers on a grand table’, quips his interlocutor. ‘No’, says Gilles. ‘I wander, principally I wander.’13
Back in Gilles’s and Geneviève’s day, Parisian rents were bearable; cheap thrills were still to be had, cold-water affordability was possible. With Michèle, Debord lived only a stone’s throw away from Les Halles, the old fruit and vegetable market halls, destined to be demolished in 1971 to make way for the rapid commuter train. (The Centre Pompidou, completed six years later, would seal the neighbourhood’s fate.) Before that, Les Halles had been a sprawling, delirious, humdrum world, intensely alive, bawdy and beautiful, an urban paradise for Debord. When Baudelaire wrote in Le Voyage ‘To plunge into the abyss … And find in depths of the unknown the new’, it might have been the old Les Halles he was describing. In To the End of the World (1956), Blaise Cendrars, a nomadic scribe and a Foreign Legion veteran with only one arm, takes us on a cascading, roller-coaster ride through Debord’s old seedy neighbourhood:
From the Halles rose a rancid, fermented exhalation of rotting bananas and sick flowers, a mouldy sewer-smell that invaded the room, a mustiness that mingled with the window-rattling of motors starting off, the sounds of heavy lorries that shook the house to its foundations, the hooters that blew one atop the other in a skyscraper of sound, a dysentery of thunder, the shouts of the workmen unloading, jawing at each other as they manoeuvred their barrows; it mingled as well with the shifting shadows and lights that wandered over the ceiling. It was inhabited by polite little people, eccentric, pleasure-loving, rakish, gluttonous, respecting nothing, refined to their fingertips, though not very well-dressed, behaving every day as if it were a holiday and considering unemployment a blessing.14
Debord’s vagabond peregrinations around Paris followed the well-trodden path staked out long ago by the voyou (hoodlum) of all voyous, François Villon, the medieval poet and mauvais garçon. Villon wrote intensely personal and lyrical poetry, as in his masterpiece The Testament (1462), as well as some wonderfully ribald verses in slang that Debord fondly cites in his books. Villon often used the argot of the Coquillards, an organized criminal underworld with their own secret language, a tongue no outsider could decipher. The canonical French poet had loose Coquillard connections; his friend Régnier de Montigny, petty hood, cop beater and kleptomaniac, a prototypical Jean Genet character, was a Coquillard, as was Colin de Cayeux, one of Villon’s companions in the notorious College of Navarre robbery, when one Christmas night they climbed over a high wall, picked the lock of a safe, and made off with the school’s coffers. ‘We had several points of resemblance’, Debord claimed in Panégyrique,
with those other devotees of the dangerous life who had spent their time, exactly five hundred years before us, in the same city and on the same side of the river … there had been that “noble man” among my friends who was the complete equal of Régnier de Montigny, as well as many other rebels destined for bad ends; and there were the pleasures and splendour of those lost young hoodlum girls who kept us such good company in our dives and could not have been that different from the girls the others had kno
wn under the names of Marion l’Idole or Catherine, Biétrix and Bellet.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Debord and his band of coquillards inhabited their own little patch, their own ‘zone of perdition’, where as ‘Fair children’ they followed Villon warning from The Testament:
The central ‘halle’ of the market at Les Halles, 1950.
Be careful not to lose
the finest flower in your hat;
you, my clerks, whose fingers are like glue,
if you must take to robbing
or to swindling, save your skins!
For when he tried these things
(thinking an appeal would work)
Colin de Cayeux lost his.15
Villon preached in his ‘poems in slang’:
Keep changing outfits and ducking into churches;
take off, make sure your
clothes don’t trip you up.
To show the others
they strung up Montigny;
he babbled to the crowd a while,
and then the hangman snapped his neck.
And:
Prince of jerks who stick around,
hit the open road, move on,
and always keep your eyes peeled
for the hangman’s filthy paws.16
Graced with a few sous in his pocket, Debord conquered the city between midnight and three in the morning, glimpsing what the novelist Pierre Mac Orlan, another Debord favourite, called the fantastique social. This was a sensibility neither supernatural nor paranormal, but profoundly everyday, reserved for back streets and damaged people, for twilight nooks and crannies, for shadowy bars and taverns, frequently animated by liquor and invariably dramatized by departure, departures never made. One glimpsed the urban fantastic for a thrilling instant, tapped its hidden recesses by tapping the idiosyncrasies of the imagination. ‘To give an explanation to the fantastic’, Mac Orlan said in the 1920s, ‘is a difficult thing. All explanations of the fantastic are, besides, arbitrary. The fantastic, like adventure, only exists in the imagination of those who search for it. One reaches, by chance, the goal of adventure. Try as one does to penetrate its aura, the mysterious elements that populate it disappear.’17
But by the mid-1970s this pungent underworld of shady, fantastical adventure was nearly gone, destroyed in the name of economic progress and sound planning. ‘The assassination of Paris’ became the pithy thesis of Louis Chevalier’s damning 1977 autopsy on Gallic urbicide, which denounced those ‘polytechnicians’ – elite bureaucrats educated at France’s grandes écoles – who’d systematically orchestrated the deadly coup de grâce. Chevalier took his native city to heart, agonized over its woes, and Debord acknowledged a strange affinity with the conservative scholar.
It could almost be believed, despite the innumerable earlier testimonies of history and the arts, that I was the only person to have loved Paris; because, first of all, I saw no one else react to this question in the repugnant ‘seventies’. But subsequently I learned that Louis Chevalier, its old historian, had published then, without too much being said about it, The Assassination of Paris. So we could count at least two righteous people in the city at that time.18
Debord, like Chevalier, hated Le Corbusier and all he stood for. In 1925 the Swiss-cum-Parisian planner had proposed his ‘Voisin Plan’, a vision for a modern Paris that would update Haussmann’s boulevards, replacing them with a gigantic expressway grid pattern, achieving in central Paris what Robert Moses hadn’t achieved in downtown Manhattan. Sixteen enormous skyscrapers would likewise sprout up along the banks of the Seine, converting Paris into a thoroughly modernized radiant city, a real life Alphaville. The plan, of course, was a non-starter; yet the mentality persisted. The highways came, like the Right-Bank expressway in 1976, named the ‘Georges-Pompidou Expressway’ after the Republic’s president, gouging out the old quays of the Seine. And the towers went up, as at Montparnasse, and at the westerly business node, La Défense, where Cartesian glass and steel towers created pseudopublic spaces of desolation and flatness. Close by, meanwhile, the ‘new’ city of Nanterre, ‘whose boredom, hideousness, rawness, whose reinforced concrete condemned students to a kind of captivity and summed up all they detest’. ‘The young now spit on Paris, Paris that had for centuries been their paradise, the city to which they flocked, convinced they would find there all they dreamed of – pleasure, love, success, glory.’19
Paris had been victim of a ‘Grande Bouffe’, a greedy feast of rape and pillage, undertaken by technocrats in cahoots with a new breed of business executives, more brazenly entrepreneurial than their forebears, frequently schooled in America. Together, they had reorganized Parisian space rationally, re-forged it in their own crass class image. Paris once stood for ‘people from all walks of life and all classes, people of all sorts, from high society, from the middling sort, from no society at all’.20 Now the new consumerist Paris, the Paris of the spectacle, ‘is a closed universe, disinfected, deodorized, devoid of the unexpected, without surprises, with nothing shocking, a well-protected universe’.21
Still from the film The Society of the Spectacle.
Those ‘bards of conditioning’, Debord knew, had assassinated Paris, making a killing in the process. The city had died in his arms, in her prime, from a ‘fatal illness’. It was ‘carrying off all the major cities, and this illness is itself only one of the numerous symptoms of the material decadence of a society. But Paris had more to lose than any other. It was a great fortune to have been young in this town when, for the last time, she shone with a fire so intense.’22 Paris’s centre has been colonized by the well-heeled, expelling the poor to the periphery, miles out in the banlieue. It was an expulsion with nineteenth-century roots, begun in earnest in the 1850s when the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges Haussmann, Louis-Napoleon’s ‘demolition artist’, blasted and brutally hacked open medieval Paris, wiping out dirty working-class neighbourhoods. This gerrymandering set a historical precedent, contested only twice since, whereby low-income dwellers found themselves shoved out and priced off the land, scattered around the farthest reaches of the city, and deprived of their urbanity, of their ‘right to the city’.
Bulldozers and the wrecker’s ball never actually made it to the Latin Quarter, not since Haussmann’s day; but the tourist cafés, wine bars and restaurants, as well as antique shops and chic boutiques, have now just as effectively seen off this neighbourhood. Unsurprisingly, Moineau’s is a distant memory. Dodging traffic across the boulevard Saint-Germain and journeying on to rue du Four offers little novelty for the present-day wanderer, for any intrepid urbanist intent on serendipity. This is where Debord found and lost his youth, where ‘we no more than other men could stay sober on this watch’. But it’s a watch that has now undergone solid embourgeoisement. On the boulevard Saint-Michel, the Gibert-Jeune bookstore still stocks Debord’s books, now canonized by Editions Gallimard. They still sell, of course, and find avid readers, many of them learning Debordian thought by rote for their media or cultural studies assignments. In these rarefied circles, the ‘society of the spectacle’ becomes an academic catchphrase, not a revolutionary byword.
Like Debord, Chevalier saw the destruction of Les Halles’ old market halls as the violation of Paris, its real sacking, its real assassination. ‘With Les Halles gone, Paris is gone.’ The 27 February 1969 proved Les Halles’ last waltz, its long-dreaded last night, when Parisians must have felt the same pain that New Yorkers had felt when old Penn Station was torn down three years earlier. There was hardly anyone to contemplate the scene, Chevalier recalled, save ‘a few nocturnal creatures, a few nostalgia seekers, a few poets, a few clochards’. 23 Soon everybody was ousted, a crater hacked out, and the ‘hateful’ Centre Pompidou crushed everything under a mountain of dust. Renzo Piano’s and Richard Rogers’s national centre of arts and culture, with its ‘frightful jumble of pipes and conduits and ducts’, dubbed ‘the gas works’, filled the hole but only added to the void. ‘It is blue’, Chevalier quip
ped, ‘yet Paris is grey.’ Nearby, a subterranean cave called The Forum, ‘a deep, fetid underground’, concentrating all the high-class merchandise that Paris had to show off, rubbed salt into the wounds. If the Sacré-Coeur trampled over the legacy of the Communards, Pompidou did likewise over les soixante-huitards. (Debord abhorred the Centre Pompidou. In a twist of fate, the complex held a big Situ retrospective in 1989, inviting Debord to a private viewing. He refused.)
From the late 1950s onwards, urban planners everywhere ruthlessly began to assault older neighbourhoods, chopping them up into new functional units, purposely mobilizing renewal, bulldozing frayed but healthy quarters. Cities were marching to Le Corbusier’s infamous battle cry: supprimer la rue! (‘eliminate the street’). Streets, said Corbusier, symbolized disorder and disharmony; they were everything that was bad about urbanism, everything that belied a city out of sync with the machine age. They needed ‘readjusting’, he said. The city needed a new plan, with streets in the sky. Sidewalks down below, cafés like Moineau’s, pavement life like Les Halles, were all ‘fungi’ that required weeding; flowers – or ‘forests of pillars’ – needed replanting in their stead.
Guy Debord (Critical Lives) Page 4
