The Letterist International (LI) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman rejoined by Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna as a schism from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group. The group went on to join others in forming the Situationist International, taking some key techniques and ideas with it.
'Letterist' (lettriste) was the form the group themselves used, as in their 1955 sticker: 'If you believe you have genius, or if you think you have only a brilliant intelligence, write the letterist internationale.' Though the spelling 'Lettrist' is also common in English, authors and translators such as Donald Nicholson-Smith, Simon Ford, Sadie Plant and Andrew Hussey use the 'Letterist International' spelling.
The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls and self-proclaimed failures. In the Summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e. before anyone from either group achieved notoriety, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.
History and theory
The LI was the first breakaway faction from Isidore Isou's Letterists. (They would be followed in turn by the Ultra-Letterists). The schism developed when the 'left-wing' of the Letterist group disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris in October 1952. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin." Isou was keen to distance himself from his younger acolytes' tract. His own attitude was that Chaplin deserved respect as one of the great creators of the cinematic art. The breakaway group felt that he was no longer relevant, and they turned Isou's own words back against him: "We appreciated the importance of Chaplin's work in its own time, but we know that today novelty lies elsewhere, and 'truths which no longer entertain become lies' (Isou)." As they proceeded to explain, "the most urgent exercise of liberty is the destruction of idols".
Although the LI had in fact already been covertly formed by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman in June 1952, even before the Chaplin intervention and the public split from Isou, it was not formally established until 7 December 1952. The four signatories of the Chaplin tract (Debord and Wolman, together with Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna) agreed on a constitution for the group during a visit to Aubervilliers (where Brau's father lived). Anyone collaborating with 'Isouian activities', they declared, would be automatically excluded, even if this was being done in defence of the LI. 'It is in the transcendence of arts that everything has yet to be done.' The official base of the group was at 32, Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Geneviéve, Paris, subsequently to become the official base of the Situationist International (but invariably referred to by both groups as "Rue de la Montagne-Geneviéve", signalling their disdain for religion). This was in fact the address of a bar, Tonneau d'Or, and indeed most of their time was spent either drinking in a number of bars in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, principally at Chez Moineau on the Rue du Four, or else simply walking the streets.