Thank you for the journals,[1] which I distributed at strategic points across Europe.
In the most recent Potlatch, both space and time were lacking to reveal all of the significant enormities of the last two weeks: it would have to be a weekly publication.
Did you hear that Commissioner Dides,[2] breaking with Poujade,[3] has denounced “the abject police system” that the former has put in place on his movements? Or that the municipal counselors of Paris have proposed to change the name of the rue de Moscou to the rue Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini (the photographer/parachutist from the Match)?
[André] Breton, along with Jules Romains,[4] Pierre Boutang and Thierry Maulnier,[5] have shown that the Kremlin has been ceaselessly pursuing the same role of international repression since the time of the Holy Alliance. Moreover, the Hungarian affair[6] – quite complex, but because of its hysterical utilization by the bourgeoisie – makes the people who had, until then, joyfully accepted the most unsupportable counter-truths change sides. Thus [Jean-Paul] Sartre puts the finishing touches on his beautiful career as a buffoon. Here, the intellectuals alone keep their distance. Thursday evening, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, despite the largest deployment of police forces that I have ever seen. The demonstrators were workers, as the reporter from Le Monde splendidly noted: “as far as one could judge by their placement [la mise]”!
Who’s is the funereal mask on the cover? We cannot agree. Some of us recognize Khrushchev or Blaise Pascal.
Quite cordially,[1] Translator: Les Levres nues #9.
[2] Translator: Jean Dides was an ultra-Rightist police commissioner.
[3] Pierre Poujade, founder of the Union for the Defense of Merchants and Artisans in 1953.
[4] Jules Romains, author of Copains and Hommes de bonne volonté.
[5] Pierre Boutang and Thierry Maulnier, right-wing authors and journalists.
[6] The uprising in Hungary and the [subsequent] Soviet repression.
(Published in Guy Debord Correspondance, Vol "0": Septembre 1951 - Juillet 1957: Complete des "lettres retrouvees" et d l'index general des noms cites by Librairie Artheme Fayard, October 2010. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! March 2011. Footnotes by the publisher, except where noted.)