The SI began as a group called The Lettrist International, which was a collection of artists and drop - outs living in Paris during The 1950 s. The Lettrists belonged to that long French tradition of epater la bourgeoisie - to shock and provoke and unsettle The bourgeoisie - that is, they wanted to reject The banalities of bourgeois life and celebrate instead all their wildest and most profane impulses. They wanted to find new and experimental ways of living and of being.
The Lettrists were most famous for their elaborate stunts and pranks - one example of which would be when one of their number snuck into Notre Dame cathedral during Easter High Mass in 1950, stole a priest 's outfit and went up to The main pulpit where he started giving a sermon on how God is Dead. When The congregation eventually realised what was going on, they chased him down and, The legend goes, if a policeman hadn' t intervened he would 've been lynched.
There are loads of examples of Lettrist pranks like this - but in 1957 the so - called left - wing of the group realised that its activities needed more structure, more focus. This left - wing split off and formed the Situationist International, which was founded as a way of formulating these types of nihilistic gestures of defiance into a more systematic and ordered programme of assault upon life and culture under capitalism.
from: http://www-scf.usc.edu/~estevao/itp104/project_SI/about.html
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