Charles Chaplin in Europe

In 1952 Charlie Chaplin, whose City Lights had been part of Debord's crib-list, visited Europe to promote his new film Limelight. Debord had admired Chaplin for the same reason as Barthes did : because “he shows the public its blindness by presenting at the same time a man who is blind and what is in front of him. To see someone who does not see is the best way to be intensely aware of what he does not see.” Chaplin’s sophisticated portrayal of the pre-proletarian, pre-class-conscious worker had earned him a blacklisting from the United States, where he had recently been denounced as a traitor.

But in Europe, Chaplin basked in the glory of still being worshipped. He accepted an audience with the United Kingdom’s new queen, and the prestigious Légion d’Honneur in France. After a press conference in the Paris Ritz on 29 October 1952, Chaplin walked out of the hotel to face an adoring crowd, plus four men called Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, Lettrists all. They hurled abuse at Chaplin and scattered splenetic leaflets which suggested to Chaplin he might not be so welcome among all Parisians :

The point of this stunt was threefold : to turn in an easy target, to destabilise the position of Isou (who played no part in it) as leader of the Lettrists, and to signal the end of Lettrism itsekf. For the Chaplin stunt (and the ICA screening of Hurlements) had both gone beyond Lettrist theories. Isou himself sympathised with his colleagues at the time, but disapproved of attacking Chaplin, who he regarded as untouchable. Debord was unrepentant : “the most compelling exercise of freedom,” he said in the first issue of the Internationale Lettriste, the splinter group formed by Debord after his brutal rupture with Isou, “is the destruction of idols, especially when they speak in the name of freedom.”

Isou and Lettrism were withering, they had become “submissive and graying.” Debord, ever the frosty strategist. was in the ascendant, and the seeds of Situationism had been sown