A Season with Marianne

Préface
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Auteur

Alain Segura was born in 1949, in Bellac, a town near Limoges, France, where his father, active as an anarchist militant in Spain, settled after the Civil War of 1936–1939. In his teens, he was a member of several small anarchist groups, including the Anarchist International.
Anna O’Meara is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History & Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation research investigates how the Situationist concept of Spectacle relates to World. Anna is coeditor of On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy (Common Notions, 2022). Her translations have been published by Three Rooms Press, Verso, and Annex Press, among others.

Sarah Lynne Roberts is a PhD student in Art History Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. She studies surrealist intersections with Latin American film from a feminist perspective. She holds an MA in Art History Visual Studies from the University of Victoria and a BA in Art History and Visual Culture with proficiency in French from the University of Exeter. Born in Watford, England, she lives in Victoria, BC, on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples. 


Texte du rabat

A memoir of the infamous “last Surrealist” amid the heady militancy of May ’68.

Alain Segura was a teenage anarchist in Paris during the mid-to-late 1960s when he hung around with members of the Enragés and the Situationist International. He was particularly captivated by Yugoslavian militant, poet, and painter Marianne Ivsic, a member of André Breton’s Surrealist group. It was Guy Debord who approvingly called her “the last Surrealist.”A Season with Marianne details the heady days of friendship, rebellion, and creative militancy surrounding May ’68, against the backdrop of a colossal split between the Anarchist International and the Situationists in 1967, and the impossible demands of a revolution briefly glimpsed.

Résumé

A memoir of the infamous “last Surrealist,” Marianne Ivsic. Alain Segura documents their initial meeting in 1967, amid the heady militancy of May ’68.
Alain Segura was a teenage anarchist in Paris during the mid-to-late 1960s when he hung around with members of the Enragés and the Situationist International. He was particularly captivated by Yugoslavian militant, poet, and painter Marianne Ivsic, a member of André Breton’s Surrealist group. It was Guy Debord who approvingly called her “the last surrealist.” Segura wrote this book so that Ivsic’s life and creative legacy are not forgotten. A Season with Marianne details the heady days of friendship, rebellion, and creative militancy surrounding May ’68, against the backdrop of a colossal split between the Anarchist International and the Situationists in 1967, and the impossible demands of a revolution briefly glimpsed by the author through an encounter with the last surrealist.

Échantillon de lecture

“Gleaming coats of mail, bright shining helmets, and lances and shields, and gold and azure and silver.” Like Perceval,  I was dazzled.  They moved about in a maze of backstreets that they seemed to have known forever; they loved the cafés on whose signs working-class insurrection bloomed; they told anecdotes and made mysterious remarks. Seekers of the Castle Dangerous,  adepts of the High-Science, they called themselves situationists.

            In 1966, I was in my first years at the Jean-Baptiste Say High School. Students my age, but from another section, had published a little journal of anarchist leanings, several badly bound pages, faltering ink, in which, if I remember correctly, they spoke of the anniversaries of Hungarian insurrection and the Spanish Civil War.  I was vaguely familiar with the history of the latter country, from which (I knew) my father had fled, and also because of an excellent teacher who had instructed us—few were the students who were disposed to follow her—to translate the poetry of García Lorca [from Spanish into French].

            I soon found myself invited to the meetings of the anarchist group, whose activity, as well as its very existence, depended on a short young man with long hair and a black beard, who signed the name René Riesel to almost all the articles.

            His commitment, combined with his lively intelligence, won him the goodwill of the teachers whom he sometimes embarrassed, like the day in the amphitheater when he launched into a thundering version of “Il était un petit navire,” which seriously upset an admiral who’d come to publicize a promotional film about the benefits of a career in the marines corps. The lights came back on, revealing dismayed faces, while the song, taken up as by a chorus, made the rows of seats shake.

            In love with radicalism, always on the lookout for new movements and currents, he sold copies of the group’s journal during recess and every Wednesday evening attended the meetings of the Comité de liaison des jeunes anarchistes.

            This was how he got wind of the famous “Strasbourg Scandal.” A small pamphlet had been published there, at the expense of the University, and it spoke—in brilliant language and between beautiful blue covers—of “On the Poverty of Student Life.”  At first, I understood nothing. But in its exposition there was a breath of fresh air, a joyful enthusiasm, and the gracefulness of truth. Moreover, the diatribe concluded, not leaving the critique unresolved, but by connecting it to the strongest currents, which were momentarily extinguished, but waiting to be rekindled. The moment seemed imminent, as one paragraph after another did away with the nonsense of isolated demands in order to embrace a global theory, a small problem that the Workers Councils would easily overcome.

            Even more so than the amazing writing, or this universal remedy for a finally liberated world, the rumors and noise surrounding the pamphlet’s authors didn’t fail to evoke a mysterious brotherhood, omniscient, invisible and resolutely closed: The Situationist International.

Contenu

1. Exploding-fixed
In June 2020, a pair of Serbian anarchists who had seen the text that I published in 2011 (“And So They Went on, the Knights on Their Quest,” see below) contacted me because they wanted to know more about one of its protagonists, Marianne Ivsic. 2. “Operation Marianne”

I recount the work undertaken in Serbia by those anarchists and me in Paris to track down as much as possible that concerned Marianne. Illustrations include pictures of the places in Paris where Marianne lived. 3. “And So They Went on, the Knights on Their Quest”

This is the heart of the book and the text that drew the attention of the Serbian anarchists. It mostly covers the period between 1966 and 1969, but extends as late as 1995. *…