Postwar Culture

Michèle Bernstein is a French writer and a critic, best known as a founding member of the Situationist International. Throughout her career, spanning the Lettrist International to the S.I., Bernstein served as a crucial contributor to the groups’ publications, such as Potlatch and Internationale situationniste. In conjunction, Bernstein worked in a variety of different capacities, from advertisement to writing horses’ horoscopes for racing magazines. Bernstein also published two détourned novels in a Situationist manner, Tous les chevaux du roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961), spoofing different literary genres while narrating her relationship to Guy Debord. The success and proceeds of the books were used to support the Situationists, including the publication of Debord’s La société du spectacle.

Born in Paris, France in 1932, Bernstein had been attending the Sorbonne when she met Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, Patrick Straram, among others, who had recently broken off from Isidore Isou’s Lettrisme around 1952 and were establishing the Lettrist International. After joining the movement, Bernstein subsequently wrote in the bulletin Potlatch, discussing concepts of the derive in “Derive by the mile” (1954), for instance. In 1954, Bernstein wed Debord.

In 1957, as the Lettrist International had slowly become disintegrated, Bernstein and Debord established the Situationist International alongside the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and the London Psycogeographical Committee. For the next decade, Bernstein wrote numerous essays in the Internationale situationniste, such as “In Praise of Pinot Gallizio” (1958) and “The Long Voyage” (1960). In 1964, Bernstein wrote an article on the S.I. to the Times Literary Supplement.

Around this time, Bernstein and Debord split—the subject of the series of poems that Debord wrote to Bernstein in the Beinecke’s collection. In 1967, Bernstein left the S.I. as the longest standing member of the group, stating that she was “becoming allergic to the constant inversion of the genitive.” Thereafter, she rekindled her connection with a former member of the S.I. Ralph Rumney, and moved to England. In 1972, Bernstein and Debord officially divorced. From 1982, Bernstein worked as a literary critic for the French journal Libération.