Underground ! La presse alternative des années 1970 en France

Creative, DIY, protest-driven: at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, a parallel press emerged in France, on the fringes of the so-called “bourgeois” news media. Born in the wake of May 68 and nourished by Anglo-Saxon influences – from the Californian Free Press to the British underground – this “new press” accompanied an entire generation in its political, cultural, and social awakening. This wall exhibition, conceived from heritage collections, showcases this effervescence.

The exhibition La presse alternative echoes the aspirations of a youth breaking away from dominant models: political and libertarian struggles, regionalist demands, antimilitarism, anti-nuclear commitment, sexual liberation, the quest for new forms of communal life inspired by the hippie movement...

Rejecting the codes of mainstream news media, it champions autonomy, direct speech, experimentation, and the right to utopia. A graphic and formal profusion. This militant press is also profoundly inventive in its form.

Rejecting the rules of traditional journalism, it subverts genres, multiplying collages, comic strips, handwritten typographies, and fragmented layouts.

Many artists and illustrators made their debut there, while Do It Yourself techniques (offset, roneo, linocut) became both political and creative acts.

Poetry fanzines, comic books, wall newspapers, leaflets, and ephemeral sheets bear witness to a graphic profusion at the crossroads of arts, poetry, happenings, science fiction, and rock culture. The golden age of the 1970s.

The exhibition highlights the 1970s, a period of both peak and fragility for the alternative press. While it experienced exceptional vitality, it faced a number of obstacles: economic precarity, uncertain periodicity, censorship, seizures, and legal proceedings.

By the end of the decade, the decline was clear. ” From the margins to heritage.

To bring it back into the spotlight, an extraordinary heritage collection of nearly 400 titles was identified within the BnF's collections, initially with the help of a research project led by James Horton, PhD in h