After ’68, several things blended together:
young people disillusioned with formal politics, increasingly hard-line leftist groups, a bourgeoisie looking for spirituality on trips to India, and a publishing market that realized all of this could be turned into a product.
ACTUEL was a French magazine launched in 1968 by Jean-François Bizot.
A journalist from an affluent background, Bizot gathered the themes circulating in the post-’68 atmosphere and shaped them into a marketable format: soft drugs, psychedelia, underground music, open sexuality, light politics, and cultural experimentation.
The magazine mixed travel reports (India, Nepal, Morocco), pieces on LSD and psychedelic experiences, interviews with marginal musicians and artists, articles on communes and alternative movements, and a graphic style that felt dense but more relaxed than traditional press design.
There was a young readership that no longer identified with established newspapers or militant outlets. Bizot saw that this group could become a small but reliable market. ACTUEL stepped in to fill that space.**
Agit 883 wasn’t a professional outlet. It was cheap, improvised, and designed to circulate quickly through the city. This political newspaper/pamphlet from West Berlin was active between 1969 and 1972.
It was produced by radical leftist collectives, mainly students and autonomous groups. The name “883” referred to a phone number used to coordinate activities within the movement.
ABC was not an ideological magazine. It was a commercial journalistic product that included a supplement called ABC Documento. This supplement offered thematic issues, usually focused on a specific case, event, or journalistic investigation. ABC covered the wave of political and social violence that swept through Italy in the late 1960s
At the time, Italy was entering what would later be called the “Gli anni di piombo”—the early phase of the “Years of Lead”:
– clashes between students and police,
– massive demonstrations,
– political radicalization on both the left and the right,
– state repression and episodes of police brutality.
This particular issue documented the death of a student during protests and street clashes. Such deaths became symbols of the political tension of the era and were widely exploited by the press.
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Sources
The images in this post were sourced from the Yale University Library digital collections:
Yale University Library – Digital Collections
https://collections.library.yale.edu
