Whatever happened to the situationists? I know you’ve been wondering. Especially as next month brings the 40th anniversary of les événements in Paris in 1968.

For those of you who can’t remember the 1960s because you were there, or are distressingly young, the Situationist International was the dialectical Marxist group that steered the first Sorbonne Occupation Committee – and when the “situation” seemed to demand the tearing up of cobblestones for the purposes of lobbing same at les flics, the SI were right there at the back yelling, “Allez-y, mes camarades”. When the university demos spread to a general strike of 10m French workers, the SI set up the Council for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO). There were a lot of extremely pompous organisational titles in those days but it was a heady moment.