The walls have the floor: From Paris 1968 to Jadavpur 2026
May 1968 turned Parisian walls into a radical public sphere, where anonymous graffiti became a medium of dissent, collective authorship and political imagination. Nearly six decades later, as outrage agianst graffiti walls of Jadavpur University begin to reshape public political vocabulary, the walls of from Kolkata to Paris raise a sharper question: who controls the commons of expression?
In Paris the streets turned into an open forum in May 1968; this did not happen merely through speeches or leaflets, but by means of chalk, paint and spray being used on the city's walls. When students and workers began striking and brought the country to a halt, an anonymous group suddenly appeared in the Latin Quarter. One of the first spray-painted messages was 'Prohibiting prohibited', an act directed against the whitewashed fortress of authority which, as Julien Besançon later put it, aimed to tear down all walls.
The radio journalist from Besançon, working for Europe No. 1, walked around the streets carrying a notebook and recorded the cries before they were wiped out. The book he produced, Les murs ont la parole (The Walls Have the Floor), which was first published in July 1968 and was reissued by the MIT Press in 2018, captures a moment when 'graffiti itself became a form of freedom'. Almost sixty years on, in 2026, it is still a document that is both historical and remarkably contemporary—A reminder that the first social network was not Twitter or Facebook, but the wall.
The Voices of the Anonymous
The slogans collected in Besançon are a carnival of voices—some poetic, some crude, some hopeful, some sarcastic and some extremely witty. The best known of them, 'Under the paving stones, the beach', originated when people were having beers in a run-down cafe and was influenced by the Situationist International. Yet for each carefully worded phrase there were many others which favoured a direct and unfiltered expression. 'I have nothing to write' comes up over and over again, and as Besançon points out,
"They were not naive: they cried out to feel that they belonged".
What mattered most was the act of taking part rather than the elegance of the message.
Certain slogans burst with sharp humour. The phrase 'Enjoy without restraint. Live without dead time. Fuck without carrots' combined a hedonistic attitude with a critique of the boredom caused by bureaucracy. 'Exaggeration is the mother of invention' was a reversal of a common saying. Others used dark irony, for example 'When I grow up I'm gonna be a cop' or 'I'm stupid' in order to ridicule the system which regarded protesters as delinquents. One piece of graffiti even stated, 'I don't like writing on walls', a self-aware way of putting it which only served to highlight the urge to speak.
Literary and philosophical quotations were also reflected on the walls. Among them were André Breton's words, 'Imagination is not a gift but above all an object of conquest', Saint-Just's 'Happiness is a new idea in Europe' and 'No liberty for the enemies of liberty', Bakunin's 'Socialism without liberty is a barracks' and Spinoza's 'That which cannot be conceived through another THING must be conceived through ITSELF'. Mao was quoted on several occasions with the statements 'All reactionaries are paper tigers' and 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun', while a playful student had written 'I'm Marxist with groucho leanings'.
A Dialogue of Cross-Outs and Add-Ons
What is striking about these inscriptions is the way they allow interaction. Besançon described the walls as "a vertical forum, democracy via cross-outs: add-ons and replies established a dialogue". A bold slogan would appear and then be scratched out or have a reply added to it. One entry was 'Long live rape and violence!' and this was followed by bracketed responses: '[No] [Yes]'. Another one, 'power isn't taken, it's gathered up', prompted further comment. The walls thus became a living conversation, a public commons in which every passerby could modify, contradict or enlarge what had been written.
The same spirit of dialogue was present in the act of writing itself. 'It was a celebration of anonymity,' Besançon said.
"When people quoted others they did not sign their writings and thus attached authorship to the circumstances rather than to the individual."
The message was important, not the person who conveyed it—a position which is in sharp contrast to our present-day emphasis on personal branding and the culture of influencers. During the height of '68, the collective voice suppressed the individual ego.
Chittoprosad: The Artist Who Defied Erasure
An artist who was half the world away and many decades before him realised the value of bearing witness. Chittoprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) was an artist and activist who joined the Communist Party of India officially in 1940. At the beginning of his career he produced satirical pen-and-ink drawings caricaturing politicians and the colonisers in the Party's weekly newspaper, People's War. However, it was not until 1943 that he attained fame when the Communist Party asked him to go to the Midnapore district—the area most affected by the disaster—to write illustrated accounts of the Bengal Famine.
What he created was extremely damaging; his black-and-white sketches, which showed the peasantry of rural Bengal suffering from hunger, clearly illustrated the severity of the disaster. 'His sharp caricatures and drawings of the poor dying during the Bengal famine had the effect of modern-day reportage and caused the middle class as well as the British officials to lose their apathy'. Twenty-two of his on-the-spot sketches were gathered together and put into a pamphlet called Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapur District (1943).
The British reaction was quick and severe. So offensive was the stark objectivity of his art against the extractive colonial regime that they banned the book and tried to destroy each and every one of the 5,000 copies that had been printed; the only copy known to have survived was the one that the artist sent to his mother, who preserved it.
Chittoprosad mainly concentrated on linocuts, woodcuts, and pen-and-ink drawings, creating 'a visual language characterised by economy of line, graphic clarity, and emotional immediacy'. He did not use oil on canvas since he favoured cheaper and more versatile mediums which allowed him to reach a wider audience. The figures he depicted—usually emaciated and always human—presented viewers with the unbearable reality of man-made famine.
P.C. Joshi, who was fascinated by Chittoprosad's artistic abilities, invited him to visit the headquarters of the Communist Party in Bombay. He encouraged Chittoprosad to investigate the local traditions relating to pottery, sculpture, and the making of puppets. Chittoprosad eventually founded Khelaghar, a puppet theatre group aimed at entertaining children who lived in the slums near his home in Andheri. Although by the 1950s he had withdrawn from active politics because he had become disillusioned following the expulsion of his mentor Joshi from the Communist Party, his art—based on what one writer referred to as 'the radical politics of love'—kept on envisioning a better and more hopeful future.
The Walls of Jadavpur
In 2022 some students from Jadavpur University decided to get Chittoprosad once again displayed on the walls. Sagnik Vajra, who at the time was a student of engineering, had come across the artist and was 'madly in love with his works'. He stated that 'what fascinated me was the fact that he didn't care about what any art school thought of him, it was only his political commitment to doing good for the world that mattered'. Although he had no formal artistic training, Sagnik painted a mural of Chittoprosad on one of the most busy and largest walls on campus—the artist's face in three shades of gray, smoking a pipe, with red cuts from his own works surrounding it—and immediately it became the favourite spot for taking selfies on campus.
Sagnik had not painted his first mural earlier with his classmates an image of Alan Turing—'a hero in the realm of computer science, and gay'—in order to have a positive presence on the male-dominated engineering side of the campus. Their aim was 'for the next generation joining our department to see that the realm of computer science is not only about placements and techbros—there is another option, one which is proudly gay and one which uses the power of an algorithm to end wars, not to bomb kids.'
M.N. Roy—who was the founder of both the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of Mexico and had been a student at Jadavpur—was portrayed in a two-toned image reminiscent of Che Guevara. Kalpana Dutta and Ila Mitra, women who 'do not receive the same level of 'aura points' as men do in the left-wing circles', were also painted. As Sagnik stated, 'Since I myself was coming across these overlooked figures in history, I felt the need to turn them into heroes.'
This tradition extended beyond the murals; for many decades graffiti and poster culture have played a prominent role at Jadavpur University and have always been linked with the politics of the university. The walls displayed portraits of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Bhagat Singh, and others—forming a visual record of resistance.
The Whitewashing
On August 24, 2026, West Bengal's Chief Minister, Suvendu Adhikari, uploaded a video to X featuring graffiti from Jadavpur University, including the Chittoprosad mural. He stated that the slogans were 'not suitable for the country' and asked the authorities to take appropriate action. The video also displayed slogans such as 'Free Palestine' and 'Fascists do not deserve democracy / Fascists deserve a bullet in the head'. Adhikari wrote that 'a nationalist attitude is compulsory... From our borders right through to educational institutions, nationalism alone will prevail'. He had previously remarked about the university that 'either it will stay or we will'.
The university authorities reacted quickly. On the 29th and 30th of August workers came with lime and whitewash, and any writing which had been there for years—on Palestine, on Manuvad, on Rabindranath Tagore, and on Che Guevara—was either painted over or covered with paper. The Chittoprosad mural was one of those that were erased. The men who carried out the work said that the order had been given 'from above'
The students were furious.
The removal was selective, since the students observed that wall writings and publicity materials associated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student arm of the RSS, had been left alone while their own had been taken down. Likewise, the hoardings erected by a employees' group aligned with the BJP stayed up.
The Walls Speak Back
Yet the walls did not remain silent. Just one day after the whitewashing, the students came back with brushes, paint and spray cans and, despite the intermittent rain, repainted the slogans on the freshly whitewashed walls. On the wall of the open-air theatre they painted a quotation attributed to Karl Marx:
'We have no compassion / And we ask no compassion from you / When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror'.
The slogan Free Palestine showed up once again, Ho Chi Minh was repainted, and Urdu couplets together with lines from a poem by Tagore were also painted on the walls: 'When deception comes in the form of religion and takes hold / The blind hit the blind and both perish in vain'. The students wrote 'Long Live the Resistance' in red paint.
It is alleged that the ABVP carried out vandalism on the campus on August 20 in order to protest an attack on its unit president. At a rally on August 28, the chief minister addressed ABVP activists and said, 'JNU in Delhi; Osmania University in Hyderabad. You have already taught them a lesson. Jadavpur still hasn't been taught a lesson and this too will be looked after.'
The Echoes of '68
The situation at Jadavpur in 2026 is exactly comparable to that in Paris in 1968. Although the slogans are different—'Free Palestine' rather than 'Under the paving stones, the beach'—the underlying motivation is the same: to use public space for public expression, to oppose the suppression of dissenting views, and to assert that walls should belong to everyone.
The similarities are obvious. In Paris the authorities painted over the walls in order to get rid of the protests; in Jadavpur they did so in order to erase politics which they regarded as anti-national. In Paris the students repainted the walls as a response; in Jadavpur they came back within 24 hours. In Paris the walls turned into 'a vertical forum, democracy achieved through cross-outs'; in Jadavpur they became a battleground concerning who is allowed to speak and what is allowed to be heard.
Both movements realised that walls are not neutral since they are surfaces of power and writing on them amounts to challenging that power. When the British burned his pamphlets Chittoprosad realised this. The students of Jadavpur realise it when their murals are covered with a layer of whitewash and the students in Paris realised it when they wrote 'Prohibiting prohibited' on the walls of the Sorbonne.
The Commons of Knowledge
One of the main messages of The Walls Have the Floor is its emphasis on the commons. The graffiti expressed the idea that knowledge is not something held by a small number of people—such as 'mandarin' professors or government technocrats—but rather is something shared by everyone. People had the freedom to read it, the freedom to respond to it, and the freedom to erase it and rewrite it. The walls were owned by everybody who passed by.
The idea now seems more and more distant in 2026; our digital public squares are owned by corporations, their content is selected by algorithms, and they are geared towards generating revenue at every opportunity. When it came to their readers the walls of '68 asked nothing more than attention and of their writers nothing more than courage. The walls of Jadavpur ask the same thing.
As Sagnik Vajra stated following the row,
"All the things that I and my friends did on campus were based solely on our feelings of love for this world and for the people nearby."
He pointed out that the chief minister's video placed greater emphasis on the couple kissing to the left of Chittoprosad's face—a scene which had been directly copied from one of Chittoprosad's own cuts. "Is that what worries them? Is that what they consider 'deranged'? Love? I still can't see how. But I do know this: given all that is going on around us, I believe that each and every one of us needs a little bit of love in our lives and should keep on holding onto that love."
In his series of linocuts which show couples embracing, Chittoprosad had made use of 'the political dimension of radical love and care in the face of hate and oppression'. It is this kind of love—love for the hungry, love for the oppressed, and love for the right to speak—that the walls defend; and that is the reason why the walls respond by speaking back.
As Besançon said,
"Such cries—made with a nail on chalk, with limestone on bondstone, and with ink on paper, rejecting politics, challenging philosophy, aesthetics, and poetry—were creative acts."
They continue to be so. Whether it was on a wall in Paris in 1968, in Midnapore in 1943, or at Jadavpur in 2026, the same question arises: who is allowed to speak and who is allowed to listen?
The walls have the floor and they are not returning it.
