Letterist International

The Letterist International (in French: L'Internationale lettriste, abbreviated I.L.) was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman rejoined by Jean-Louis Brau and Serge Berna as a schism from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group. The group went on to join others in forming the Situationist International, taking some key techniques and ideas with it.

"Letterist" (lettriste) was the form the group themselves used as in their 1955 sticker "If you believe you have genius, or if you think you have only a brilliant intelligence, write the letterist internationale". Although the spelling "Lettrist" is also common in English, authors and translators such as Donald Nicholson-Smith, Simon Ford, Sadie Plant, and Andrew Hussey use the "Letterist International" (LI) spelling.

The group was a motley assortment of novelists, sound poets, painters, film-makers, revolutionaries, bohemians, alcoholics, petty criminals, lunatics, under-age girls, and self-proclaimed failures. In the summer of 1953, their average age was a mere twenty years, rising to twenty nine and a half in 1957. In their blend of intellectualism, protest and hedonism—though differing in other ways, for instance in their total rejection of spirituality—they might be viewed as French counterparts of the American Beat Generation, particularly in the form it took during exactly the same period, i.e., before anyone from either group achieved notoriety, and were still having the adventures that would inform their later works and ideas.