Ever wondered how the great revolt of the student back in 1968 was supported by artists?ever wondered where did they find the money to have all these mind provoking sketches on the walls of Paris.The use of image and drawings as a way to pass your message to a wide and great audience is  greatly exploited by those in control of mass media today...Still an image or a painting can also support a revolution,....look at the drawings around these pages which were on the walls of paris during the month of may by the student and you will understand how a poster can support a movement.... 
So it all started back in paris 1968 when the frustration from the conservative governement of charles de gaule,the great amounts of unempoyd people because of the wrong use of the syste and the poverty motivated thousands of people to get out of their houses and shout for their right to free education,freedom and the right to live a descent life..
All that didnt happen in one day but during the pass of time the ask and the shouting for a change was spread all over france.Afterall till the 15nth of may about 11 million workers and the majority of university schools were on strike/occupied...This is when the ATELIER POPULAIRE (Popular Workshop) was formed. The faculty and student body of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were on strike, and a number of the students met spontaneously in the lithographic department to produce the first poster of the revolt, "Usines, Universites, Union."

On May 16th, art students, painters from outside the university and striking workers decided to permanently occupy the art school in order to produce posters that would, "Give concrete support to the great movement of the workers on strike who are occupying their factories in defiance of the Gaullist government." The posters of the ATELIER POPULAIRE were designed and printed anonymously and were distributed for free. They were seen on the barricades, carried in demonstrations and were plastered on walls all over France. Their bold and provocative messages were extremely influential and still resonate in our own time.

OF course maybe this revolution did not achieve it's primary goals...still it managed to warn these people who have the power to control and decide on our lives that when people can't take no more they have the will , and they have the power to make their voice heard all over the globe....
 
 

Statement by the ATELIER POPULAIRE
"The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the ATELIER POPULAIRE has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an "outside" observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political plane."