Between 1952 and 1954, Jean-Michel Mension haunted Saint- Germain-des-Prés as a member of the legendary Lettrist International, direct progenitor of the Situationist International. In a series of conversations, Mension recounts this very particular vie de boheme whiled away with Guy Debord and a rogues' gallery of hard drinkers and thinkers.
The Tribe is a rare, vivid tour of a moment and milieu barely noticed at the time by the tourists who flocked to the Left Bank for a glimpse of Sartre & Co. The rich iconography includes many of Ed van der Elsken's celebrated photographs of "the tribe" and a trove of Letterist leaflets and posters.

The Tribe relates the Parisian wanderings of a heterogeneous group of individuals who cultivated laziness and revolt, alcohol and talk, drift and chance, creative hopes and encounters ... in the quest of a Rimbaldian derangement of the senses, of detournement of art and daily life by the defiance of order, by vandalism, be delinquency, but also by an altogether contemporary quest for a supersession of Marxism. * Le Monde libertaire *

Jean-Michel Mension (b. 1934) misspent his youth in Saint- Germain-des-Pres in the early 1950s before joining the Communist Party in 1962 and the Ligue Communiste in 1968. The Tribe is Mension's first book; he recently published his second, Le Temps gage: aventures politiques et artistiques d'un irregular a Paris.