The Notre-Dame Affair was an action performed by Michel Mourre, Serge Berna, Ghislain Desnoyers de Marbaix, and Jean Rullier, members of the radical wing of the Lettrist movement, on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1950, at Notre-Dame Cathedral

Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...

 in Paris, while the mass was aired live on national TV. Mourre, dressed in the habit of a Dominican

Dominican Order

The Order of Preachers , after the 15th century more commonly known as the Dominican Order or Dominicans, is a Catholic religious order founded by Saint Dominic and approved by Pope Honorius III on 22 December 1216 in France...

 monk

Monk

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

 and backed by his co-conspirators, chose a quiet moment in the Easter High Mass to climb to the rostrum and declaim before the whole congregation a blasphemous anti-sermon on the death of God, penned by Berna.

The Mourre-Berna Proclamation

Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,

Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,

I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,

I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,

I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality,

Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.

Verily I say unto you: God is dead,

We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers,

For your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.

Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead,

And till this earth anew with your bare hands,

With your PROUD hands,

With your unpraying hands.

Today Easter day of the Holy Year,

Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,

We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

The aftermath

The action and the events leading up to and following it are described in detail in Michel Mourre's autobiography. The authors of the action, young bohemians tied to Lettrism

Lettrism

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...

, an avant-garde movement surrounding Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou

Isidore Isou , born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist...

, were all arrested by the police, and thereby saved, in effect, from the furious mob that chased them from the church. The only one held for any length of time was Mourre, himself a former Dominican monk and the instigator of the whole affair. As his fate was being decided, dozens of prominent voices from culture, the church and the state joined a debate in the newspapers on the merits or (more commonly) not, of the provocation.

In particular Combat

Combat (newspaper)

Combat was a French newspaper created during the Second World War. Originally a clandestine newspaper of the Resistance, it was headed by Albert Ollivier, Jean Bloch-Michel, Georges Altschuler and, most of all, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Emmanuel Mounier, and then Raymond Aron...

, an organ of the French Resistance

French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

, began with a commentary by its editor Louis Pauwels condemning the action; but a vehement letter in response by André Breton

André Breton

André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

, attacking Pauwels for his "partial account," and defending the actions, escalated the debate; to it were devoted eight days of coverage and a running editorial forum amounting to a total of twenty-some articles by such figures as Jean Paulhan

Jean Paulhan

Jean Paulhan was a French writer, literary critic and publisher, director of the literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Française from 1925 to 1940 and from 1946 to 1968. He was a member of the Académie Française...

, Pierre Emmanuel, Maurice Nadeau

Maurice Nadeau

Maurice Nadeau is a French writer and editor. He was born in Paris. One of his well-known works, translated into several languages, is the Histoire du surréalisme , published in French in 1944 and in English 21 years later, translated by Richard Howard. Nadeau turned 100 in May 2011.- External...

, Messieur the Police Commissioner, le curé de Saint-Pierre de Chaillot, Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society...

, Benjamin Péret

Benjamin Péret

Benjamin Péret was a French poet, Parisian Dadaist and a founder and central member of the French Surrealist movement with his avid use of Surrealist automatism.-Biography:...

, and René Char

René Char

René Char was a 20th century French poet.-Biography:Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in the Vaucluse department of France, the youngest of four children of Emile Char and Marie-Therese Rouget, where his father was mayor and managing director of the Vaucluse plasterworks...

.

The police and the Church, for their part, unable to let the insult pass unpunished, nevertheless wanted to avoid amplifying it through a public trial. After a few days they brought in a psychiatrist of questionable integrity, who recommended locking Mourre away in an asylum. Participants in the Combat debate, attentive to the case, protested, and upon the intervention of a second psychiatrist, Mourre was released on 21 April.

The scandal resonated into the heart of the Lettrist movement. Consistent with practices of agitation on which Isou had founded his movement in 1945, the Notre-Dame affair nevertheless put Isou's radicality, and that of his supporters, to the test. The action thus advanced a nascent rupture in the movement, between two blocs which could be called, respectively, "artistic" and "actionist," a rupture which two years later would lead to a schism and formation of the Lettrist International

Lettrist International

The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group...

. It was after Gil J. Wolman

Gil J. Wolman

Gil Joseph Wolman was a French artist, born in Paris in 1929 and dying there in 1995. His work encompassed painting, poetry and film-making. He was a member of Isidore Isou's avant garde Letterist movement in the early 1950s, then becoming a central figure in the Letterist International, the group...

, Jean-Louis Brau, and Guy Debord

Guy Debord

Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...

, the principal agents of this schism, joined the Lettrist movement, siding with the actionist Ultra-Lettrist bloc still distinguished by the Notre-Dame Affair, and who, along with Ivan Chtcheglov

Ivan Chtcheglov

Ivan Vladimirovitch Chtcheglov, was a French political theorist, activist and poet, born in Paris to Ukrainian father and French mother.-Family background:...

 and Berna, formed the LI. It was the LI, launched on the occasion of an intervention directed against Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

, that between 1952 and 1957 experimented with new forms of art and action that would lead to the Situationist International.

The contributors to the Combat debate sought to diminish the importance of the Notre-Dame action by pointing out that it was not entirely without precedent, as, on 22 March 1892, young Blanquistes had interrupted mass, shouting "Long live the Republic! Long live the Commune! Down with the Church!"