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.

"In his oral memoir The Tribe, Jean-Michel Mension provides a useful context for [Guy] Debord's particular estrangement from postwar modernity. Mension reveals a multicultural dimension that is rarely explored in the burgeoning literature on this group . . . " –McKenzie Wark, Bookforum

"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 quest of a Rimbaudian derangement of all the senses, of detournement of art and daily life by the defiance of order, by vandalism, by delinquency, but also an altogether contemporary quest for a supersession of Marxism." —Le Monde libertaire

Jean-Michel Mension (b. 1934), after his vie errante in the Latin Quarter, became a militant in the Ligue Communiste.The Tribe is Mension’s first book; he recently published his second, Le Temps gage: aventures politiques et artistiques d’un irrégulier à Paris.