Suzanne, grandmotherly with neat snowy hair, prim gray anorak and white shirt fastened at the collar with a blue brooch, glanced furtively up and down the subway platform bustling with out-on-the-towners.
Slowly, the station emptied; the coast was clear. Spinning on her heels, a mischievous glint in her soft blue eyes, she whipped a red wax crayon from her handbag and, wielding it sword-like, scrawled her fury across a platform-wall advertising billboard for French home appliances retailer Darty.
"TOO MANY THINGS, NOT ENOUGH POETRY!" she wrote.
Pow! Thus was another blow struck in a fight raging in France against advertising. The attackers are a small, heterogeneous but determined band of campaigners for whom publicity is a plague. Their battlegrounds are the tunnels and platforms of Paris' subway, and bus stops in other towns. Their targets: companies that make capitalism tick.
Organizing over the Internet, hunted by the forces of order, these urban guerrillas are focusing debate on advertising's power. Is there too much of it? Does it really work? Should we fight back?
For Suzanne, a 63-year-old political militant since she first threw stones at police during student riots that shook France in 1968, the answer to those questions is "Yes."
"Capitalism needs consumerism to survive," she said. "If we get rid of advertising, we get rid of consumerism and that will get rid of capitalism."
Mmmmmm. It's hard to envisage the foundations of the global economy toppling soon. But the anti-advertising movement has provoked a counterattack from French advertising giant Publicis and Paris' public transportation operator, the RATP.
Joining forces, the two firms are taking 62 anti-ad militants to court on Wednesday, seeking US$1.2 million in damages for destruction wreaked on billboards.
Suzanne is not among those 62, but the threat of fines scares her enough that she won't give her surname. Nevertheless, she campaigns on, riding the Metro with a band of like-minded teenagers one recent Saturday, trailing destruction in their wake.
Pssssshhhhhh. Louis, 16, worked quickly but efficiently with a can of black spray paint. "ADVERTISING NUMBS YOU" read his still-dripping slogan on a billboard for the movie "Shrek 2."
"Walt Disney. Hollywood. Big budget. No good," he muttered by way of explanation before sprinting down the platform to attack another billboard before a train pulled in.
"It's joy," he said, describing how it felt to spray. "It's a real pleasure to finally be able to resist."
France's anti-advertising campaign to some extent dovetails with a larger European and even worldwide movement against globalization that regularly protests meetings of the WTO, the G8 industrial nations and other "capitalist" bodies.
One of Suzanne's band, Christophe, 17, said he traveled down to the Alps last June to protest a G8 summit.
Suzanne's group changed subway lines every three or four stations to avoid security agents. At each station, they first followed other passengers heading toward the exits. Then, having determined that no guards were lurking in the tunnels, they doubled-back to spray and rip down ads.
In all, militants damaged 3,500 posters that night, says Metrobus, a Publicis subsidiary that sells the subway's advertising space. It says it has to compensate firms whose ads are targeted.
Suzanne's group alone attacked more than 50 billboards in at least eight stations. At one stop, they happened across other campaigners slapping up stickers marked, "The struggle against ads continues." Other stickers read, "Every day I wash my brain with advertising," mocking laundry detergent ads.
"Advertising is a one-way message that amounts to harassment," said one campaigner, Nicolas, a teacher in his 30s. "We should have the right to refuse it."
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