The Game of War

The first biography in English of the modern French revolutionary.'It could almost be believed that I was the only person to have loved Paris', Debord said, then, almost with a shrug, 'but no one has twice raised Paris to revolt.'Since his death in 1994 (when he put a bullet through his heart in his lonely farmhouse), Guy Debord has been hailed as one of the key thinkers of the age. He was full of contradictions; his public life was predicated upon the single-mindedness of his revolutionary intentions, but in private he sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism. Implicated in the events of May 1968, Italian terrorism, and the murder of his friends, he was under surveillance by the French secret police for over a decade. This is the story of the lone, defiant figure who, at one historic moment in 1968, appeared to lead the drift of art and politics in Paris.