Hains' works were made as if in collaboration with the countless people from a vast array of backgrounds who had pasted, touched, or torn at the posters on the street. Produced at the height of France's postwar identity crisis--when the nation was divided about the best way to deal with a war of independence in its colony Algeria and was experiencing new waves of materialism and modernization--the posters within the work bear witness to this turmoil. In fact, a 1961 exhibition by Villeglé and Hains was titled simply La France déchirée (France in Shreds).