INTRODUCTION 29

before man. 8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why

should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors
of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the
absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipotent speed. 9. We will glorify
war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture
of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. 10.
We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight
moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice. 11. We will
sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of
the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will
sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent
electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents;
factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride
the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adven-
turous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels
paw the tracks like hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the
sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and
seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.
Standing on the summit of the world, we once more send a challenge to the
stars!38

With his sense of theater, Marinetti knew that in order to strike the imag-
ination of his contemporaries, this cry of rebellion had to come out of Paris.
The mecca of arts and letters, an unequaled cultural center, Paris was also a
major center of Italian culture where the most famous Italian writer of his
period, the nationalist hero of the immediate postwar era, Gabriele D’An-
nunzio, lived and worked. Moreover, Marinetti and D’Annunzio often wrote
in French and participated in the intellectual life of the French capital.39
The manifesto of February 1909 was followed by a whole series of declara-
tions of principles applying to various artistic domains such as music, paint-
ing, and architecture. There was even a futurist science and a futurist cui-
sine. And Marinetti’s influence was more or less—and more, rather than
less—felt in most of these areas. The Fascist synthesis meant that aesthetics
became an integral part of politics and economics.40
The Fascist style, striking in its aggressivity, well expressed the new ethi-
cal and aesthetic values. The style expressed its content; it was not simply a
means of mobilizing the masses but represented a new scale of values, a new
vision of culture. All the futurists had the cult of energy, of dynamism and
power, of the machine and speed, of instinct and intuition, of movement,
willpower, and youth. They professed an absolute contempt for the old bour-
geois world and praised the necessity and beauty of violence.41
Was it not natural that these rebels recognize the Sorelians as their verita-
ble twins, especially as this “poetry of heroism” involved a cult of direct