Futurism

Futurism, founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, appears in the narrative both as an avant-garde artistic movement and as a source of language and methods for early Fascist politics. Its rejection of inherited cultural authority, praise of action and war, and demand that bystanders choose sides gave it a conspicuous place in the street politics of postwar Milan. Yet the evidence also distinguishes Futurism’s direct interventions from the later growth of Fascist institutions: shared rhetoric and political proximity do not establish that Futurists controlled every development that followed.

Origins and program

Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto circulated across Europe, reaching from Paris to Moscow. It called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies, and proposed replacing reverence for inherited culture with celebration of movement, mass activity, rebellion, and war. Its imagery included the phrase “murdering the moonlight”; its program also praised militarism, patriotism, and destructive acts undertaken in the name of liberation. The movement’s celebration of force was accompanied by contempt for women, a revealing part of the program rather than an incidental feature of its rhetoric.

Futurism’s claims were not confined to artistic language. Marinetti himself enlisted in 1915, leaving the luxuries of his home on Corso Venezia to serve with the Alpines. Wounded, he returned to the front; he experienced defeat at Caporetto and later victory at Vittorio Veneto in a Lancia model 1Z armored car. The contrast between manifesto and experience therefore narrowed: the war Futurism had praised from civilian life became a war its founder personally entered. The narrative records that trajectory without treating his experience as proof that all Futurists shared it.

Futurism in the streets of Milan

On April 15, 1919, a demonstration that had drawn tens of thousands to the Milan arena was followed by the departure of an avant-garde of several thousand marchers, who headed toward Piazza del Duomo. There, beyond a cordon of troops, Marinetti addressed a mixed crowd that included civilians, officers, university students, Arditi, and Fascists. He had climbed onto the marble lion at the base of the equestrian monument to Vittorio Emanuele II; after climbing down, he urged perplexed onlookers to join the counter-demonstration. His insistence that there should be no spectators turned neutrality itself into a target. The appeal made participation a test of political allegiance.

The two processions embodied different relationships to violence. At the head of the socialist column, women carried a portrait of Lenin and a red flag, singing for a better life for their children. The smaller counter-procession was led by men accustomed to wartime killing, among them Arditi and Futurists. Carabinieri initially divided the sides, but when the cordon opened, the confrontation became a brief battle: stones and clubs came from the socialist marchers, while officers, Arditi, and Futurists fired first into the air and then toward the column. The marchers fell silent and stared at the armed men. In this scene Futurism was not simply a doctrine discussed in print; its founder acted as an organizer within a confrontation in which the artistic celebration of action met the real force of street politics.

From avant-garde language to Fascist organization

The movement also contributed people and vocabulary to early Fascist organizing. The first Roman Fascio, formed on May 15, was initiated by Futurists Mario Carli and Enrico Rocca together with Giuseppe Bottai, a young Arditi lieutenant and aspiring poet. Its first assembly remained very small, consistent with the wider weakness of Fascist organization at this stage. Futurist participation thus helped establish a local political group, but the small gathering cautions against mistaking initiative for mass influence.

At a later Fascist meeting in the Teatro Olimpia, Benito Mussolini presented the movement in terms that drew explicitly on Futurism. He described the Fascists as anti-doctrinal, dynamic, practical, modern, and oriented toward action, insisting that they had no settled set of preconceived ideas. This language offered a way to hold together a politically mixed movement by defining it through action rather than a coherent doctrine. Mussolini also resisted being reduced to a bodyguard for the bourgeoisie, while maintaining that ties with former interventionist comrades should not be abandoned. Futurist vocabulary therefore served a political strategy of flexibility as well as a style of speed and rupture.

Marinetti spoke after Mussolini at the same meeting. He demanded the de-Vaticanization of Italy, replacement of the Senate with a body of twenty-year-olds, public acclamation of intellectuals, and free access to art exhibitions. The proposals joined institutional upheaval to cultural reform, carrying the movement’s attack on established authority into a specific political program. Their reception, however, differed from their ambition: the rally was already over, and outside the meeting the crowd was armed with stones. Futurist performance could command attention, but it could not by itself overcome popular hostility or resolve the strategic tensions within Fascism.

Political development and limits of the evidence

The subsequent narrative places these early scenes against the expansion and institutionalization of Fascism. In 1921, the party ticket was presented as settled rather than open to discussion, and liberal acceptance of an alliance with Fascists marked their entry into parliamentary politics. By December, the newly elected secretary general Michele Bianchi declared party sections and combat squads inseparable, openly asserting an armed dimension to party organization. These developments show a political movement increasingly combining electoral and parliamentary activity with organized violence; the evidence does not identify them as decisions made by Futurists or as direct consequences of Futurist organization.

Other later scenes underscore the changed political setting without establishing Futurist control over it. In November 1922, the Chamber of Deputies was packed for Benito Mussolini’s entry as head of government, and the public spectacle of the occasion obscured the deaths and serious injuries that had occurred during the preceding fifteen days in Rome. The narrative also describes the founders of the National Fascist Party kneeling at the Unknown Soldier’s tomb, framing the act as evidence that politics was becoming a religion. By May 1924, Giacomo Matteotti had the floor in a hostile Chamber. These episodes register the transformation of public politics from street confrontation to parliamentary spectacle and intimidation. Futurism’s significance lies in its early contribution to the language and theatrical pressure of action, not in a demonstrated command of this later sequence.