A Preface to Futurism (on the 100 year anniversary of the publication of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism)

When the founding manifesto of Futurism first appeared in the Saturday, February 20, 1909 edition of Le Figaro, a brief preamble was tacked on by Gaston Calmette, the managing editor:

Mr. Marinetti, the young Italian and French poet endowed with a remarkable and fiery talent [1], known throughout the Latin world thanks to his stirring performances [2] and followed by a constellation of enthusiastic disciples [3], has just founded the School of "Futurism" [4], the boldness of whose theories exceeds that of all prior and contemporary schools [5]. The Figaro has provided a platform for many of the latter [6] (and not the least outstanding among them). So, today, it presents its readers with the manifesto of the "Futurists" [7]. Needless to say, the manifesto's author assumes full responsibility for his singularly daring and extravagant ideas [8] and for their often unjust attack on eminently respectable and universally respected things [9]. Yet it seemed worthwhile to grant our readers an exclusive first look [10] at this document, irrespective of one's views regarding its merits [11].¹

Properly speaking, the moment of Futurism's birth had occured four months earlier, when the following article appeared in Corriere della Sera:

This morning, a bit before noon, F. T. Marinetti was heading down Via Domodossola in his car. The vehicle's owner was at the wheel accompanied by a 23 year-old mechanic, Ettore Angelini. Although the details of the incident remain sketchy, it appears that an evasive maneuver was required by the sudden appearance of a bicyclist, and resulted in the vehicle being flipped into a ditch.²

Within a few short weeks the event had been reworked as the foundation myth of the century's first cultural political avant-garde, initially literary but soon encompassing the full spectrum of the arts, whose eleven-point platform weds advocacy of "the habit of energy and fearlessness," "aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the race pace, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch" to the exaltation of the beauty of speed. The prose is telegraphic, the message time-sensitive; the manifesto is news from the future. Marinetti sought to publish it immediately (and there were leaks and pre-releases). But the news pipeline was so clogged with reports on the simmering Bosnian crisis, soon to be followed by the Messina earthquake, that three months would pass before backstage lobbying by a family friend led to the text's appearance on the Parisian newspaper's front page.

As the artfully crafted prose of the preface reproduced above suggests, the three month delay may also have been motivated by other considerations. Authored by Calmette, Le Figaro's managing editor since 1903 and the older brother of the noted bacteriologist Albert Calmette, it was strategically placed before the manifesto in order to vaccinate the newspaper's readership against Marinetti's breach of the then-conventional decorum governing cultural debates. Such prefaces were infrequent even in a daily that courted controversy as recently as the Dreyfus affair, carrying no less than four of Émilie Zola's fiery polemics in the run up to the publication of his no less incendiary J'accuse on the pages of its republican socialist rival L'Aurore.³ Though omitted from subsequent editions of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Calmette's preface marks the inaugural moment in the reception history of the 20^th century's first avant-garde.

The commentary that follows tracks Calmette's attempts to comfort and contain even as he acknowledges the manifesto's disruptiveness. The tone is self-assured. The aim is to push Futurism back into the mold of prior literary-artistic schools: to frame its rhetoric of rupture, however incendiary, in a manner that conveys continuity. Yet, in so doing, Calmette cannot resist the temptation to traffic in two of the mainstays of the emerging public sphere of the early 20^th century: sensationalism and the claim that this is a Le Figaro exclusive. Five years later, the editor himself would fall victim to one of the era...