The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism

In public Benito Mussolini seldom acknowledged his debts to the cultural movements that had contributed to fascism’s formation. In private, however, he was often quite explicit in issuing generous certificates of recognition, especially to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, chief among them the Futurist movement and the group that been centered around the journal La Voce. His encounter with La Voce, Mussolini confided to his preferred biographer, had been a revelation for him, giving him the certainty that he was a man of destiny, someone “called upon to announce a new age.” ¹ And with equal generosity il duce spoke of his debts to Futurism: “I formally declare that without Futurism there would never have been a fascist revolution.” ²

Even apart from Mussolini’s statements, which are hardly negligible in their own right, it is difficult to deny the participation of the avant-garde in the formation of fascist political culture. Collaborators and important readers of La Voce became fascist militants; the principal exponents of Futurism were among the founding fathers of the fascist movement and firmly adhered to the totalitarian regime, actively collaborating in the creation of its culture and the diffusion of its ideology; and some, such as Marinetti and Sironi, remained faithful to Mussolini and fascism into the years of the Republic of Salò. Yet the overt participation of avant-garde culture in the generation and the fortunes of fascism has never sufficed to prevent the rise of a lively debate, begun already in the early 1920s, about the nature of their relation, especially in the case of Futurism. In 1923 Giuseppe Pressolini, for example, denied that there was any ideal connection between Futurism and fascism as it had come to be in power, for Futurism was antitraditionalist, individualist, libertarian, antimoralist, and anti-Catholic, while fascism was classicist, hierarchic, authoritarian, moralist, and Catholic. ³ Benedetto Croce, however, writing in 1924, urged the opposite view: “To anyone with a sense of historical connections, the ideal origins of fascism are to be found in Futurism.” ⁴ And in support of his claim the philosopher listed the Futurist matrices of fascism: the cult of action, the disposition toward violence, the intolerance of dissent, desire for the new, disdain for culture and tradition, and the glorification of youth. Ironically, both Croce and Prezzolini may have been right, and, at the same time, wrong. The same might be said for many others who have continued to discuss this question in more or less the same way, sometimes accentuating the points of convergence or consensus between the two movements, sometimes emphasizing their moments of discrepancy or disagreement. Either interpretation can seem valid if one proceeds, as did Croce and Prezzolini, by isolating a single aspect or a particular moment in the relations between the two movements and using that as a basis for generalization.

Analysis of the relations between fascism and Futurism, however, cannot be limited to collating their doctrinal agreements or to registering, in a sort of parallel history, their record of coalition and conflict. Though certainly useful, ultimately such a procedure proves critically sterile, for in practice it merely leads to the reaffirmation of what was already self-evident to the historical protagonists themselves. We know, after all, that Futurism was not identical with fascism on the historical, cultural, or political levels: any such identification was repeatedly contested by futurists who were neither fascists nor antifascists, and it conflicts with the variety of contradictory political ideologies that were lodged within Futurism both before and after the arrival of fascism in power, contradictions that neither prefigured nor were ever resolved within the ideology of fascism. But this recognition does not imply that one can sustain the view, urged by apologists of Futurism committed to minimizing its involvement in fascism, that the culture of Futurism was of a kind that differed fundamentally in its values and its myths from fascist political culture. Nor can the collaboration of Futurism and fascism be dismissed with the reductive thesis that Futurist participation in fascism was merely a matter of personal inclination, an...