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Futurism, Fascism, and the Art of War
Michael Subialka, Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
The Italian entry into World War I was rooted in a complex mix of secret diplomacy, longstanding
nationalist sentiments, and popular cultural provocation. One of the features of that mix is that it made
for strange bedfellows and stranger combinations of beliefs even within single groups or movements. The
Italian Futurists are no exception, and their years of provocation on behalf of intervention against AustriaHungary (and in Africa) can be traced to a series of conflicting impulses that emerge out of the 19th
century. In their thought, the basic irredentist cause of “completing” the Risorgimento’s unification of
Italy is combined with the 19th-century discourse on vitalism, Darwinian visions of race theory and natural
selection, and also an impulse toward the abstract, mysterious, and metaphysical, transposed from the
realm of religion to human action and artistic creation. This blend of impulses makes the Futurist
provocation emblematic both of the late 19th century and of the coming era of Fascism. It is in this light
that we should approach the shift of alliances achieved by the Patto di Londra (Treaty of London), signed
secretly 26 April 1915, nearly a month before Italy’s entry into the war.
In this presentation I analyse that confluence of historical forces and overlapping ideological
commitments to tackle a pressing question that faces us when we consider Futurist interventionism: why
do political activists think that the best way to achieve their practical aims is through art? I show how, far
from a simply naïve overestimation of the power of art, the Futurist choice to use cultural revolution as a
tool for social and political revolution is indicative of a particular, 19th-century vision of historical change
as a spiritual process, uniting their modernist nationalism to the philosophy of the Italian Risorgimento.
Understanding this helps us to make sense of the particular approach that the Futurists take toward what
Walter Benjamin has called the ‘aestheticization of politics’: they seek to redefine both art and politics.
With examples drawn from the special collections at the Taylor Institution Library, I examine how the
Futurists’ particular form of modernist nationalism emerges at the confluence of those 19th-century
movements. The situation of their artistic call for war spans from Risorgimento irredentism to protoFascist African imperialism (first in Somalia and Ethiopia, then Libya). But the strange fascination of their
bellicose art may be rooted in their (19th-century) vision of Italian spiritual renewal.