should end up with a celebration of the aeroplane: aviation constituted a perfect synthesis of all Futurist themes, the contempt for history and attachment to the past, a warlike view of the world, the celebration of technology and speed, ending up with a post-humanist vision of the human body and the machine:
It is necessarily therefore to prepare the imminent and ineluctable identification between man and engine, which will make possible and perfect an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline … We aspire to create a non-human type in whom moral weakness, goodness, emotion and love will be abolished … The non-human and mechanical type, built for an omnipresent speed, will be by nature cruel, omniscient and combative.12
Futurism, the first resolutely avant-garde movement, linked the aesthetic and political fields intimately together13 with the aim of superseding the human, aviation and the figure of the airman being the prototypes of this. Futurism not only launched into ‘aero-poetry’ and ‘aero-painting’, but also into ‘aero-cuisine’, the promotion of a ‘food adapted to a life ever more aerial and rapid’, involving above all ‘the abolition of pasta, the absurd Italian religion’, since ‘it is on account of eating this that [Italians] grow sceptical, ironic and sentimental’.14
The year after the publication of this manifesto saw the appearance of another memorable text on ‘the social influences of aviation’. Achille Loria, professor of economics at the University of Turin and editor of a major intellectual periodical, Echi e commenti, was already one of Italy’s leading intellectuals, and would be appointed a senator in 1919.15 Though almost forgotten today, his name gave rise to Gramsci’s concept of ‘Lorianism’, coined to denote a form of stupidity specific to intellectuals, and of which his article on aviation was the ideal-type:16 ‘this article is entirely a masterpiece of “oddnesses”’ and, ‘given the hilarious character of its content, suited to becoming a “counter-manual” for a school of formal logic and scientific good sense’.17
Like D’Annunzio, Loria was convinced that aviation would revolutionize social life, marking the definitive triumph of economic liberalism. Its first victim, protectionism, would succumb ‘when goods fall on us like meteorites’. In this way, aviation would realize human freedom in the full sense: ‘the tie … that binds the worker to capital will disappear … when the worker, reluctant to enter the factory or banished from it, finds an aeroplane or dirigible that will lift him into the air’. But individual morality would also benefit. The rate of criminality in cities and plains is higher than in mountain villages, which proves the moral benefits of altitude. Loria thus recommends the construction of aerial prisons, and ‘we shall then see, under the magic influence of the rarefied atmosphere, the most baleful murderers transformed into gentle and pious meditators’.18
Given such high stakes as these, it was certainly no longer possible to ‘view aviation as a strange and dangerous game, lacking any practical importance and reserved for acrobats and the mad’, to quote D’Annunzio once more. On the contrary, it set humanity at a crossroads. By its capacity to free him from the hold of gravity, aeronautics could realize man’s true humanity. Technological progress would make him good and benevolent, free, master of himself and the universe. Freed from the weight of earthly phenomena, he could finally realize his spiritual essence. This spiritual and moral idea typical of liberal thought was directly linked with an economic argument, followed by a political one: as humanity would no longer be separated from itself by artificial political borders, men could finally devote themselves to unimpeded global trade. Social conflicts would die down, peace and harmony be established, first of all within one society, then in the whole of the world.
It was not surprising, given this, that the promises of aviation included perpetual peace. Victor Hugo had already formulated this hope. In 1864, from his exile in Guernsey, he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Nadar to congratulate him for his essays on the subject of air travel: ‘Release man. From whom? From his tyrant? Which tyrant? Weight.’19 Aviation meant
the immediate, absolute, instantaneous, universal suppression of borders, everywhere at once, throughout the world … All border posts are abolished. All separation destroyed … All tyranny with no rationale. It means the disappearance of armies, conflicts, wars, exploitation, subjugation, hatred. It means a colossal peaceful revolution … It means the tremendous release of the human race.20
As early as the 1860s, Hugo already reached the conclusion – by an intellectual argument on the philosophical level and a liberal one on the economic and political levels – that aviation was the bearer of universal peace. He was not alone in investing aviation with this power, nor in falling into this technological lyricism. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion said something very similar: ‘When the conquest of the air is achieved, universal fraternity will be established on earth, true peace will descend from the heaven, castes will finally disappear.’21
At the start of the twentieth century, the heroic age of aviation, this conclusion would be reached by a quite different argument. Aviation had the miraculous power to make war impossible, not because it freed men, bringing them together and abolishing borders but, paradoxically, on account of its destructive power.22 The liberal vision of peace was followed by a militarist one. The arrival of flying armies made the art of warfare obsolete: mobilization of men, concentration of troops, marches across the countryside, manoeuvres. At the start of the twentieth century, writers already envisaged the destruction by bombs from the air of industrial centres, capital cities, and military headquarters.
This idea was formulated first of all by Jean de Bloch, a banker and financier of Polish railways, in a book which had tremendous influence, La Guerre future (the book that gave Tsar Nicholas II the idea for an international disarmament conference, leading to the Hague Convention). In Bloch’s well-documented reasoning, the unprecedented increase in firepower had made every kind of classical manoeuvre impossible, inevitably leading to a stabilization on the front. As a consequence, wars would be long, and decided not by victory on the battlefield but by the economic and political collapse of one or more of the warring parties. Bloch was one of the few analysts to foresee the shape of the First World War. Other writers investigated the consequences of aviation for the future of war. In a programmatic work of 1910, La Conquête de l’air et la paix universelle, François Mallet brandished the spectre of the massive destruction of cities. In the face of such a danger, only one outcome was possible: peace, general disarmament, and ‘the solemn reconciliation of peoples as the conclusion’.23
There was thus, on the one hand, the dream of aviation as bearer of perpetual peace, which, by liberating men and bringing them together, prepared the conditions for true freedom and a fully human realm; while, as the converse of this technological idyll, there were warnings against the destructive power of air war and the conclusion that, given that European nations had by and large the same level of technological development and industrial capacity, war would become steadily less likely as it became more risky. What rational government could take the risk of seeing its cities, its industry, and its infrastructure destroyed by bombing in a single night? War could no longer bring any gain, and governments would necessarily end up understanding this.24 We thus see the beginnings, in the discourse on air war of the early twentieth century, of the future doctrine of ‘deterrence’.25 But whether it emphasized this or indeed the rapprochement of peoples, the thesis of a peace-making aviation became a common subject: in France, Paul Painlevé subscribed to it, as did Thomas Edison in the United States.26 Many examples could be given, but the idea remains the same.
Aviation thus sounded the death-knell of war. Perpetual peace could be seen on the horizon and, where this was not the case, the conditions for its advent must be created. And so, after the liberal peace of rapprochement of peoples and free movement of goods, after the armed peace of mutual deterrence, a third idea of peace came into view: cosmopolitan peace. In 1911, the French airman Clément Ader proposed the formation of an air army against Germany. Revanchist nationalism
