In early 1918 F T Marinetti founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later was absorbed into Benito Mussolini’s Fasci Di Combattimento, making Marinetti one of the first supporters and members of the Italian Fascist Party. He opposed Fascism’s later exaltation of existing institutions, calling them “reactionary,” and, after walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrew from politics for three years. However, he remained a notable force in developing the party thought throughout the regime’s existence. For example, at the end of the Congress of Fascist Culture that was held in Bologna on March 30, 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed Sergio Panunzio on the need to define Fascism more purposefully by way of Marinetti’s opinion, stating, “Great spiritual movements make recourse to precision when their primitive inspirations – what F. T. Marinetti identified this morning as artistic, that is to say, the creative and truly innovative ideas, from which the movement derived its first and most potent impulse – have lost their force. We today find ourselves at the very beginning of a new life and we experience with joy this obscure need that fills our hearts – this need that is our inspiration, the genius that governs us and carries us with it.” Thus Futurism continued to influence Fascist thinkers outside of the Futurist movement.
Throughout the Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but failed to do so. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to numerous styles and movements in order to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923 he said, “I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.” Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was as able a cultural entrepreneur as Marinetti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento Group, and even persuaded Marinetti to sit on its board.
Although in the early years of Italian Fascism, modern art was tolerated and even embraced, towards the end of the 1930s, right-wing Fascists introduced the concept of ‘degenerate art’ from Germany to Italy and condemned Futurism. In 1938, hearing that Adolf Hitler wanted to include Futurism in a traveling exhibition of ‘degenerate art’, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini to refuse to let it enter Italy. In the same year he protested publicly against anti-Semitism, which was being copied from Germany by the Italian Fascists.
Marinetti made numerous moves to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant garde with each. He moved from Milan to Rome to be nearer the centre of things. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, saying, “It is important that Futurism be represented in the Academy.” He married despite his condemnation of marriage, promoted religious art after the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and even reconciled himself to the Catholic church, declaring that Jesus was a Futurist.
There were other contradictions in his character: despite his nationalism, he was an international figure, educated in Egypt and France, writing his first poems in French, publishing the Futurist Manifesto in a French newspaper and tirelessly traveling to promote his movement.
Marinetti volunteered for active service in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Second World War, serving on the Eastern Front, despite his advanced age. He died of cardiac arrest while working on a collection of poems praising the wartime achievements of the Decima Flottiglia MAS in Bellagio, Italy on December 2, 1944.