Abstract
If the avant-garde is a reaction to the crisis of modernity, it reacts to an even greater extent to the World War, being a catastrophic manifestation of this crisis. While the (Italian) Futurists see their fantasies of destruction realized in this war, the French pre-war avant-garde produces more nuanced reactions: Apollinaire presents a ‘normalisation’ of the events of the war and Cendrars exposes the exceptional character of this ‘normality’. As for the Surrealists, the experience of war leads them to declare ‘war’ on society and literature. By their manifestos and through the urban novels of Aragon, Breton and Soupault, the Surrealists declare a ‘state of exception’ in order to revolutionize art and society, a project repudiated, at the latest “vingt ans après” (Aragon), by the Second World War.
