According to Marinetti, futurism was born as a direct consequence of a 1908 car crash in which, attempting to avoid two cyclists, he crashed his Fiat and went flying head over heels into a ditch. The experience led directly to the first futurist manifesto, which achieved an extraordinary coup-de-theâtre when he persuaded the editor of "Le Figaro" to publish the entire manifesto on the front page, February 20th, 1909. Amongst a series of exhortations to replace the 'pensive, immobile' traditional literature with 'exaltmovements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness ... the slap and the blow with the fist.' and 'want[ing to glorify war – the only cure for the world', the piece includes the famous line: