Dadaism, the revolutionary artistic movement that emerged in different European countries around 1916 and that preceded Surrealism, was, in effect, an angry and outraged reaction to the values of contemporary society, and was fuelled even more by the senseless destruction of the First World War, which many saw as the consequence of those values and beliefs. The fate of millions of young men dragooned into fighting for their country and exposed by their superiors to the most terrible conditions – clinging mud, stinking trenches, endless shelling, mustard gas, disease, hunger and, in many cases, death or chronic illness and injury – intensified a fundamental questioning of all those hitherto sacred cows that had led to and were manifest in the course of that catastrophic conflict: patriotism, honour, and self-sacrifice among them. These were, of course, ideals that were identified with those groups that exercised power and control, that enjoyed position and wealth, and in which the bourgeoisie figured prominently. In relation to the French social structure in particular, the word ‘bourgeois’ covered a broad economic spectrum, which included those families that were extremely rich, as well as those that were salaried or self-employed but not necessarily very well off. Wealthy or not, they nevertheless shared similar views, those at the lower end of the scale aspiring to the status of those above, and therefore embracing all those things that the latter believed in, be it decency and propriety, the importance of money, good name, respect or love of one’s country. In short, these were the traditional and essentially conservative principles that had been at the heart of French and European society for many years and which the Dadaists made every effort to undermine.

The extent to which Dadaism struck out at everything conventional may be gauged by the activities of one of its founders, Tristan Tzara, who in 1916 was also one of the founders of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and the co-editor of a new magazine of the same name. The Cabaret Voltaire was in reality a room in a milk bar, the Meierei, in one of the more disreputable parts of Zurich, an area inhabited by many foreign exiles then in neutral Switzerland. A different programme was offered every night and was invariably anarchic. Richard Huelsenbeck, a medical student and poet, read his poems to the beat of a big drum.