To the Public
Before going down among you to pull out your decaying teeth, your running ears, your tongues full of sores,
Before breaking your putrid bones,
Before opening your cholera-infested belly and taking out for use as fertiliser your too-fatted liver, your ignoble spleen and your diabetic kidneys,
Before tearing out your ugly sexual organ, incontinent and slimy,
Before extinguishing your appetite for beauty, ecstasy, sugar, philosophy, mathematical and poetic metaphysical pepper and cucumbers,
Before disinfecting you with vitriol, cleansing you and shellacking you with passion,
Before all that,
We shall take a big antiseptic bath,
And we warn you,
We are murderers.
-- Manifesto signed by Ribemont-Dessaignes and read by seven people at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, 5th February 1920