2013 marks the one hundredth anniversary from 1913, an annus mirabilis for French Modernism, with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Alcools, La Prose du Transsibérien, the creation of the first ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, or the premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps. The International Conference “1913: The Year of French Modernism” seizes the opportunity of the centennial in order to capture a moment of vibrant creativity in France and a crucial moment for the quickly emerging modernism throughout the world. Through papers on specific works that were created or made public on and around 1913, we will try to outline the physiognomy of French Modernism: its protagonists, strategies, and genres, its dynamics, themes, and legacies as they were put into place during that seminal year. In addition to shedding new light on specific works, the conference’s underlying theoretical motivation is twofold. First, to create collectively a coherent landscape for French Modernism, a domain in scholarship that remains still unexplored as a canonical category; in other words we will try to answer the deceptively simple question “what constituted Modernism in France?” Second, our goal is to establish with this conference a strong position for French Modernism within the thriving field of Modernist Studies in American Academia, dominated almost exclusively by the Anglophone world. In other words, we will try to answer the question “what is the place of France on the map of global Modernism?”