Frantz Fanon

Based on Wikipedia: Frantz Fanon

The Psychiatrist Who Became a Revolutionary

In 1956, a French-trained psychiatrist working at a colonial hospital in Algeria faced an impossible contradiction. By day, he treated French soldiers suffering psychological trauma from torturing Algerian prisoners. By night, he treated the Algerians those same soldiers had tortured. The man caught between these two worlds was Frantz Fanon, and his attempt to make sense of this moral abyss would produce some of the twentieth century's most influential writings on colonialism, race, and human liberation.

Fanon's story spans three continents and multiple identities: Caribbean islander, French soldier, psychiatrist, revolutionary, diplomat, and philosopher. He died at thirty-six from leukemia, having compressed into that short life enough experience and thought to shape liberation movements for decades to come.

A Caribbean Childhood in the Shadow of Empire

Frantz Omar Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique. The island had been a French colony for centuries, and by Fanon's time it occupied a peculiar position in the imperial hierarchy—not quite France, but not quite foreign either. His family was middle class, comfortable enough to send him to the Lycée Victor Schœlcher, the most prestigious secondary school on the island.

There, Fanon encountered a teacher who would shape his thinking: Aimé Césaire, the poet and politician who would become one of the founders of the Négritude movement. Césaire's ideas about black identity and dignity planted seeds that would later flower in Fanon's own work.

The young Fanon was also an avid football player. This detail might seem trivial, but it hints at something important about his character—a physicality and engagement with collective activity that would later manifest in his belief that mental health treatment should integrate patients into their communities rather than isolating them in institutions.

War and Disillusionment

World War Two arrived in Martinique through the back door. After France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, the island came under control of naval officers loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime. Fanon later described watching these French authorities drop their masks and behave like "authentic racists." The veneer of Republican ideals—liberty, equality, fraternity—had been thin all along.

In 1943, at seventeen, Fanon fled during his brother's wedding. He made his way to the British colony of Dominica to join the Allied cause. When a local uprising overthrew the Vichy regime in Martinique later that year—an event Fanon would later call "the birth of the Martinican proletariat"—he returned home and enlisted in the Free French Forces.

What followed was a brutal education in the gap between French rhetoric and French reality.

Fanon underwent training in Morocco, where he was shocked by the racial discrimination within the supposedly liberationist Free French army. He then deployed to Algeria, where he witnessed the antisemitism and Islamophobia of the pieds-noirs—the French colonists who had enthusiastically supported Vichy's racist laws. In August 1944, his unit participated in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France. Near Montbéliard, shrapnel tore into his body. He spent two months in a hospital and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery.

Then came the final insult. After Allied forces crossed into Germany, Fanon and his fellow black soldiers were removed from their units and sent south. Charles de Gaulle, the leader of Free France, had decided that the liberation of German cities should appear to be accomplished by white Frenchmen. The black colonial soldiers who had bled for France's freedom were now an embarrassment to be hidden away.

Fanon wrote to his brother Joby from Europe: "I've been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes... I'm sick of it all."

Becoming a Psychiatrist

After the war, Fanon returned to Martinique to finish his secondary education. He worked on Aimé Césaire's campaign for the French National Assembly before leaving for France to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. There, he also immersed himself in literature, drama, and philosophy, attending lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist whose ideas about embodiment and perception would influence Fanon's thinking about how racism is experienced not just intellectually but physically, in the body.

Fanon wrote three plays during this period. Two survive, though they remain little-known compared to his political writings. After qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951, he did a residency at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole under François Tosquelles, a radical Catalan psychiatrist who had fled Franco's Spain. Tosquelles emphasized the role of culture in mental illness—an insight that would prove crucial to Fanon's later work in Algeria, where he would have to develop entirely new therapeutic approaches to reach patients whose cultural backgrounds differed radically from anything French psychiatry had prepared him for.

Black Skin, White Masks

In 1952, while completing his residency, Fanon published his first book. It began as his doctoral dissertation, originally titled "Essay on the Disalienation of the Black." The faculty rejected it—too inflammatory, too personal, too political for an academic thesis. Fanon submitted a narrower, more conventional dissertation on hereditary neurological disorders and received his degree. But he wasn't about to let his real work disappear into a drawer.

Francis Jeanson, a left-wing philosopher and book editor at Éditions du Seuil, read the rejected manuscript and recognized its importance. He suggested a new title: Black Skin, White Masks. When Fanon came to the editorial meeting, amid Jeanson's praise, he suddenly exclaimed: "Not bad for a nigger, is it?"

Jeanson, insulted, threw him out of his office.

Later, Jeanson learned that his refusal to play along—his insistence on treating Fanon as an equal who could be held to normal standards of conduct—had earned him the writer's lifelong respect. The incident captures something essential about what Fanon was trying to articulate: the psychic trap of racism, where even praise can feel like condescension, where success can feel like performing for white approval, where the colonized person is never simply a person but always a "Black person," defined by their difference from the unmarked, universal "Man."

Black Skin, White Masks is a difficult book—part psychoanalysis, part autobiography, part philosophical treatise. Its central argument is that colonialism doesn't just exploit people economically or dominate them politically. It gets inside their heads. It creates feelings of inferiority so deep that the colonized person may unconsciously try to become white, to adopt the colonizer's language, values, and standards, in a doomed attempt at recognition that can never succeed because the colonial system requires their subordination.

Fanon drew on his own experience. As a child in Martinique, he had been admonished for speaking Creole French instead of "real French"—meaning white French, metropolitan French. The message was clear: to be accepted, to be fully human, he would have to erase himself.

Algeria: The Laboratory of Colonial Violence

In 1953, Fanon took a position at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. He was now working within the heart of the French colonial system, in a country where over a million European settlers ruled over nine million Arabs and Berbers. The pieds-noirs whose racism had shocked him during the war were now his neighbors and colleagues.

Fanon immediately began transforming his ward. He introduced socio-therapy, connecting with patients' cultural backgrounds rather than treating them as generic cases. He organized football matches between patients and staff—echoing his youthful love of the game. He trained nurses and interns in his new methods.

Then, in November 1954, the Algerian War of Independence began.

The French response was brutal. Torture became routine. And Fanon found himself in an impossible position. French soldiers came to him suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress—nightmares, anxiety, depression—caused by the torture they had inflicted on prisoners. Algerian victims of that same torture came to him seeking healing from their trauma. Fanon treated both.

He also began making clandestine trips across Algeria, particularly in the Kabylia region, studying the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. Some of these trips provided cover for meetings with the Front de Libération Nationale, the revolutionary organization leading the independence struggle. Visits to a ski resort called Chrea, which hid an FLN base, were particularly useful.

By summer 1956, Fanon could no longer maintain the pretense. In November, he submitted his resignation letter to the French authorities, a document that would itself become influential in anti-colonial circles:

There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months, my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself.

Shortly after, he was expelled from Algeria.

Revolutionary Diplomat

Fanon moved to Tunis, where he joined the FLN openly. He became part of the editorial collective of Al Moudjahid, the revolutionary newspaper, and served as ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government. He attended conferences across Africa—Accra, Conakry, Addis Ababa, Leopoldville, Cairo, Tripoli—building connections between the Algerian revolution and pan-African liberation movements.

This was not merely symbolic work. Fanon was deeply involved in military strategy. He helped plan the opening of a southern front to the war, working out how to run supply lines across the Sahara. He drove hundreds of miles across the desert in conditions so punishing that the journey contributed to his physical collapse.

It was after returning from one such trip that Fanon received his diagnosis: leukemia.

The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon went to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced a temporary remission. He returned to Tunis knowing he was dying. What followed was an extraordinary burst of creative energy. Too weak to write, he dictated his final book, The Wretched of the Earth, while continuing to lecture to soldiers of the Armée de Libération Nationale at their base near the Tunisian border.

He also traveled to Rome for a three-day meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher who had greatly influenced his thinking. Sartre agreed to write a preface to the book—a preface that became famous in its own right, perhaps too famous, since some readers encountered Fanon's ideas only through Sartre's interpretation of them.

The Wretched of the Earth is angrier than Black Skin, White Masks. Where the earlier book psychoanalyzed the effects of racism on the individual psyche, this one addresses the collective violence of colonialism and the necessity of revolutionary violence in response. Fanon argued that decolonization could never be a peaceful process, because the colonial system was itself founded on violence. The colonized would have to fight their way to freedom, and that fight—however brutal—would be psychologically liberating, a reclamation of human dignity.

This argument has made Fanon controversial ever since. Critics accused him of glorifying violence. Supporters argued he was simply describing reality: that colonial powers never grant independence peacefully, that violence is already present in the colonial situation, and that the question is only whether the colonized will fight back.

Death in Bethesda

As Fanon's condition worsened, his comrades urged him to seek treatment in the United States, where his Soviet doctors believed he might find better care. In 1961, the Central Intelligence Agency arranged his trip—an irony not lost on anyone involved. The revolutionary who had dedicated his life to fighting Western imperialism would die in the belly of the beast.

The circumstances of his final weeks remain disputed. What seems clear is that he was kept waiting in a hotel for several days before receiving treatment, during which time he contracted pneumonia. The delay may have been bureaucratic, or it may have been deliberate. Fanon was, after all, an enemy of France and a symbol of movements the United States was working to suppress.

On December 6, 1961, Frantz Fanon died in Bethesda, Maryland. He was thirty-six years old. He had been admitted under the name Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan alias he had adopted after being wounded on an FLN mission. His body was returned to Algeria, where it lay in state in Tunisia before being buried in a martyrs' cemetery at Aïn Kerma.

The Wretched of the Earth was published the same year he died. Algeria won its independence the following year, after one of the bloodiest colonial wars of the twentieth century.

Legacy and Family

Fanon left behind a French wife, Josie, their son Olivier, and a daughter from an earlier relationship, Mireille, whom he had acknowledged but never really known. Josie grew disillusioned with the independent Algeria that Fanon had helped create. After years of depression, she died by suicide in Algiers in 1989.

Mireille became a professor of international law and conflict resolution and now serves as president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Olivier became president of the Frantz Fanon National Association, created in Algiers in 2012. The family has worked to preserve and contextualize Fanon's legacy, which has been claimed—and sometimes distorted—by movements across the political spectrum.

For more than sixty years, Fanon's ideas have inspired national liberation movements in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. The Black Panther Party studied him. So did Palestinian revolutionaries. So did anti-apartheid activists. His analysis of how colonialism damages the psyche remains central to post-colonial studies and critical theory.

The Psychiatrist's Vision

It would be a mistake to remember Fanon only as a revolutionary theorist of violence. He was also a practicing psychiatrist who cared deeply about healing. His model of community psychology—integrating patients into family and community rather than isolating them in institutions—anticipated developments in mental health treatment that wouldn't become mainstream for decades. His work with Tosquelles helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy, which sought to transform the asylum from a place of confinement into a therapeutic community.

In a sense, Fanon's politics and his psychiatry were always connected. He saw colonialism as a kind of collective mental illness, a deformation of both colonizer and colonized. And he saw liberation not just as political freedom but as psychological healing—the recovery of full humanity by those whom the colonial system had reduced to less than human.

That vision, forged in the impossible contradictions of a colonial hospital, continues to challenge and inspire. The scaffolding Fanon built—to borrow the metaphor of the Substack article that prompted this exploration—was meant to support the construction of a world where such contradictions would no longer be possible. Whether that world can be built remains an open question. But the tools Fanon provided for understanding why it must be built have lost none of their power.