Early life Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in
Fort-de-France,
Martinique, which was then part of the
French colonial empire. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, worked as a
customs officer, while Fanon's mother, Eléanore Médélice, who was of
Afro-Caribbean and
Alsatian descent, was a shopkeeper. Fanon was the third of four sons in a family of eight children. Two of his siblings died young, including Fanon's sister Gabrielle, with whom he was very close. As they were
middle class, his family could afford to send Fanon to the Lycée Victor Schœlcher, the most prestigious
secondary school in Martinique, where Fanon came to admire one of his teachers,
Aimé Césaire. The young Frantz Fanon was an avid football player, and played the sport in Martinique, later organizing football matches for patients and staff while working at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria.
World War II After the
Battle of France resulted in the
French Third Republic capitulating to
Nazi Germany in July 1940, Martinique came under the control of
French Navy elements led by Admiral
Georges Robert who were loyal to the collaborationist
Vichy regime. The disruption of imports from
Metropolitan France led to major shortages on the island, which were exacerbated by an American naval
blockade imposed on Martinique in April 1943. Robert's authoritarian regime repressed local
Allied sympathizers, hundreds of whom escaped to nearby
Caribbean islands. Fanon later described the Vichy regime in Martinique as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists". In January 1943, he fled Martinique during the wedding of one of his brothers and travelled to the
British colony of
Dominica in order to link up with other Allied sympathizers. Robert's regime was overthrown by a local uprising in June of that year, which Fanon would later acclaim as "the birth of the [Martinican]
proletariat" as a revolutionary force. After the uprising, Fanon "enthusiastically" returned to Martinique, where
Free French leader
Charles de Gaulle had appointed
Henri Tourtet as the colony's new governor. Tourtet subsequently raised the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion to serve in
Free French Forces (FFL), and Fanon soon joined the unit in Fort-de-France. He underwent basic training before boarding a
troopship bound for
Casablanca,
Morocco in March 1944. After Fanon arrived in Morocco, he was shocked to discover the extent of
racial discrimination in the FFL. He was subsequently transferred to a Free French military base in
Béjaïa,
Algeria, where Fanon witnessed firsthand the
antisemitism and
Islamophobia of the
pieds-noirs, many of whom had supported racist laws promulgated by the Vichy regime. In August 1944, he departed on another troopship from
Oran to France as part of
Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of German-occupied
Provence. After the US
VI Corps secured a
beachhead, Fanon's unit came ashore at
Saint-Tropez and advanced inland. He participated in several engagements near
Montbéliard,
Doubs, and was seriously wounded by shrapnel, which resulted in his being hospitalized for two months. Fanon was awarded a
Croix de Guerre by Colonel
Raoul Salan for his actions in battle, and in early 1945 rejoined his unit and fought in the
Battle of Alsace. After German forces had been pushed out of France and Allied troops crossed the
Rhine into Germany, Fanon and his fellow black troops were removed from their formations and sent southwards to
Toulon as part of de Gaulle's policy of removing non-white soldiers from the French army. Although Fanon had been initially eager to participate in the Allied war effort, the racism he witnessed during the war disillusioned him. Fanon wrote to his brother Joby from Europe that "I've been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes... I'm sick of it all." After qualifying as a
psychiatrist in 1951, Fanon did a residency in psychiatry at
Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole under the radical
Catalan psychiatrist
François Tosquelles, who invigorated Fanon's thinking by emphasizing the role of culture in psychopathology. In 1948, Fanon started a relationship with Michèle Weyer, a medical student, who soon became pregnant. He left her for an 18-year-old high school student, Josie, whom he married in 1952. At his friends' urging, he later recognized his daughter,
Mireille, although he had no contact with her.
Paulin Joachim, who knew Fanon, said that on a number of occasions he had seen Fanon hit Josie. In France, while completing his residency, Fanon wrote and published his first book,
Black Skin, White Masks (1952), an analysis of the negative psychological effects of
colonial subjugation upon black people. Originally, the manuscript was the
doctoral dissertation, submitted at Lyon, entitled
Essay on the Disalienation of the Black, which was a response to the racism that Fanon experienced while studying psychiatry and medicine at the University in Lyon; the rejection of the dissertation prompted Fanon to publish it as a book. In 1951, for his
doctor of medicine degree, he submitted another dissertation of narrower scope and a different subject (''Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l'hérédo-dégénération spino-cérébelleuse : à propos d'un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession
– Mental alterations, character modifications, psychic disorders, and intellectual deficit in hereditary spinocerebellar degeneration: A case of Friedreich's disease with delusions of possession'').
Left-wing philosopher
Francis Jeanson, leader of the pro-Algerian independence
Jeanson network, read Fanon's manuscript and, as a senior book editor at
Éditions du Seuil in Paris, gave the book its new title and wrote its epilogue. After receiving Fanon's manuscript at Seuil, Jeanson invited him to an editorial meeting. Amid Jeanson's praise of the book, Fanon exclaimed: "Not bad for a nigger, is it?" Insulted, Jeanson dismissed Fanon from his office. Later, Jeanson learned that his response had earned him the writer's lifelong respect, and Fanon acceded to Jeanson's suggestion that the book be entitled
Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon's methods of treatment started evolving, particularly by beginning
sociotherapy to connect with his patients'
cultural backgrounds. He also trained nurses and interns. Following the outbreak of the
Algerian revolution in November 1954, Fanon joined the
Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), after having made contact with
Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955. Working at a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon became responsible for treating the psychological distress of the French soldiers and officers who carried out torture in order to suppress anti-colonial resistance. Additionally, Fanon was also responsible for treating Algerian
torture victims. Fanon made extensive trips across Algeria, mainly in the
Kabylia region, to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. His lost study of "The
marabout of Si Slimane" is an example. These trips were also a means of conducting clandestine activities, notably during his visits to the ski resort of
Chrea, which hid an FLN base.
Joining the FLN and exile from Algeria By summer 1956, Fanon realized he could no longer support French efforts, even indirectly, through his hospital work. In November, he submitted his "Letter of Resignation to the Resident Minister", which later became an influential text of its own in
anti-colonialist 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. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done. Shortly afterwards, Fanon was expelled from Algeria and moved to
Tunis, where he joined the FLN openly. He was part of the editorial collective of
Al Moudjahid, for which he wrote until the end of his life. He also served as
Ambassador to
Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government (
GPRA). He attended conferences in
Accra,
Conakry,
Addis Ababa,
Leopoldville,
Cairo and
Tripoli. Many of his shorter writings from this period were collected posthumously in the book
Toward the African Revolution. In this book, Fanon reveals war tactical strategies; in one chapter, he discusses how to open a southern front to the war and how to run the supply lines. , Algeria
Death and aftermath With his health declining, Fanon's comrades urged him to seek treatment in the
U.S. as his Soviet doctors had suggested. In 1961, the
CIA arranged a trip under the promise of stealth for further leukemia treatment at a
National Institutes of Health facility. During his time in the United States, Fanon was handled by CIA agent Oliver Iselin. As Lewis R. Gordon points out, the circumstances of Fanon's stay are somewhat disputed: "What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia." He had begun
leukemia treatment but far too late. He had been admitted under the name of Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan
nom de guerre he had assumed in order to enter a hospital in
Rome after being wounded in
Morocco during a mission for the
Algerian National Liberation Front. He was buried in Algeria after
lying in state in
Tunisia. Later, his body was moved to a
martyrs' (
Chouhada)
graveyard at
Aïn Kerma in eastern Algeria. Frantz Fanon was survived by his French wife, Josie (née Dublé), their son, Olivier Fanon, and his daughter from a previous relationship,
Mireille Fanon-Mendès France.
Josie Fanon later became disillusioned with the government and, after years of depression and drinking, died by
suicide in
Algiers in 1989. Mireille became a professor of international law and conflict resolution and serves as president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. Olivier became president of the Frantz Fanon National Association, founded in Algiers in 2012. ==Works==