Frantz Omar Fanon (, US: ; French: [fʁɑ̃ts fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical and Pan-Africanist, concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported the Algerian War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Fanon has been described as "the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time". For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national liberation movements and other freedom and political movements in Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.
Fanon formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would have an improved prognosis if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under François Tosquelles and Jean Oury.
An often overlooked aspect of Fanon's work is that he did not like to physically write his pieces. Instead, he would dictate to his wife, Josie, who did all of the writing and, in some cases, contributed and edited.
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.
In June 1940, the German victory in the Battle of France resulted in the French Third Republic capitulating to Nazi Germany. Martinique subsequently came under the control of French Navy elements under Admiral Georges Robert who were loyal to the collaborationist Vichy regime in France. The war disrupted imports from Metropolitan France to Martinique, leading to major shortages on the island, while Robert's authoritarian regime repressed Martinican Allied sympathizers, hundreds of whom escaped to nearby Caribbean islands. Fanon later described the pro-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. Following the uprising, Fanon "enthusiastically" returned to Martinique, where the pro-Allied 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 quickly enlisted in the unit at Fort-de-France. He underwent basic training before boarding a troopship bound for Morocco in March 1944. After Fanon arrived in Casablanca, he was shocked to discover the extent of racial discrimination in the FFL. Fanon was subsequently transferred to a Free French military base in Béjaïa, Algeria, where he 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, Fanon embarked on another troopship at Oran to participated in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of German-occupied Provence. After the American VI Corps secured a beachhead, Fanon's unit came ashore at Saint-Tropez and advanced inland. In Doubs, he participated in several engagements near Montbéliard and was seriously wounded by shrapnel, which resulted in him being hospitalized for two months. Fanon was awarded a Croix de Guerre by Colonel Raoul Salan for his military service 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. Fanon was subsequently transferred to Normandy to await repatriation to the West Indies.
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." In the fall of 1945, a newly-discharged Fanon returned to Martinique, where he focused on completing his secondary education. Césaire, by now a friend and mentor of his, ran on the French Communist Party ticket as a delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the French Fourth Republic, and Fanon worked for his campaign. Staying in Martinique long enough to complete his baccalauréat, Fanon proceeded to return to France, where he intended to study medicine and psychiatry.
Fanon was educated at the University of Lyon, where he also studied literature, drama, and philosophy, sometimes attending Merleau-Ponty's lectures. During this period, he wrote three plays, of which two survive. 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.