Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (, ; ; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a Francophone Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department).

His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.

As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist 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 Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States.

He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental health patients would do better 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 Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which was then a French colony and is now a French single territorial collectivity.

His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a descendant of African slaves, and worked as a customs agent.

His mother, Eléanore Médélice, was of Afro-Martinican and white Alsatian descent, and worked as a shopkeeper.

Frantz was the third of four sons in a family of eight children.

Two of them died young, including his sister Gabrielle, with whom Frantz was very close.

His family was socio-economically middle-class.

They could afford the fees for the Lycée Schoelcher, at the time the most prestigious high school in Martinique, where Fanon came to admire one of the school's teachers, poet and writer Aimé Césaire.

After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Vichy French naval troops were blockaded on Martinique.

Forced to remain on the island, French sailors took over the government from the Martiniquan people and established a collaborationist Vichy regime.

In the face of economic distress and isolation under the blockade, they instituted an oppressive regime; Fanon described them as taking off their masks and behaving like "authentic racists".

Residents made many complaints of harassment and sexual misconduct by the sailors.

The abuse of the Martiniquan people by the French Navy influenced Fanon, reinforcing his feelings of alienation and his disgust with colonial racism.

At the age of seventeen, Fanon fled the island as a "dissident" (a term used for Frenchmen joining Gaullist forces), traveling to Dominica to join the Free French Forces.

After three attempts, he made it to Dominica, but it was too late to enlist.

Fanon left Martinique in 1943, when he was 18 years old, in order to join the Free French forces.

After the pro-Vichy Robert regime was deposed in Martinique in June 1943, Fanon returned to Fort-de-France to join the newly created, all black 5e Bataillon de marche des Antilles.

He enlisted in the Free French army and joined an Allied convoy that reached Casablanca.

He was later transferred to an army base at Béjaïa on the Kabylia coast of Algeria.

Fanon left Algeria from Oran and served in France, notably in the battles of Alsace.

In 1944 he was wounded at Colmar and received the Croix de guerre.

When the Nazis were defeated and Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany along with photojournalists, Fanon's regiment was "bleached" of all non-white troops as Fanon and his fellow Afro-Caribbean soldiers were sent to Toulon (Provence).

Later, they were transferred to Normandy to await repatriation.

During the war, Fanon was exposed to more white European racism.

For example, European women liberated by black soldiers often preferred to dance with fascist Italian prisoners, rather than fraternize with their liberators.

In 1945, Fanon returned to Martinique.

He lasted a short time there.

He worked for the parliamentary campaign of his friend and mentor Aimé Césaire, who would be a major influence in his life.

Césaire ran on the communist ticket as a parliamentary delegate from Martinique to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic.

Fanon stayed long enough to complete his baccalaureate and then went to France, where he studied medicine and psychiatry.

Fanon was educated in 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.