Frantz Fanon won a Croix de Guerre, then watched France sideline its black soldiers
At 17 Frantz Fanon slipped away from his brother's wedding in Martinique to join the Free French. Wounded near Montbéliard and decorated for bravery, he was later pulled from the front with other black troops as the Allies crossed into Germany. That experience fed one of the century's most influential anticolonial minds.
Fanon arrived on 20 July 1925 in the Martinican capital, Fort-de-France, then part of France's colonial empire, born into a middle-class family: his father was a customs officer, and his mother, of Afro-Caribbean and Alsatian descent, kept a shop. He was the third of four sons among eight children, loved football, and later organised matches for patients and staff at the psychiatric hospital where he worked in Algeria.
After France fell in 1940, Martinique came under Admiral Georges Robert, loyal to Vichy, whose regime Fanon said dropped its mask and behaved like authentic racists. In January 1943 he fled to British Dominica to join Allied sympathisers. When a local uprising toppled Robert that June, he returned and enlisted in a new Antillean battalion of the Free French.
Military service was an education in prejudice. In Casablanca he was shocked by discrimination within the Free French forces, and in Algeria he saw antisemitism and hostility to Muslims among European settlers. He landed at Saint-Tropez in August 1944 during the Allied invasion of Provence, was hospitalised for two months after being hit by shrapnel in the Doubs, received the Croix de Guerre from Colonel Raoul Salan, and fought in Alsace in early 1945. Then, under de Gaulle's policy of taking non-white soldiers out of the French army, he and fellow black soldiers were sent south to Toulon and on to Normandy to await passage home.
As a psychiatrist he argued that many patients would do better reintegrated into family and community than confined in institutions, and he helped found institutional psychotherapy while working with François Tosquelles and Jean Oury at the Saint-Alban hospital. He supported Algeria's war of independence from 1954 and joined its National Liberation Front. Historians Jansen and Osterhammel call him the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time, and liberation and freedom campaigns from South Africa and Sri Lanka to the United States have drawn on his work. He died on 6 December 1961.
Source: Frantz Fanon
