In 1954, when France normalized massacre and torture in its Algerian colony, Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in a hospital in Algiers. Those delighting in, or alarmed by, the spectre of armed Black men on American streets barely noticed the specific context of Fanon’s book-his experience of a ferocious Western resistance to decolonization that by the early nineteen-sixties had consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. In 1966, a writer in these pages claimed that Fanon’s “arguments for violence” are “spreading amongst the young Negroes in American slums.” A reporter for the Times worried about their effect on “young radical Negro leaders.” Indeed, Stokely Carmichael described Fanon as a mentor, and the founders of the Black Panther Party regarded “The Wretched of the Earth” as essential reading. Hannah Arendt criticized Sartre’s preface at length in her essay “ On Violence” (1970), but she mostly ignored Fanon’s text, with its many pages on the degeneration of anti-colonial movements and its case notes about psychiatric patients in Algeria. It now emerges as a strikingly ambivalent account of decolonization. For the book’s sixtieth anniversary, it has been reissued, by Grove, with a new introduction by Cornel West and a previously published one by Homi K. Sartre’s celebrity brought Fanon’s work widespread attention but also colored its initial Western reception. Fanon, who had spent years in Algeria agitating for its liberation, was, at the time of the book’s publication, little known and dying from leukemia.

Sartre wrote these incendiary words in a preface to “ The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the French and West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” Sartre, despised in France for his solidarity with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted to goad people into seeing the “strip-tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” “Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement.

The wretched of the earth 1961