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3

An Tan Robè

On 25 March 1941, the Compagnie des Transports Maritimes’ steamer Capitaine Paul Lemerle left Marseille, bound for Fort-de-France. The passenger manifest made for interesting reading. The 350 passengers on board included Victor Serge and his family, the novelist Anna Seghers, the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the painter André Masson, and André Breton, the magus of surrealism, who paced the few empty spaces on the crowded deck, dressed in a thick overcoat and looking ‘like a blue bear’.¹ Their departure from Marseille was the first stage on a circuitous journey that would eventually take them all to the USA. Together with an Austrian metal-dealer and a Tunisian with a Degas canvas in his suitcase who claimed, somewhat improbably in the circumstances, to be going to New York for ‘only a few days’, Breton and Lévi-Strauss soon found that they had boarded a ship with only two passenger cabins and a total of seven proper bunks. Most of the passengers spent an uncomfortable voyage sleeping on the straw-mattressed bunk beds that had rapidly been constructed in the hold. All had good reasons for leaving France. In May 1940, the German army’s rapid advance through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes had routed the French. On 14 June, the Wehrmacht entered Paris unopposed.

The Third Republic, which had changed Martinique so much, no longer existed. On 16 June, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the eighty-year-old hero who had defended Verdun in 1916 and was now head of the newly established Etat français (‘French State’), concluded that further resistance was impossible. On 22 June, he signed a humiliating armistice with Germany that divided France into an occupied northern zone and a southern ‘free’ zone under the control of a ‘Vichy regime’ eager to collaborate with Germany.² Pétain’s actions were perfectly constitutional, as he derived his powers from the last government of the Third Republic. Communists, Jews and surrealist subversives were, however, well aware that, whatever the constitutional status of the Etat français may have been, any life they could lead under Vichy would be an uncomfortable one.

Life on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle was not comfortable either. The ship limped across the Mediterranean to Oran, west to the Straits of Gibraltar and on to Casablanca and then Dakar before heading out into the Atlantic. So much time was spent avoiding British patrols and hugging the coastline that Lévi-Strauss was convinced that she was carrying some clandestine cargo. After a month at sea, the ill-assorted company reached Martinique, where they had an unfriendly reception. For the military interrogators who boarded the ship, the non-French passengers were enemies, whilst their French companions were traitors who had deserted their country in its hour of need.³ Lévi-Strauss was accused of being ‘a Jewish freemason in the pay of the Americans’.⁴ Denied the baths they were longing for, all but three of the passengers – a rich béké, the mysterious Tunisian and Lévi-Strauss himself – were interned under armed guard in the Lazaret camp on the south side of Fort-de-France’s great natural harbour. As its name suggests, Le Lazaret was once a leper hospital; the site it occupied on the Pointe-du-Bout peninsula is now a concrete hotel complex.

The internees were finally released, not because of humanitarian concerns on the part of the authorities, but because local tradesmen in Fort-de-France argued that their continued detention was depriving the town of a potential source of income.⁵ As it happened, there was little for them to spend their money on. Lévi-Strauss was not impressed by what he saw on landing in Fort-de-France for the first time:

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Fort-de-France was a dead town: it was impossible to believe that anyone lived in the ramshackle buildings which bordered the long market-place planted with palm trees and overrun with weeds, and which was more like a stretch of waste-ground with, in its middle, an apparently forgotten statue, green with neglect, of Joséphine Tascher de la Pagerie, later known as Joséphine de Beauharnais.⁶

Breton’s experience of Martinique was equally depressing. The local students he met in a bar and who so kindly offered to show him around proved to be working for the police. The shops were virtually empty and all sold the same cheap and nasty goods, and the few bookshops offered for sale only a score of books so tattered as to be unreadable. Cheap white rum distracted the most disinherited of the local population from the bitter thoughts that might otherwise have come to their minds. In the spring of 1941, Martinique was, Breton concluded, a poor advertisement for three centuries of French colonialism.⁷ All the European visitors he spoke to were struck by the destitution and delapidation they saw in Martinique. Breton was, however, more impressed than Lévi-Strauss by the ‘blue-tinted statue of Joséphine’ with her breasts spilling out of her high-waisted Empire dress. He thought that it placed the town under ‘a tender, feminine sign’.⁸

As he wandered through the forlorn streets of Fort-de-France, Breton did at last find something to read. He was looking for a ribbon to give to his daughter Aube but the draper’s shop in which he found it also had something else on display. It was a little magazine, which Breton bought for twelve francs. Having seen something of the intellectual poverty of Robert’s Martinique, he expected to be disappointed:

I couldn’t believe my eyes: but what was being said there was what had to be said, not only as well as it could be said but as loudly as it could be said! All the grimacing shadows were torn apart and dispelled; all the lies and all the derision turned to rags: the voice of a man which had not been broken or drowned out stood up like a sword of light. Aimé Césaire was the name of the man speaking.⁹

Breton had stumbled across the first issue of Tropiques, which was published in April 1941.¹⁰ Césaire’s short ‘introduction’ was in itself stunning:

A silent, sterile land. It’s our land I am talking about. By the Caribbean Sea, my ear takes stock of the terrifying silence of Man. Europe, Africa, Asia. I can hear the steel screaming, the tomtoms in the bush, the temple praying among the banyans. And I know that it is man who is speaking. And I still listen, keep listening. But here, the monstrous atrophy of the voice, the centuries-long despondency, the prodigious dumbness. No town. No art. No poetry . . . A death worse than death, where the living wander. Elsewhere, the sciences progress, philosophies renew themselves and aesthetics succeed one another. And on this land, our hand sows seeds in vain. No town. No art. No poetry. Not a seed. Not a shoot. Or only the hideous leprosy of imitations. In truth, a sterile, silent land . . . Wherever we look, the darkness is gaining ground. The lights go out one after another. The circle of darkness closes in, amidst the screams of men and the howling of wild animals. And yet we are some of those who say no to the darkness. We know that the salvation of the world depends on us too. That the world needs its sons, no matter who they are. The humblest . . .¹¹

The shop in which Breton bought Tropiques belonged to the sister of René Ménil, who, along with Césaire and his wife Suzanne, was the main inspiration behind the journal. All three were teachers at the Lycée Schoelcher. Their paths were to diverge, with Césaire becoming Martinique’s best-known poet-politician, whilst Ménil became the Martinican Communist Party’s chief spokesman on cultural affairs,¹² but for the moment they formed the nucleus of a highly innovative undertaking. Given the small scale of Foyalais society, it was not difficult for Breton to arrange to meet both men. The final product of the meeting was Breton’s essay ‘A Great Black Poet’, which was printed as the preface to the bilingual edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal/Memorandum on My Martinique, published in New York by Brentano’s in 1947. Here, Breton remarks of Césaire: ‘This is a black man who handles the French language better than any white man can handle it today.’¹³ Césaire did not take exception to this, and Breton’s essay was first published in the May 1944 issue of Tropiques. Although it now sounds patronizing, the remark was well-meaning; André Breton has been accused of many things but casual racism is not one of them. Fanon, however, took the view that there was no reason for this to be said.¹⁴ No one would describe Breton as ‘a great white poet’, and Césaire was not writing in a foreign language.

Eleven issues of Tropiques were published between 1941 and 1945. Exploiting elements of surrealism, psychoanalysis and anthropology, the journal began to take a new look at Martinican realities and to dig beneath the veneer of universal French culture. To that extent, it anticipates the negritude with which Césaire was so closely associated in the post-war years, and which both attracted and repelled Fanon. Writing in the April 1942 issue, Suzanne Césaire, who appears to have quite disappeared from public life after 1945, made an astonishing analysis of the ‘discontents’ of Martinican civilization. The desire to imitate French culture that was originally a defence against an oppressive society was now unconscious:

No ‘evolved’ Martinican is willing to admit that he is no more than an imitation, because his current situation appears to him to be natural, spontaneous and born of his most legitimate aspirations. To that extent, he is being sincere. He really does not KNOW that he is an imitation. He is ignorant of his own nature, but it exists all the same . . . The hysteric is unaware of the fact that he is merely imitating a disease . . . Similarly, analysis shows us that the attempt to adapt to a foreign style that is made of the Martinican, has the effect of creating a state of pseudo-civilization which we can describe as abnormal or teratoid.¹⁵

There is no indication in his published work that Frantz Fanon ever read Suzanne Césaire’s essay, and whether or not he ever read Tropiques must remain a matter for conjecture. It is, on the other hand, almost inconceivable that he did not know something about it. The little journal was produced by teachers at the lycée he attended and, whilst he was not taught by Ménil, he was in contact with Césaire. René Ménil is mentioned only once in Peau noire, masques blancs. A single quotation is borrowed by Fanon from Leiris’s ‘Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti’, and it comes from Ménil’s ‘Situation de la poésie aux Antilles’, published in Tropiques in May 1944. Ménil is describing his ‘analytic and historical examination of the Antillean mentality’. It reveals that:

The contemporary super-ego of the Antillean people, which was shaped, let us not forget, in the not-so-far-off good old days of slavery, is the result of an operation in three parts. First, the traumatic repression of the way of life of the negro slaves (African totemism): this explains the centuries-old charge of anxiety which . . . drowns the collective consciousness in the Antilles. Secondly, the replacement, within the consciousness of the slaves, of the repressed spirit by an agency representing the master, an agency established within the depths of the collectivity, and which keeps it under guard in the way that a garrison keeps guard over a conquered town: this explains the Antillean people’s inferiority complex. Thirdly, the negro turns his aggressivity against himself. As it can find so little expression in a society founded upon exceptional cruelty, that aggressivity is turned against him and strangles him within his own consciousness: this explains the existence of a certain masochism amongst the Antillean people.¹⁶

Like Leiris, Fanon mentions only the second of Ménil’s three stages.¹⁷ This strongly suggests that he had not read Ménil’s article itself; had he done so, he would surely have picked up the reference to aggressivity. He clearly recognized his own concerns in the passage he found in Leiris, and those concerns have to be recognized as being profoundly Martinican.

Tropiques was a rare beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak Fort-de-France and it was soon extinguished, if only temporarily. All those who arrived on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle found their enforced stay in Martinique frustrating. Rumours about boats that were about to leave inevitably proved to be unfounded, and obtaining visas from the Dominican consulate was a slow process. On 16 May, Breton at last boarded the Presidente Trujillo, which took him to Guadeloupe and then the Dominican Republic, from whence he finally reached New York. Lévi-Strauss spent more time in Martinique. He had time to witness Martinican justice at work when he attended the trial of a peasant who had bitten off part of the ear of an opponent during a fight. It took five minutes for the three judges to sentence him to eight years’ imprisonment. Writing about the incident in 1955, Lévi-Strauss commented: ‘Even today, no dream, however fantastic, can inspire me with such a feeling of incredulity.’¹⁸ Had he spent more time in Martinique, his credulity would have been very strained. Although the atmosphere was sinister, with the police spinning webs of deceit around everyone, the anthropologist enjoyed what he saw of the countryside and especially the ‘huge, soft, feathery fronds of the tree-ferns, rising above the living fossils of their trunks’.¹⁹ He finally negotiated a passage on a Swedish banana boat bound for Puerto Rico and was eventually allowed to enter the United States. The Capitaine Paul Lemerle’s erstwhile passengers had the luck – and the requisite papers – to get away from Martinique. The local population was not so fortunate.

Lévi-Strauss and Breton had escaped Vichy France only to land in a very strange time and place. They had briefly encountered the Martinique of Tan Robè, or ‘Robert Time’. Tan Robè and its aftermath had an incalculable effect on the young Fanon, who now began to learn precisely what it meant to be a black Martinican wearing a white French mask. ‘Robè’ was the Creolized name given by the locals to Admiral Georges Robert, High Commissioner for the French West Indies and Commander-in-Chief of the West Atlantic Fleet. Born in 1875, and a former commander of the Mediterranean squadron, Robert had reached retirement age in 1937 but volunteered for active service in August 1939. Awarded the rank of a Five-Star Admiral by Georges Mendel, the Minister for the Colonies, he sailed from Brest on the cruiser Jeanne d’Arc on 1 September 1939 and reached his new and important post a fortnight later. His appointment was in keeping with a pre-war plan to create a Western Atlantic theatre of operations centred on Fort-de-France.²⁰ Shortly after the armistice of June 1940, the forces at Robert’s disposal – the Jeanne d’Arc, three auxiliary cruisers and one submarine – were reinforced by the arrival of the aircraft carrier Béarn, carrying one hundred planes purchased from the American government, and then the cruiser Emile Bertin with 300 tons of gold from the Bank of France. Protecting the gold, and not establishing a theatre of operations, was to be the main task of Robert’s men.

Under the terms of the armistice, France retained full sovereignty over her colonies and the forces stationed in them. When General Charles de Gaulle rejected the armistice on 18 June 1940 and called for continued resistance in a speech that was in legal terms a call for sedition, the colonies therefore took on a new importance. As Fanon’s old comrade Charles Cézette likes to recall with an ironic smile, the first ‘Free French’ were France’s colonial subjects.²¹ In his appeal to the nation de Gaulle stressed that ‘France is not alone. She has an immense Empire behind her.’²² France’s Indian and Pacific territories rallied to his side almost immediately. In August, the colonial authorities in Chad declared their support for de Gaulle, and Cameroon, the Congo and Ubangi-Shari (the modern Central African Republic) followed the example set by Governor Félix Eboué, a black civil servant from Guyane who had spent his entire career as an administrator in Equatorial Africa before becoming Governor of first Guadeloupe and then Chad in 1938. He was the first black to reach this elevated rank. Fanon had little patience with West Indians who became colonial administrators in Africa, but admired Eboué who addressed the Africans he met at the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 as ‘My dear brothers’. Fanon comments: ‘This fraternity was not evangelical, it was based on colour.’²³

News of the armistice and of de Gaulle’s defiance reached Martinique on 24 June, just over a month after Fanon’s fifteenth birthday. The immediate reaction of the island’s mayors and the Conseil Général was to pledge Martinique’s ‘continuation of the struggle alongside the Allies with the French overseas Empire’ and a telegram was drafted to that effect.²⁴ The text begins: ‘Meeting in Fort-de-France on 24 June 1940, the Mayors and members of the Conseil Général proclaim in the name of the island’s population Martinique’s unfailing loyalty to France, her readiness to consent to the ultimate sacrifices in order to achieve the final victory by continuing the struggle alongside the Allies and the French Overseas Empire.’²⁵ The text faithfully captured the patriotic fervour of the moment but its signatories were to be frustrated. Robert flatly refused to send the message on the grounds that, whilst doing so might have flattered its signatories, it was both ‘inoperative and inopportune’. On 26 June, he issued a proclamation of his own:

The armistice is about to come into force. Metropolitan France finds it impossible to continue the struggle, and although it was defended inch by inch with the most admirable heroism, her ancient land is strewn with dead bodies, ruins and immense pain.

Such is the situation. As a result, we wish more than ever to be French. We wish to be French and we will remain French in order to support the mother-land in her terrible ordeal, and in order to put all our forces at her disposal so that she may be delivered and may rise again.²⁶

In practice, this meant support for Pétain and the collaborationist Vichy government. One of the effects of the French presence in Martinique has long been the construction in the tropics of a miniaturized France. The theatre whose ruins can be seen in St Pierre was a small version of the theatre in Bordeaux. One of the more improbable sights to be seen from the centre of Fort-de-France is the gleaming white building in the green hills to the north. This is Balata’s ‘Eglise de Montmartre’, a scaled-down replica of Paris’s Sacré-Coeur built in 1935 to honour the memory of the Martinican soldiers who died in the First World War. In 1940, Robert began the formation of a miniature Vichy regime, with himself cast in the role of Pétain in a white tropical uniform.

In international terms, Robert’s position was not a strong one and he was forced to negotiate with the Allies, who viewed him as a potential enemy. His relationship with the Royal Navy soured when the British bombed and sank the French fleet in the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kéber in July 1940 to forestall the possibility of its coming under German control, and he feared that his own ships might face a similar fate. He was aware that the US press was calling for the occupation of Martinique, but probably did not know of the existence of an Allied plan – codenamed ‘Asterisk’ – to provoke an uprising on the island if he refused to negotiate a neutral settlement.²⁷ In August 1940, Robert entered into negotiations with Admiral Greenslade of the US navy. The initial negotiations ended in failure and Martinique was blockaded by the US cruisers that Breton and Lévi-Strauss saw as the Capitaine Paul Lemerle sailed into Fort-de-France. Operation Asterisk was quietly shelved when the attempt to land Free French forces in Senegal ended in a disastrous fiasco.²⁸ The stalemate in Martinique lasted until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought the United States into the war, and tensions increased even further as the Vichy government in France collaborated more and more closely with the Germans.

In May 1942, the Allies finally recognized Robert’s internal authority in exchange for his assurance that the ships in Fort-de-France’s harbour would be immobilized under US supervision, and that the planes on the Béarn remained grounded and were made incapable of flying. The famous gold bullion was to be placed in Fort Dessaix, which was just outside Fort-de-France, for the duration. One clause of the agreement had immediate repercussions for the local population: all naval personnel were to be based permanently on shore. The population of the capital increased dramatically and its ethnic balance shifted. In his retrospective account of wartime Martinique, Fanon speaks of the island being ‘submerged’ by 10,000 men, but in his memoirs, Robert speaks of 2,500 sailors and a similar number of colonial infantry.²⁹ The latter figure is the more accurate (and is confirmed by other sources³⁰), but Fanon’s inflated statistics are an accurate reflection of what he thought he saw when he returned from his exile in Le François to a town that was suddenly crowded with unusually high numbers of sailors. He had simply never seen so many white people and quite understandably over-estimated their numbers.

Robert’s internal authority was quickly established and that of Martinique’s Governor overruled. A grandiosely named Légion des combattants et des volontaires de la Révolution Nationale was established to promote Vichy values,³¹ and it became a regular participant in the parades and military displays so beloved by the Etat français. Robert’s attitude towards his new subjects was dismissively paternalistic – like all ‘native populations’, Martinicans were basically ‘good and simple’, but they were also ‘infantile, superstitious and easily led astray’³² – and he had no qualms about removing their elected representatives from the Conseil Général. They were replaced by appointees chosen from lists drawn up by the new mayors, who were themselves appointed and not elected. All the appointees were from very specific socio-economic categories: landowners, industrialists, artisans, reserve officers and veterans, mothers and fathers involved in charitable works.³³ All were white. In the eyes of the majority of the population, the békés were taking their revenge on the black and mulatto population with the full backing of the civil authorities and the church.

The nomination of councillors such as this was a faithful reflection of Vichy’s corporatism, which was designed to overcome the divisions that were supposedly introduced by class loyalties and political parties. As in France itself, the Republican motto of ‘Freedom, Equality, Fraternity’ was replaced by Vichy’s ‘Fatherland, Family, Labour’. In 1940, the absurdity of appointing a ship’s captain to represent the interest of the workers of Fort-de-France was tragic rather than comic but other aspects of tan Robè did border on the farcical. While the trenches were being dug on the Savanne, a blackout was imposed in anticipation of air raids, even though it was far from clear where the Luftwaffe’s fighters would actually take off from. Panic spread when German submarines were seen in Martinican waters. The anticipated invasion never came and the only Germans to set foot on the island during the war were the two wounded sailors who were landed from a submarine in February 1942. Their story figures prominently in Martinican novels about Tan Robè.³⁴

The new newspaper, La Petite Patrie, quickly began to promote a personality cult: Admiral Robert was ‘our Pétain transposed. Let us never speak of him other than with admiration and respect. For us, he is the guide, and he is pure and beyond reproach; the resolute and paternal chief; the worthy representative of the France that loves and understands us.’³⁵ Photographs and portraits of Robert were soon on sale in the shops and markets, and in many homes they hung alongside pictures of Pétain himself. Vichy’s ideology placed enormous emphasis on the family – hence the appointment to office of ‘mothers and fathers of families’ – and Robert himself became Martinique’s symbolic father when he agreed to become the godfather of a local child. As a British historian of Martinique notes, it was certainly no accident that the child was from Schoelcher, a commune on the outskirts of Fort-de-France that is named after the ‘liberator’ who freed the slaves.³⁶ Robert became both a symbolic father and the liberator who would dispel the dark mood of 1940. That mood was captured in a poem published in a newspaper:

Peuples noirs, c’en est fait; le malheur est sur nous;

Celle qui se penchait sur notre triste sort,

Qui guidait notre marche et nous montrait la voie,

Celle qui tendrement préparait notre essor,

La France, en butte aux trahisons, succombe et ploie

Celle qui sur nos fronts faisait luire l’espoir

La grande nation puissante et généreuse

Qui, seule dans le monde, aimait vraiment le Noir,

Doit subir du Germain l’odieuse tutelle.³⁷

[Black peoples, it is over; misfortune has befallen us;

The France who watched over our sad fate,

Who guided our steps and showed us the way,

Who was tenderly preparing us for our rise,

Has been exposed to treason, bends her knee and succumbs.

The France who made our faces shine with hope,

The great nation, powerful and generous,

The only nation in the world to truly love the black man,

Must submit to the odious sway of the German.]

As in metropolitan France, paternalism went hand in hand with repression. Freemasonry was made illegal. The small Communist Party was proscribed. Vichy’s ‘Jewish Statute’ was introduced and enforced, even though Martinique’s Jewish population was so tiny as to be statistically insignificant. The Statute excluded Jews from senior positions in the civil service, the officer corps, the ranks of non-commissioned officers and all professions that might influence public opinion. A quota system was devised to limit the number of Jews in the liberal professions.³⁸ By August 1942, a total of sixteen Jews in Fort-de-France had registered, as required, with the police.³⁹ It was forbidden to listen in public or in private to BBC radio, whose broadcasts were relayed from Dominica to the north and St Lucia to the south. A law adopted in July 1940 imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of entering the service of a foreign power, and the same penalty was later extended to those who, like Fanon, joined the Free French forces outside Martinique. The student-policemen encountered by Breton were part of an island-wide network of agents and spies who encouraged the denunciation of subversives.⁴⁰ Tropiques was, like all journals and newspapers, subject to pre-publication vetting by a heavy-handed information service and when, in May 1943, Suzanne Césaire requested a paper ration to print a new issue, she was refused it on the grounds that it was ‘revolutionary, racial and sectarian’.⁴¹ Tropiques was banned. Publication began once more when Tan Robè was over.

The attempt to establish a local version of the Vichy regime was not popular with the majority black population of Martinique. The countless portraits of Pétain that André Breton saw on the walls of Fort-de-France in 1941 were regularly slashed with knives, and he quickly became convinced that the vast majority of the working population were hoping for an Allied victory. He was probably right. Many black Martinicans would have agreed with the basic argument of Coridun’s Mon Pays, Martinique! Martinique!: the best defence against the white plantocracy was the extension of republican institutions, and it was the power of those very institutions that was being eroded by Robert. The black population was not, according to Breton, taken in by the patronizing use of Creole to promote the image of ‘Li bon papa Pétain’ (‘Good father Pétain’).⁴² Martinique was both hungry and unhappy. The prudence dictated by the repressive atmosphere meant, however, that there were as yet few acts of defiance.

One of the reasons for the sullen discontent was the rise of overt racism. Food rationing had been introduced, and the queues in the half-empty shops were segregated, as they never had been in pre-war Martinique. In normal years, the crews of visiting naval ships had only a week’s shore leave, but now they were permanently on shore with little to do. They could now take off their masks and behave as ‘authentic racists’.⁴³ What Lévi-Strauss described as the ‘excessive drinking of punch’,⁴⁴ the increase in prostitution and the rise in sexual tensions as local girls like Mayotte Capécia’s heroine consorted with white and relatively rich officers all contributed to the increasingly ugly mood. The strong naval presence caused a housing shortage, and property prices soared. Food shortages and the rise of the black market fuelled discontent, both in the capital and the countryside. The monoculture of sugar co-existed with small-scale agriculture geared towards self-sufficiency, but the economy could not really cope with the influx of non-productive sailors. A character in Glissant’s novel Le Quatrième siècle describes a typical foraging party arriving in trucks at a small habitation and taking away all the yams, breadfruit and bananas they could carry. ‘A whip was being wielded against the blacks.’⁴⁵

The dominant memory of the war years is that of hunger, and it has become part of a collective memory that can be shared even by those who are too young to have lived through the war. In his semi-autobiographical Ravines du devant-jour, Raphaël Confiant, who was born in 1951, recalls that when he refused to eat his soup as a child, his grandmother would tell him that if there was ever a return to Tan Robè, he would eat it because he would understand what hunger really meant.⁴⁶ The blockade had disastrous effects, which are described by Chamoiseau in his novel Texaco: ‘We had to do without oil, salt, dried vegetables, salted meat, soap, garlic, shoes. The poor could no longer find wood, corrugated tin or nails. Coal was becoming scarce, and more and more expensive. Those who lit a fire no longer had matches and did all that was possible to keep it glowing ad aeternam.’⁴⁷ In 1939, 76 per cent of all foodstuffs had been imported, and those imports had now ceased. Even if there had been no blockade, things would have been difficult. Most of Martinique’s food imports came from France, and France’s agricultural produce was now being diverted to Germany. Between 1940 and the end of the war, retail prices in Fort-de-France rose by 600 per cent, and in 1943, the kilo of cod that had cost 3.8 francs in 1939 had risen in price to 32 francs.⁴⁸ By 1943, near-famine conditions were being reported in the countryside. And yet Glissant, adopting a famous phrase from Sartre, claims that the people of Martinique had never been so free as they were during the ‘Occupation’.⁴⁹ Isolation meant that the island had to make a bid for self-sufficiency for the first time since 1635. Some of the land that had been left derelict by the decline in sugar production was brought back into food production. A more or less satisfactory substitute for cooking oil was made from coconuts. Shoes and sandals were made from old tyres. After three hundred years of colonialism, it was finally realized that Martinique was surrounded by salt water and that its climate was such that salt water could easily be evaporated to produce salt. Salt did not have to be imported from France.⁵⁰

By 1942, a traditional sign of revolt had reappeared. The cane fields were being set ablaze at harvest time. This form of primitive rebellion was made a capital offence.⁵¹ It was at roughly this time that Fanon saw something so strange that he could scarcely believe his eyes: a crowd of Martinicans refusing to bare their heads as the ‘Marseillaise’ was played, and armed sailors forcing them to stand to attention in silence.⁵² He concluded that his fellow islanders had ‘assimilated the France of the sailors to the bad France, and the “Marseillaise” those men respected was not their “Marseillaise”’. Scuffles between local youths and Robert’s sailors became increasingly common, and Fanon is reported to have been involved in some of them. Manville has described how, as they were going home after playing football one morning, he, Fanon and Mosole encountered two sailors kicking a youth they had knocked to the ground on the Savanne. Fanon immediately ran to help him. Less impulsive than their friend, Manville and Mosole intervened to ask what was going on. The sailors said that the boy had tried to rob them, and then walked off. The three friends took the boy to the police for first aid, but never got a real explanation for the incident.⁵³ Intervening in a fight like this was obviously dangerous. Had there been more sailors about, the schoolboys might well have taken a bad beating themselves. Fanon and his family also took risks by breaking the law to listen to the BBC in secret. Like many a boy around the world, Frantz plotted the movements of the Allied armies on a map. He almost provoked a quarrel with a friend whose father was Italian by rejoicing at the British victory at Benghazi and making disparaging remarks about Italians, but either he was badly informed at the time or his memory failed him when he wrote Peau noire, masques blancs: it was Wavell and not Montgomery who took Benghazi from the Italians on 7 February 1940.⁵⁴

On 3 March 1943, Governor Nicol issued a circular to the mayors of Martinique, noting that a number of boats had recently been stolen. It was, he suggested, advisable that all boats should be beached at points where they could be kept under watch at night, and that it was unwise for boat-owners to leave oars, sails or other tackle on the beach after dark.⁵⁵ It was not only boats that were disappearing. Queries about young men who had not been seen for a while were becoming increasingly common, and the standard answer to them was: ‘Sill pay neyè, i Ouchingtone’ (‘If he hasn’t drowned, he’s in Washington’). A new form of marronage had emerged, and young dissidents were leaving Martinique by clandestine means. Their choice of destination was restricted to St Lucia or Dominica, where they could join the Free French. St Lucia and Dominica are, respectively, only twenty-seven and thirty-five kilometres away from Martinique, but the journey was dangerous. The dissidents (dissidence is the Martinican equivalent to résistance) travelled in open boats propelled by oars or sails. The boats were the locally built craft normally used for in-shore fishing. Brightly painted and with high prows, they still bore a distinct resemblance to the dug-out canoes they had replaced long ago. The seas around Martinique are home to populations of sharks, and both the St Lucia Channel to the south and the Martinique Passage to the north are treacherously dangerous stretches of water where powerful Atlantic currents converge in narrow straits. In purely maritime terms, it would have been safer to leave from Fort-de-France itself, but the strong possibility of detection there meant that most of the clandestine departures were from Sainte-Anne and Le Diamant in the south or Saint-Pierre and Le Prêcheur on the northern Caribbean coast. Some of the passeurs or smugglers who carried the dissidents on their boats were acting out of patriotism, and some were themselves dissidents, but others were less altruistic and charged high prices for their services. There were rumours that some would-be dissidents had been thrown overboard by unscrupulous passeurs and left to drown or to deal with the sharks as best they could. An estimated 4,500 Martinicans made the dangerous voyage and they were joined by some 500 metropolitan Frenchmen, most of whom had deserted from their ships in Fort-de-France.⁵⁶

Fanon left no written account of his departure from Martinique in early 1943, and seems to have been as reluctant to speak of it as he was to talk of his subsequent wartime experiences in France. After the event, a disillusioned Fanon would tell his parents that he had left Fort-de-France because he still believed in the ‘obsolete ideal’ of French patriotism,⁵⁷ but in 1943 he clearly still believed that the cause of France was his cause. His place was not, he thought, on the sidelines, but ‘in the heart of the problem’, or in other words, in the war.⁵⁸ Charles Cézette, who did not go to Dominica but did fight with the Free French, puts it with heartbreaking simplicity: ‘We were twenty, and we believed in France.’⁵⁹ Fanon ignored the warnings of Joseph Henri, who had taught him at the Lycée Schoelcher and who once studied in Paris with Alain, the anti-militarist who converted so many young men to radical pacifism. He also ignored the warnings of his brother Joby, who can still cite Henri’s words from memory: ‘Fire burns and war kills. The wives of dead heroes marry men who are alive and well. What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When white men kill each other, it is a blessing for blacks.’ According to his brother, Fanon was outraged by this and called his teacher a ‘bastard’. At seventeen, he was still convinced that ‘freedom is indivisible’. He would, however, recall a further piece of advice from the same teacher: ‘When you hear people speaking ill of the Jews, keep your ears pricked; they’re talking about you.’⁶⁰ The decision to leave for Dominica was an early indication of both a character trait and a pattern of behaviour. The decision was taken suddenly, with little consultation and little foreknowledge of its consequences. It was also irrevocable.

Fanon’s convictions may have been sound, but his finances were not. He was still at school and had no source of income, and whilst finding a passeur was not difficult, finding the means to pay him was. The solution was a temporary return to delinquency. Fanon’s father had slowly accumulated sufficient clothing coupons to buy a bolt of cloth and was looking forward to wearing the suit he would have made from it. Fanon appropriated the cloth, and sold it to pay for his clandestine passage to Dominica. For the rest of his life, Casimir Fanon (who died in 1947) would complain to his wife about how ‘her son’ had stolen his suit. To make matters worse, Frantz’s departure was planned for the day of his brother Félix’s wedding in Morne-Rouge. A great deal of money and a great many precious food coupons had been spent to celebrate the occasion. A bullock, two sheep and a pig had been slaughtered, and between 150 and 200 guests were expected. Joby tried to argue with him, but Fanon was adamant and made his way to Le Prêcheur. Bitterly disappointed, his mother mourned the loss of two sons on the same day: one to a wife, and one to de Gaulle’s Free French.⁶¹ Precisely how Fanon made his way from Morne-Rouge, a pleasant town on the south-eastern slopes of Montagne Pelée, to the beach where he met his passeur after dark that night is not on record but, although short, it cannot have been an easy journey as he must have had to make his way on foot across the lower slopes of the volcano and through steep ravines choked with dense tropical vegetation.

The absence of any first-hand account makes it difficult to trace Fanon’s movements after his secretive and illegal departure from Martinique. He reached Dominica safely and was, like any other clandestine arrival, interrogated about his reasons for trying to join the Free French. He underwent very basic military training. He did not, however, follow the other dissidents south to St Lucia, on to Trinidad and finally the United States, from whence they shipped out for the battlefields of Europe. At seventeen, he may have been considered too young for active service. More significantly, events had overtaken his plans, and Martinique was no longer an outpost of the Vichy regime. Tan Robè was at last over. Fanon’s adventure ended in bathos. After a few weeks, he was repatriated to Martinique and went back to school.

In the spring of 1943, pro-Gaullist slogans could be seen scrawled on the walls of Fort-de-France and in June leaflets were calling on the population to join in illegal demonstrations to be held in both the capital and St Pierre. A Comité Martiniquais de Libération came into being. The colonial infantry units based at Balata, just outside Fort-de-France, were becoming restive and their commanding officer Henri Tourtet was rumoured to have pro-Gaullist sympathies. Tourtet was a career officer with a deep sense of loyalty to his superiors and therefore a very reluctant rebel, but his decision to move against Robert’s sailors was the decisive factor in Martinique’s ‘June Days’. Robert’s position was increasingly untenable, and his actions increasingly irrational. He had on three occasions refused to obey Vichy’s orders to scuttle the ships under his command, and was still convinced that he might have to use them to defend Martinique from an American invasion.⁶² Faced with popular unrest in the streets and a growing mutiny in Balata, he was forced to negotiate a ‘change of regime’ at the end of June. In order to avoid bloodshed, he now agreed to surrender his authority to a French plenipotentiary.⁶³

On 14 July, the destroyer Terrible docked in Fort-de-France and Henri Hoppenot, representing the Free French, announced to the delirious crowd on the Savanne: ‘I bring you back France and the Republic.’ Speaking on behalf of the Comité de Libération, Dr Emmanuel Véry went on:

Henri Hoppenot has come to deliver us from the yoke of the men of Vichy, who are Hitler’s lackeys. For us, he is the France that made the Revolution of 1789, the France that flung in the face of the world the immortal principles of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the generous France of 1848, the France which, after the defeats of 1940, and faithful to her past and traditions, took up the fight once more alongside the Allies, the France which we can never divorce from the Republic, because we cannot forget that it was the Republic that made us men and citizens.⁶⁴

In September 1944, Admiral Georges Robert was sentenced by the courts of the Provisional French Government to ten years’ hard labour for hampering the French war effort. In October 1946, he was released on bail after suffering a brain haemorrhage and eighteen months later his sentence was quashed because of irregularities during the original trial.⁶⁵ In 1950, he published his own self-serving account of the last days of Tan Robè:

This was a time when the idea spread throughout the island that General de Gaulle was a black general who, just like Toussaint L’Ouverture, wanted to liberate people of colour from the yoke of the white land-owners. To complement this fable, dissidence was either the General’s wife – and, like him, coloured – or a neighbouring island under his control. And so people left en dissidence, in the way that one went to Guadeloupe for a change of air and to find better conditions of existence than those prevailing in Martinique, which was subject to the rigours of the American blockade. And this later came to be known as the Resistance.⁶⁶

The story of those who believed that dissidence was de Gaulle’s wife has become part of the collective memory of Tan Robè, but its meaning shifts considerably depending on whether it is told by the ever-patronizing Robert, or by a self-aware Martinican with a critical perspective on his or her history.

A fortnight after the arrival of Hoppenot, the decision was taken to raise a local unit of volunteers to fight alongside the Free French and the Allies. It was a light infantry battalion known as the 5ème Bataillon de Marche des Antilles (5BMA) but, although recruitment began almost immediately, its actual formation was delayed by a shortage of weapons and trained men.⁶⁷ It was not ready to leave Martinique until the following March. Young men volunteered for all the reasons that lead young men to volunteer for war. Some wanted adventure, others glory. Some no doubt saw the war as a means of fulfilling the classic Martinican dream of leaving the island, which really had come to resemble a prison. Fanon’s own motives were grounded in the conviction that his own freedom, that of Martinique and that of France were inextricably bound up together. His decision to enlist meant that he once more had to go against his family’s wishes and the advice of his elder brother. He again ignored Henri’s warnings about the fire that burns and the wars that kill. Manville recalled that Fanon told his teacher that, when freedom was at stake, ‘we are all involved, white, black or yellow’.⁶⁸ He was not alone in believing this. His fellow volunteers included Charles Cézette, Marcel Manville and Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole, who had also made the dangerous voyage to Dominica.⁶⁹ As they prepared to board ship, Manville promised a tearful Eléanore Fanon: ‘Yes, yes, Madame Fanon, I will look after Frantz for you’, but he was only too aware that his size – and Manville was a big man – could offer no one any protection in a modern battle.⁷⁰ This must have been the one occasion in his life in which the voluble Marcel Manville was almost lost for words.

At 14.00 hours on 12 March 1944, the Oregon, a cargo boat converted into a makeshift troop ship, slipped out of Fort-de-France with a lone Dutch torpedo boat as an escort. The 1,000 men on board were under the command of Tourtet and, with the exception of the officers and some of the NCOs, all were black. The békés’ attempt to create a local version of the Vichy regime had ended in failure, and they were not about to fight for de Gaulle’s Free French. No béké volunteered. Fanon, who at eighteen was the youngest man on the Oregon, muttered to Manville that they should be flying the black flag. As they sailed out of the harbour, the elated volunteers sang in Creole: ‘Hitler, nous ké roule en bas morne-là’ (‘Hitler, we’re going to knock you off your hilltop’).⁷¹ The elation masked fear. Manville recalls that he and Fanon were afraid that they were going to a watery grave rather than to the glory of battle. Such fears were not entirely unfounded. The Oregon carried only the light weaponry of a transport, and her tiny escort could have provided little protection against a submarine attack. Most of the men on board were violently seasick as the ship hit the rough waters of the Martinique Passage. Fanon had entered a military world of confusion and secrecy, and had no idea of where he was going on the ship that was taking him away from the Caribbean for the first time. Some of his comrades thought they were going to Italy, while others were convinced that their destination was the Far Eastern theatre. The Oregon was in fact steaming north-west towards Bermuda, and reached it within four days. After a night in port to take on supplies and fresh water, she joined a convoy of 120 ships and sailed east into the Atlantic. After fourteen days at sea, she reached the Moroccan port of Casablanca on 30 March, and Fanon’s battalion was immediately transferred to the El Hajeb camp near Meknes. They remained there for two months of very basic training as officer cadets.

The anonymous soldier who meticulously kept the 5BMA’s daily log, or journal de marche, noted that his unit received a very poor reception and wrote that their living conditions were deplorable. He gives no explanation for his remarks, but a later entry in the log suggests that inter-ethnic tensions were high. The camp was crowded with Algerians, Moroccans and troops from the African colonies, and on 22 May, a new Mobile Field Brothel – that most curious item of French matériel de guerre – was brought in for the exclusive use of the Martinican contingent. Whether this was because certain of the prostitutes were reluctant to service Martinicans, or whether the latter were reluctant to share ‘their’ women, is not made clear by the journal de marche, which provides a terse and sometimes incomplete record of events, but no analysis. It is, on the other hand, quite clear from the 5BMA’s records that, on other occasions, the sexual rivalry between the West Indians and the Africans led to physical violence, as there were serious outbreaks of brawling when some Tirailleurs sénégalais attacked those West Indians they found in the company of white women in Nantes in August 1944.

Fanon and Manville’s knowledge of Morocco was restricted to the little that they had learned at school: ‘From a geographical point of view, it was a beautiful country where the sun was cold; from a historical point of view, it was a country conquered by Marshal Lyauetey, who declared that in a colony you have to show your strength so as not to have to use it.’ They now found that the French protectorate was also a divided country in which there co-existed a privileged world of European conquerors and a devalorized world in which an Islamic people lived in squalor.⁷² The camp at El Hajeb was another divided world. The Martinicans and the volunteers from Guadeloupe were not billeted in the same barracks as the African troops. They did not eat the same food, much to the annoyance of Manville, who would much rather have eaten spicy African stews than ‘the food served to those who came from the great cold’.⁷³ And they did not wear the same uniforms. The West Indians were from the ‘old colonies’, were treated as semi-Europeans and wore the same uniform as their metropolitan counterparts. The Africans of the Tirailleurs sénégalais wore the traditional chechia, or fez, red flannel belts and jerkins with rounded collars. Not all of them were happy with this convention, and unsuccessfully demanded the right to wear standard-issue French uniform.⁷⁴ It was becoming clear that the heteroclite army which Fanon and Manville had hoped would free Europe and the world from fascism and racism was in fact structured around an ethnic hierarchy, with white Europeans at the top and North Africans at the bottom. Black colonial troops were seen as superior to Arabs, and the position of West Indians was ambiguous in the extreme.

At the beginning of July, Fanon’s unit entrained and went east to Algeria, which was the springboard for the landings in southern France. Fanon knew no more about Algeria than he knew about Morocco, and what little he did know derived from what he had learned at school. Algeria became part of the school history syllabus in 1928.⁷⁵ Every schoolchild knew that France invaded Algeria in 1830 to avenge the insult suffered by the French consul in April 1827, when the Bey of Algiers struck him with a fly whisk. Everyone knew that France wanted to rid the Mediterranean of pirates, that Algiers lived by kidnapping and ransoming foreigners and that those unfortunate enough not to be ransomed became galley slaves. Piracy had certainly been an Algerian industry, but it was also practised throughout the Mediterranean and was by no means a specifically Algerian practice.⁷⁶ It was also very much in decline by 1830. It was also claimed by French schoolbooks that the Algerian expedition was intended to free Algeria from the Ottoman Turks, who were its nominal rulers. Everyone knew that Algeria had been an integral part of France since 1848, and that France had a civilizing mission there. The reality was much more prosaic. The incident between the Bey and the consul related to unpaid bills for grain supplied to French forces during the Napoleonic era. The imperial gesture of dispatching a fleet to Algiers was an attempt to boost the popularity of a failing regime in Paris. No one was taught at school that most of Algeria’s ten million ‘natives’ were colonial subjects and not citizens with full voting rights, that only a tiny élite belonged to a second ‘junior’ electoral college that returned members to the Assemblée algérienne or that Arabic and the various Berber tongues were officially regarded as ‘foreign languages’. Until 1944, the daily lives of Algeria’s ‘natives’ were governed by the code de l’indigénat, based on a list of thirty-three infractions that were not illegal under French common law but were illegal when committed by Muslims. Defaming the French Republic, travelling without a permit, refusing to fight forest fires and plagues of grasshoppers, begging outside one’s home commune and firing weapons into the air during celebrations were all offences under the code de l’indigénat. Refusing to pay taxes was an offence under both the code and the common law.⁷⁷ The abolition of the code did not greatly change anyone’s life. There was no reason for Fanon to have known any of this when he first set foot on Algerian soil. Nor was there any reason for him to have known that all attempts to introduce reforms had been frustrated by the representatives of a European population which was ‘French’ only because it had been naturalized from the 1870s onwards.

Under the terms of the 1940 armistice, France retained its sovereignty over Algeria and, although there was initially considerable local enthusiasm for continuing the war, the colony soon rallied to Pétain.⁷⁸ Most of the pied noir population became enthusiastic supporters of Pétain’s National Revolution, and particularly of its anti-Semitic laws, which deprived the substantial Jewish population of their rights as naturalized French citizens and removed them from public office.⁷⁹ The Arab-Berber population was divided, with many of the notables being attracted to the paternalism of the new regime, whilst more nationalistic elements were more likely to take a pro-German stance on the traditional grounds that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Still others hoped that an American invasion would free them from French colonialism. The Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941 had spoken of the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government and some saw this as a promise of at least self-determination.

In December 1942, Ferhat-Abbas and a delegation of twenty-four Algerian notables drafted a ‘Manifesto of the Algerian People’ and presented it to the French authorities. It called for the condemnation and abolition of colonization, recognition of the right of all peoples to self-determination and the establishment of a constitution for Algeria. The latter should guarantee the absolute freedom and equality of all without distinction as to race or religion, the abolition of feudal property, the recognition of Arabic as an official language, freedom of the press and association, free compulsory education for children of both sexes, freedom of religion and the effective participation of Algerian Muslims in their own government.⁸⁰ The document’s significance is almost incalculable. It was produced by évolués who were, in French terms, the finest products of the colonial system. These were men who had rejected the populism of most forms of Algerian nationalism, typified by Messali Hadj’s Parti Populaire Algérien, in favour of integration or assimilation into France. Many, like Abbas, one of the rare Algerians to have studied at the University of Algiers where he qualified as a pharmacist, had been members of the ‘Young Algerian’ movement, a classic évolué movement;⁸¹ those who had seen their salvation in assimilation were now thinking of independence within the framework of a new commonwealth. Although the Governor General accepted the Manifesto as a basis for further reforms, it was made clear that decolonization was not on the agenda. Reforms were indeed introduced in 1944. The code de l’indigénat was abolished. It could now be claimed that all the inhabitants of the country were subject to the same laws, and that the ‘natives’ administered their own affairs with French assistance and in accordance with their own conceptions and the rules of democracy. Where Europeans were in the majority, the basic administrative unit was the commune de plein exercise, where officials were elected, as in France. Most natives lived in communes mixtes, where French officials were appointed from above and ruled with the help of nominated Muslim judges and bureaucrats known to all as beni-oui-oui, or yes-men. France was a secular republic in which the separation of Church and State was strictly observed; in Algeria, mosques were under the control of the State.

For the first three years of the war, Algiers was a city of plots and conspiracies where factions manoeuvred for power and influence, but one in which the future of Algeria itself was definitely a secondary issue. This was a world in which double and even triple agents fought secret wars of their own. Pétainistes and Gaullistes struggled for power. The Gaullist secret service, officially known as the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, recruited agents with contacts in Algiers’s extensive criminal underworld. Assassinations took place, and the corpses of suspected Vichy agents floated in the Bay of Algiers. The sinister atmosphere of the early 1940s is well captured in Emmanuel Roblès’s novel Les Hauteurs de la ville, which deals with an Arab’s assassination of a French businessman who is recruiting Algerians to work for the Todt organization, which built fortifications in France for the German army.⁸² In November 1942, Allied troops landed in Algeria and Morocco and effectively made the two countries American protectorates in which the old Vichy supporters remained in power. Although successful in North Africa, Operation Torch was the trigger for a full German occupation of France. It did not free Algeria from French rule.

De Gaulle arrived in Algiers on 30 May 1943,⁸³ and the establishment of the Comité français de libération nationale made Algiers his capital. It also became the logistical base for Operation Anvil (later code-named Dragoon), which was planned for August 1944. It was a controversial operation. Churchill was reluctant to support it and was convinced that the main thrust should be through Italy and then into Austria. In his view, landings in the south of France would merely divert resources away from the main task. De Gaulle’s argument in favour of Anvil was highly politicized. It had long been clear that the landings in Normandy – Operation Overlord – would be mainly an Anglo-American operation and, if the whole of France were liberated by non-French forces, there was a distinct possibility that the country would come under an Allied military government. Anvil was planned as a Franco–American operation designed both to assert de Gaulle’s own authority and to establish French sovereignty. In military terms, landings in the south would provide the anvil on which the hammer blows of Overlord would pound the Germans. After a lot of political manoeuvring, de Gaulle got his way.⁸⁴

On 14 July 1944, de Gaulle took the salute at the Bastille Day parade, and watched the 5BMA as it marched past him. Fanon’s unit was in fact merely passing through Algiers on its way to a new camp near Orléansville (now known as Chlef) to await embarkation for France. Conditions were little better than they had been in El Hajeb, and the welcome that awaited the Martinicans was not a friendly one. They reached camp at four in the morning, and then had to erect their own tents on an exposed hillside. There were few distractions, apart from the occasional afternoon of leave that allowed Fanon and his friends to visit a local cinema. Manville still recalls how Fanon tricked him into wasting time on a ‘terrible film’ by telling him that he had just been to see a ‘wonderful American musical’.⁸⁵ The troops were isolated from the local population and the minimal contacts that he did make led Fanon to the depressing discovery that ‘the North Africans loathed men of colour. It was quite impossible to make contact with the natives . . . The French do not like Jews, who do not like Arabs, who do not like negroes.’⁸⁶

After their arrival in Oran, the 5BMA enjoyed a period of relative inactivity. It was near Oran that Fanon watched soldiers throwing pieces of bread to starving Arab children who fought savagely over the scraps of food.⁸⁷ He would never forget the sight. Since 1939, many areas and notably Kabylia were famine zones. Albert Camus published damning articles on the famine in Alger républican in June of that year, describing how he had seen ragged children fighting with dogs over the contents of a dustbin in the Kabyle capital of Tizi-Ouzou. He learned that, in the villages, poor people had been reduced to supplementing the small amount of grain they could obtain by eating the roots and stalks of thistles and nettles.⁸⁸ Wartime rationing made matters much worse. ‘Europeans’ and ‘natives’ had ration cards of different colours entitling them to different rations. There were ‘native’ and ‘European’ distribution centres in the countryside. In some areas, rations were limited to four kilos of barley per person per month. In some cases, even the barley had been replaced by what the locals called ‘American flour’; the maize flour caused food poisoning and other digestive disorders because the recipients did not know how to cook it properly.⁸⁹ The children Fanon saw near Oran were the lucky ones; bread was a luxury for many of their fellows. Disease was taking its toll too; in 1941 alone, typhus killed 16,000 people in Algeria.⁹⁰

Fanon did not have much time to observe the harsh realities of wartime North Africa. On 10 September, he was crossing the Mediterranean on an American-flagged transport. The 5BMA’s training had not been particularly thorough, and it was not particularly well armed, its main weapons being First World War vintage Lebel rifles, the 1915-model Chuchat light machine gun and Hotchkiss machine guns.⁹¹ The crossing took two days, and Fanon’s first sight of France was an invasion beach near St Tropez and the shattered town of Toulon. His unit was not part of the spearhead. Operation Anvil got underway early on the morning of 15 August, when 10,000 men of the US First Airborne Task Force jumped to a drop zone a few miles inland from Fréjus and St Tropez. French and American commandos were landed and took very heavy casualties. At 8 a.m., three US infantry divisions hit the beaches of the south coast, which had been heavily bombarded from both the air and the sea. By mid-morning, Allied troops had reached the centre of St Tropez, where American paratroops and the French Forces of the Interior were already besieging the German garrison. A bridgehead had been established and the French divisions of de Lattre’s ‘B Army’ landed the next day. The German infantry regiment stationed to the east of St Tropez was in retreat and the other German forces – seven infantry divisions and one Panzer tank division – were so thinly deployed that they could not be regrouped to offer much resistance. The Allied objective was now the road and rail corridor leading to Toulon, and then the Rhône valley.

After heavy street-fighting, Toulon was taken on 19 August by the sixth regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais (6RTS), which was part of the Ninth Division of Colonial Infantry (9DCI). Formed in June 1943, 9DCI was made up of a Moroccan infantry regiment, the Fourth, Sixth and Thirteenth Regiments of Tirailleurs senégalais and an artillery division from Morocco. The 6RTS had already seen combat in Corsica and Elba, where it took heavy casualities. These were tough troops who were particularly good at fighting at close quarters, and the Germans were afraid of them. So much so that, according to Cézette, they took no black prisoners. On 20 August, Général de Brigade Pierre Magnan issued an order of the day, congratulating his men on their victory:

You defeated the enemy in a three-day battle that took you from the Cuers region to the gates of Toulon. And then, taking responsibility for the conquest of the town, you wrested this old colonial city, which is the cradle of your army, from the enemy inch by inch. The high number of prisoners in your hands, and the quantity of munitions and matériel you have captured, are testimony to the valour of your efforts and the greatness of your victory.⁹²

Magnan was apparently quite oblivious to the irony of his words. Toulon was the cradle of the colonial army in more than one sense: it was the main port of embarkation for the invasion of Algeria in 1830.

Magnan had unwittingly touched upon the vital question of what happens when the colonized liberate their colonizers, and then realize that they themselves are still colonized. Similar questions had begun to be asked during the Italian campaign. When New Year parcels from America arrived for the mixed colonial and French units, a French officer decided that they should be distributed on the basis of one parcel for each Frenchman, and one parcel to be shared between three Moroccans. When an Algerian sergeant protested, he was told that he was an agitator and did not deserve the médaille militaire for which he had been recommended. The sergeant was Ahmed Ben Bella, the future first president of independent Algeria, and his feelings about the war he was fighting were becoming dangerously ambiguous: ‘I was fighting for a just cause, and I believe that I was happy. Or at least I would have been happy, if the thought of unhappy Algeria had ever left me for a moment.’⁹³ Fanon was probably not worrying about the unhappy Algeria of which he had seen so little, but his doubts as to just what he was doing would soon grow.

On landing in France, where it was immediately involved in mopping up operations, the 5BMA was split up as part of the seemingly endless and confusing reorganization of France’s fighting forces.⁹⁴ Most of its men were transferred to the Atlantic coast, where they fought bravely in the battle to retake the Royan ‘pocket’ at the mouth of the Girone estuary – which had been bypassed by the Allies after their breakout from the Normandy bridgeheads – and lost their commanding officer in doing so. The remainder, including Fanon, Manville, Cézette and Mosole, were incorporated into the 9DCI’s Sixth regiment of Tirailleurs sénégalais. Astonishingly, the friends remained together, although Cézette became a semi-detached member of the little group when he became a driver attached to a liaison officer and acquired what he calls ‘my own jeep’. As the division took Aix-en-Provence and then moved north along the Rhône valley towards Grenoble, Fanon was forced to wonder who he was: ‘on the one hand, the Europeans, either native or from the old colonies; on the other, the tirailleurs’. He no longer knew whether he was a black ‘native’ or an honorary white toubab (European), but he did have the impression that the black troops were taking the brunt of the fighting and casualties and were being sent into action first.⁹⁵

As the division headed north, the weather was becoming colder, and the High Command decided on 27 October that the three regiments of Tirailleurs sénégalais could not be expected to fight in winter conditions to which they were not acclimatized and should be pulled back to more temperate areas. Some of the beneficiaries of the decision were ungrateful enough to see it as a ploy designed to deny them the military glory of crossing the Rhine into Germany.⁹⁶ The official documents described this as the ‘whitening’ (blanchiment) of the division, which was now officially a European unit. Not all its ‘European’ soldiers were European in any real sense and they were definitely not white: some, like Fanon, came into the strange category of neither ‘native’ nor ‘toubab’. Fanon had never seen snow and, having been brought up on an island where the temperature rarely falls below the high twenties, he had never been cold. He had no more experience of the harsh winters of Eastern France than his Senegalese comrades, but he had to fight on in increasingly difficult conditions as the temperature fell to well below zero. Whether or not the decision to send the small group of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans north into the snow was deliberate or an instance of military incompetence is not clear. Charles Cézette is still tempted to think that they were simply ‘forgotten about’. He also suggests that there may have been other factors behind the decision to whiten the division. He hints, that is, that the Senegalese may have been pulled back in order to intimidate the local French population and to forestall possible outbreaks of ‘people’s justice’, a murderous purge of collaborators or even an attempted Communist insurrection. There is no proof that this was the case, but such fears were real enough in 1944 and the explanation is therefore not to be rejected out of hand.

In early September, the Germans were retreating north from Lyon, which was liberated on the first of the month, under heavy rearguard cover, and their resistance stiffened as they moved north-eastwards towards Belfort. The French supply lines were now becoming dangerously extended. The initial advance had been rapid, and Cézette recalls that his unit, advancing on foot, was often far ahead of the American-built GMC trucks carrying its supplies. It was now obvious to all that the French objective was Alsace and then the Rhine. By the middle of the month, French intelligence reported that two or three infantry battalions with artillery support were reinforcing their positions inside the great loop made by the Doubs river near the industrial town of Montbéliard, which guarded the approaches to Belfort. The French advance slowed, and the two armies became engaged in two months of almost static warfare, characterized mainly by sporadic exchanges of machine-gun and mortar fire.

The weather deteriorated steadily, and by November the keeper of the journal de marche was complaining of intense cold and heavy snow. As he drove north from Lyon, Cézette had been unsure as to precisely what was landing on the windscreen of his jeep, and it took him some time to realize that this was the snow he had heard so much about in Martinique. He soon became all too familiar with it. To make matters worse, the snow was alternating with freezing rain that thawed the ground just enough to bog down both vehicles and men in mud. Fanon and his comrades were sleeping in two-man tents that were barely a metre high, and often had to dig themselves out. The poor atmospheric conditions hampered radio communications, and the dank pine forests had been both mined and booby-trapped. It was in these conditions that a general French advance under the command of Commandant Bourgoin began in November. In the meantime, the US Seventh army and units of the First French army were attacking from the east. To the north, German forces were regrouping in Alsace. Individual soldiers on the ground rarely have any sense of the broader picture and Fanon cannot have known that he was taking part in the gradual build-up to the Battle of Alsace.⁹⁷ Cézette, Manville and Mosole all fought with distinction in that battle. Mosole was awarded the Croix de Guerre and silver star for his distinguished conduct. During a skirmish in a cemetery in Wittenheim, which fell to the French on 30 January 1945, Manville succeeded in knocking out a tank by firing a rifle bullet into its canon and detonating the shell in the breech. Whilst this was clearly a matter of good luck rather than good marksmanship, it won him the rank of corporal and the Croix de Guerre.

The terrain to the south-east of Montbéliard favoured the attacking forces, but the advance was still not an easy one. To the north of the French positions, the Doubs and the Rhine–Rhône canal ran in parallel across a sodden plain. Above it, rolling hills rose to an altitude of 400 metres. This was not easy ground: the hills were covered in pines, and cut by minor rivers and streams flowing into the Doubs. Intelligence-gathering was a matter of listening rather than of visual observation, and the sound of ongoing building work had been detected in the Bois de Grappes, which covered the steepish slopes of a hill known as Le Grand Mont, where it appeared that a German unit was digging in. On 25 November, Private Frantz Fanon was serving an 81-millimetre mortar in the wood under enemy fire and was hit by shrapnel from an incoming mortar round. Badly wounded in the chest, he was cited in a Brigade dispatch for his ‘distinguished conduct’, and awarded the Croix de Guerre with a bronze star. The citation was signed by the Sixth RTS’s commanding officer, Colonel Raoul Salan, who would later be one of the staunchest defenders of French Algeria and a leading figure in the April 1961 putsch against de Gaulle.⁹⁸ Ironically, France had already decorated another of its future enemies; Ben Bella was mentioned in dispatches on four occasions and was finally awarded the médaille militaire for the bravery he showed while retrieving three abandoned machine guns under fire. Shortly after the capture of Rome, he was awarded his medal by de Gaulle in person.⁹⁹

Fanon was evacuated and hospitalized in Nantua, a small lakeside town in the Jura mountains some ninety kilometres to the north of Lyon. He made a quick recovery from his wounds and was soon playing football for a local team as part of his convalescence. According to his brother Joby, he made good friends in the region and was particularly fond of his marraine de guerre, or ‘godmother’, who remained in touch with him when he left Nantua for a brief stay in Paris before going back to his unit in January. The regiment was now officially being ‘rested’, but its rest-period took the uncomfortable form of night patrols on the banks of the Rhine. Fanon did, however, have time to write to his brother. On 16 January 1945, he wrote:

My Dear Joby,

We don’t have the luxury of having pens here, so you will have to try to decipher my letter . . . You must have heard by now that I was wounded. I have rejoined my unit and I am on the banks of the Rhine. When I get the chance during our night patrols, I wash my face in the Rhine . . . Listen to me, I’ve grown a lot older than you. Man la prend fé tant pis pou moins, mais pas vini en France avant la fin la què va (I’ve been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes, but I won’t be back in France before the end of the war.) I’m sick of it all. Don’t worry: Pierre Mosole and Marcel Manville were still alive a week ago. You asked me if I got the cross. Yes, with bars and medals, and all the rest of it. I wanted to tell you we are still alive, but we don’t want to talk about the war. I could tell you certain things, but I’m a soldier and you won’t know them until later. You’ll have to be satisfied with knowing that I’ve had enough. But it’s still rough twenty-four hours a day. And we have to stay in holes because the Boches are on the other side, and they don’t miss. Roll on the end of the war, and my return.

Fanon had learned that freedom was not indivisible. He was a black soldier in a white man’s army. Writing to his mother that same month, Fanon tried to hide his true feelings, and spoke longingly of the punch and blaff he was looking forward to when he got back to Martinique, but another letter written to both his parents on 12 April 1945 tells a different story:

Today, 12 April. It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why? To defend an obsolete ideal. I don’t think I’ll make it this time. During all the scraps I’ve been in, I’ve been anxious to get back to you, and I’ve been lucky. But today, I’m wondering whether I might not soon have to face the ordeal. I’ve lost confidence in everything, even myself.

If I don’t come back, and if one day you should learn that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. Say: God called him back to him. This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong!

Nothing here, nothing justifies my sudden decision to defend the interests of farmers who don’t give a damn.

They are hiding a lot of things from us. But you will hear them through Manville or Mosole. The three of us are in the same regiment. We’ve been separated, but we write to each other, and even if two of us die, the third will tell you some dreadful truths.

I’ve volunteered for a dangerous mission, and I leave tomorrow. I know I won’t be coming back.¹⁰⁰

The nature of Fanon’s ‘dangerous mission’ is not known. Perhaps he simply did not have time to go on it: just over three weeks after this letter was written, Germany capitulated.

Fanon and Manville were back in Toulon for the festivities that marked the liberation of France, and were reunited with those members of the 5BMA who had fought in the Royan pocket. The port was crowded with soldiers and sailors, and there was a strong American military presence. Whilst the GIs appeared to lack for nothing, the French and Martinican troops were, according to Manville, living in bad conditions and felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens rather than as liberating heroes. That the local girls preferred American dancing partners who could give them chewing gum and nylons to black Martinicans who had nothing, added to a growing sense of disillusionment. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon describes with considerable bitterness how white French girls backed away in fear when black French soldiers asked them to dance.¹⁰¹ Fanon and his comrades wanted only one thing: to get back to the West Indies and to tell everyone how the French, for whom they had given and suffered so much, had abandoned them.¹⁰² Martinique was very much on Fanon’s mind, and he kept in touch with developments there as best he could. On 5 August 1945, he wrote to a correspondent in Martinique who has been identified only as ‘Mme. L. C.’ and remarked that the fact that Aimé Césaire had been elected as Mayor of Fort-de-France ‘proved that our compatriots are not as blind as they would have us believe’. Now that the ‘fine hours’ of action were over, he was leading a static life that did not appeal to him. The calm of peace was ‘flat, morbid and stagnant’, and the material power of money was becoming the dominant force in France. The only solution to his boredom was a return to Martinique.¹⁰³ Cézette paints a similar picture, but it is less gloomy than the one described by Manville and Fanon. Boredom was, he recalls, a growing problem, as the main task of the day was now getting out of bed in the morning. His primary duty now was to drive off in ‘his’ jeep to collect the day’s ration of wine and bring it back to their billets outside the town; his main complaint was that he and his comrades were not allowed to go into Toulon on their own. Had he been on his own, he thought, he might have had more success with the local girls.

If Fanon and his friends had expected to be repatriated directly from Toulon, they were to be very disappointed. With an inscrutable logic of its own, the army now transported them from a port in the Mediterranean to one on the Seine estuary. Their port of embarkation should have been Le Havre at the mouth of the river’s estuary, but the port facilities had been badly damaged by Allied bombing and they were therefore now taken to Rouen, which was 90 kilometres upstream from Le Havre. Rouen is a beautiful city with fine Gothic architecture and medieval streets, but in August 1945 it was in a sorry state. During the previous summer, the bridges across the Seine had been a major target for the US Air Force. They were at the time the last bridges before the sea and they had to be bombed to prevent the Germans from bringing reinforcements into Normandy from the south-west. The bridges were destroyed and so too was everything between the river and the cathedral, which was itself badly damaged. Much of medieval Rouen disappeared during the raids before the city was liberated on 1 September 1944.

The men of the 5BMA had expected to be in Rouen for a week, but they were there for a month. This time it was not military bureaucracy that caused the delay. There were still German mines in the Seine and its estuary, and they had to be cleared before any ship could leave in safety. In the meantime, Fanon and his comrades were billeted in what Manville called a ‘disused château’. This was the Château du chapitre, an abandoned country house in the richly wooded hills to the north-east of Rouen. It was badly dilapidated but, for soldiers accustomed to sleeping in two-men tents, being under any kind of roof felt like luxury. The house no longer exists and the Bois-Guillaume area is now covered with handsome and expensive suburban housing. There were few houses in 1945 and there was little for bored soldiers to do. They had been granted free use of public transport but the privilege did not mean a great deal in practice. The only link between Bois-Guillaume and central Rouen was a light railway with an infrequent passenger service. It was more convenient to use an army truck when one was available. The only alternative was a long walk. Some thought that the walk was worth the effort. Marcel Manville found Rouen ‘bourgeois, puritanical, reserved and austere’¹⁰⁴ but Cézette, who still lives there, thought otherwise. Although in ruins, the city was in festive mood as it prepared to celebrate the anniversary of its liberation and open-air dances were held. Cézette met his future wife at a dance in the place du Marché during his enforced stay in Rouen.

The boredom of Bois-Guillaume was relieved when the unit commander was invited by a local councillor to come to dinner on Sunday, 2 September, with fifteen of his men. Marcel Lemonnier was a prosperous businessman who sold stationery and supplies for artists and architects. He had also been a member of the local resistance. The invitation was readily accepted. The guests now had to be selected. The unit commander was anxious to make a good impression and was slightly worried when he learned that Lemonnier had three teenaged daughters. He wanted men who could be trusted to be on their best behaviour and therefore selected fifteen soldiers who came from good families and who had reached a relatively high standard of education. Fanon, Cézette and Manville all passed muster. As they approached the Lemonnier home, Manville thought he was going to a real château. The large thatched house standing in an extensive garden was originally part of the farm buildings belonging to the Château du chapitre. Lemonnier bought it in the late 1920s and gradually converted it into a large and very comfortable family residence. The house still stands, with its low thatched roof and thick whitewashed walls, and is the only chaumière of its vintage in the area to have survived. It is no longer in the possession of the Lemonnier family.

The dinner was a great success. For the first time in a very long time, Fanon and his friends dined off white linen tablecloths and ate good home-cooking. The talk was not of the war but of plans for the future. The young Martinicans talked excitedly of what they wanted to be. Manville was going to be a lawyer, and so was Fanon. The law was a good choice for Manville. In colloquial French, a lawyer is ‘un bavard’, or a chatter-box, and Manville was very rarely silent for long. Mosole was going be a pharmacist, but eventually became a dentist. The young black soldiers proved to pose absolutely no threat to the Lemonnier girls. Given Fanon’s subsequent traumatic encounter with the white gaze (‘Look, maman, a negro’), it is ironic that it was he and Manville who gazed at the children and could not take their eyes off them. They had never seen a girl with truly red hair, or such a blond boy, and they were fascinated. There was one slightly embarrassing moment, however. When Monsieur Lemonnier learned how his guests had been chosen, he protested that surely not everyone in the 5BMA was a middle-class young man with good educational qualifications and insisted on meeting some of the others. A second and larger meal was arranged for the next Sunday, and it was just as successful and enjoyable.

In the east of France, Fanon had met peasants who had been reluctant to fight on their own behalf and who seemed to show no gratitude to their liberators. The hospitality of the Lemonnier family showed him that France could and did have a very different face. Odette Fresel (née Lemonnier) still speaks with great emotion of the young black troops ‘who left their beautiful Martinique to liberate us’. Inviting two groups of soldiers into his house was an act of great generosity on Marcel Lemonnier’s part; Rouen may well have been in festive mood, but food was still in short supply and it was expensive. The generosity was typical of the man: he simply liked inviting people into his home. After the war, he would take an indirect route home from work in the hope that he might meet foreign cyclists or hitchhikers he could take home for dinner. As his daughter admits, this did make for a rather eventful and unpredictable home life, as the house was often full of unexpected guests. Her mother’s visitors’ book contained expressions of thanks from numerous servicemen, cyclists, hitchhikers and walkers – many of them English. It also contained several pages headed, ‘In memory of a good evening, hoping that we meet again’ and dated ‘9 September 1945’. Two of the inscriptions read as follows: ‘With thanks for the pleasant evenings spent under the sign of the great friendship shown by the welcoming Lemonnier family to some sons of the far-off Martinique’ and ‘I beg the Lemonnier family to believe that our West Indian gratitude will think for a long time to come, despite the distance and the passage of time, of these evenings when the family was unstintingly kind and generous to these spiritual sons of the immortal France. We will continue to love our motherland and her children, who were so hospitable.’ They are signed, respectively, ‘Charles Cézette, 36 rue Perinnon, Fort-de-France, Martinique’ and ‘Marcel Manville, 72 rue Victor Hugo, Fort-de-France, Martinique’. A third and shorter message is signed ‘F. Fanon, 33 rue République F de F’: ‘With thanks for the generous hospitality and homely quality of the evenings spent with the Lemonnier family.’¹⁰⁵ Whether or not Fanon remained in contact with the family is unclear. Odette Fresel was no longer living at home at the time, but thinks that both he and his sister Gabrielle visited her family when the latter was studying pharmacy in Rouen after the war. She remained in touch with both Manville and Cézette, and that evening in 1945 provided the basis for lasting friendships.

The return journey to Martinique began in October, and it was not a comfortable one. The San Mateo was a cargo boat normally used for transporting cattle and provided poor accommodation for the 700 Martinicans, Guadaloupeans and Guyanese who were shipped out of Rouen. The food was worse. The hard biscuits came from the supplies issued to the army that was defeated in 1940. The meat was corned beef, which was so loathed by the French troops who first encountered it in the trenches of the First World War that they called it singe (‘monkey’). Manville shared their opinion.¹⁰⁶

On his return to Martinique, Fanon found himself in a curious position. At the age of twenty, he was a decorated war veteran but he had yet to complete his secondary education. He had successfully taken the first part of his baccalauréat before his departure for Dominica, but now had to return to the Lycée Schoelcher to prepare for the orals. He passed and was awarded the baccalauréat that gave him the right to go to university. Fanon was aware that government grants were available for demobilized soldiers who were returning to education, but was not entirely sure how to obtain one. The funds were controlled by the Conseil Général, which had been re-established after the ‘June Days’, and Fanon decided to approach one of its members. He called at the home of Georges Gratiant, a prominent Communist councillor, in the rue Victor Hugo, and was immediately shown the door by Mme Gratiant. He had breached convention by attempting to approach an official at home rather than in his office. Disappointed and angry, Fanon turned to his uncle Edouard for advice. The school teacher refused to act on his behalf, but advised him to speak to a councillor of his acquaintance from Le François. The response was disappointing. Fanon was told to apply in writing and to attend a council meeting. The general opinion of Martinique’s elected representatives was that it was not their role to train bourgeois by sending them to elite lycées; they were there to produce farmers. It was only after a stormy meeting that Fanon was accorded the rights – and the money – that were his according to the French government.¹⁰⁷

As Fanon approached the end of his secondary education, he was still unsure of what he wanted to do or be. Career guidance was not one of the French education system’s strong points at this time and school-leavers were largely on their own when it came to choosing their direction. Martinique offered few possibilities. There were no higher education facilities apart from a teacher-training college and a law school, and few opportunities for graduates who returned from university in France. Some found employment in the local state sector, and others became one of Martinique’s stranger exports by joining the colonial administration in France’s African colonies. Despite his real admiration for Félix Eboué, the comments Fanon makes in Peau noire, masques blancs on René Maran, who did work in the African administration, show that he did not regard this as either a viable or a desirable possibility.

Fanon’s education had been primarily a literary one, and he had talked in Rouen of studying law, but he now made the surprising decision to become a dentist. The decision may have been influenced by Mosole or simply by the belief that a career in dentistry would give him a solid social position and a higher income than that earned in the customs service by his father. Becoming a dentist would have been quite in keeping with the family’s history of upward social mobility, and would have satisfied Eléanore Fanon’s ambitions for her children. Student grants were available for veterans. Years of study at the Paris Dental School seemed a logical step. In the meantime, Fanon lived with his family, attended the lycée and played football. Football was now a more serious matter for Fanon than it had ever been. Joby was teaching in St Pierre while he was preparing for the competitive examination that would lead to a career in the customs service, and was playing regularly for the local team. Both Frantz and Willy joined him, and the three played almost as a team within the team. At 1.65 metres, Frantz was not particularly tall, but he was wiry and strong and made an effective centre-forward. His brothers played outside him as inside-forwards and they played in a triangular formation, passing the ball backwards and forwards on Frantz’s shouted command. Whilst this must have been very frustrating for their flanking wingers, the three brothers made a powerfully effective attacking unit. St Pierre was a successful team.

Fanon was also aware that Martinique was going through a decisive period. In October 1945, Aimé Césaire ran for parliament as a member of the Communist Party, and Fanon was present at the meeting at which a woman fainted, so powerful was the poet-politician’s oratory.¹⁰⁸ Césaire was one of three Communist députés returned by Martinique. In 1956, he resigned from the Communist Party to found his own Parti Populaire Martiniquais, but he held his parliamentary seat until 1993.¹⁰⁹ Writing in 1955, Fanon would describe the liberation of Martinique in 1943 as the island’s first metaphysical experience and as the first awakening of a distinctively Martinican political consciousness.¹¹⁰ The election of Communist députés was a logical development of that consciousness, but it was still an ambiguous consciousness in that Martinique had relied on ‘the France of the Liberation to struggle against the economic and political power of the sugar plantocracy’.¹¹¹ Fanon’s experience of racism in the French army and of the racism of sections of the French population had sown serious doubts in his mind as to what ‘the France of the Liberation’ really meant. Perhaps more significantly still, Martinicans were discovering that the Césaire of the Cahier was right: they were black, and not Europeans.

Fanon rarely spoke of his wartime experience, even when he was with friends, but on a number of occasions he did cite a very bitter passage from Césaire’s ‘discourse on colonialism’ of 1951. Here, Césaire speaks of the need to explain to ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century’ that a Hitler slumbers within him and that what he cannot forgive Hitler for are not his crimes in the abstract, but ‘the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa’.¹¹² It is unlikely that Fanon reached this conclusion in 1945, and his obvious conviction that the angry Césaire was right was influenced by his experiences in Algeria from 1953 onwards. It is, on the other hand, clear that the dis-illusionment he had felt had opened up a festering wound that would not heal.