In France, the composite figure of Fanon–Nizan came to signify total revolt against French society and the PCF. For a tiny minority, Fanon also inspired a positive commitment to Algeria. Few young French people actually went to Algeria after the war, but Fanon was their inspiration. They read Fanon’s L’An V de la révolution algérienne and Les Damnés de la terre and were inspired to go along with the young Algerian republic as it took its first steps into what they thought was the socialist future.81 Juliette Minces, who went to Algiers to work on the Third Worldist journal Révolution africaine, describes in the preface to a collection of reprinted articles from that journal how a reading of Fanon inspired the conviction that Algeria’s long struggle for independence would inevitably produce a socialism that would work to the advantage of the wretched of the earth, and especially women and the poor peasantry. She also has to admit that this ‘lyrical enthusiasm’ was short-lived,82 as Algeria rapidly became mired in corruption and bureaucracy. As Maschino and his Algerian wife put it, their revolution had been confiscated.83 The promised liberation of the women of Algeria had not come about.84 On their return to France, these young people were dubbed ‘pieds rouges’ – a cruel pun on pieds noirs, the term used to designate the French population of Algeria, and particularly the defenders of French Algeria who finally fled when the prospect of independence offered them a grim choice between the suitcase or the coffin.
The period of what Minces calls ‘revolutionary Algeria’ represents the high tide of French Third Worldism, and Fanon helped to create that Third Worldism. A generation’s disillusionment with the orthodox left, and particularly with the Communist Party, coincided with the rise of nationalism in the Third World and gave birth to the belief that the emergence of new states there would create a new humanism or even a new socialism. Algeria, like Cuba, seemed to have a leading role in this process of rebirth.85 Disillusionment with Algeria, which soon came to look more like a sclerotic one-party despotism rather than a beacon of hope, and the ebb of Third Worldism, have brought about a decline in the French reputation of Frantz Fanon in France. When he is read, the readings are negative. In an essay which turns the ‘white man’s burden’ (le fardeau de l’homme blanc) into the ‘white man’s sob’ (le sanglot de l’homme blanc) and argues that there is no viable alternative to white European civilization, Pascal Bruckner claims that Sartre’s support for Fanon was no more than masochism, and argues that Fanon’s writings are based upon an analogy between the thesis that maturity is a form of decadence that has not lived up to its early promise and the adulation of the south, seen as the north’s only future.86 In 1982, former Maoist turned New Philosopher and anti-Marxist André Glucksmann could claim that Fanon was responsible for celebrating the ‘second wave’ of ‘planetary terrorism’ that came to Paris when a bomb exploded in the rue Mabeuf.87
As Third Worldism declined, former leftists found themselves in agreement with the author of The Closing of the American Mind, who, speaking at Harvard in 1988, described Fanon as ‘an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred of Europeans and his espousal of terrorism’.88 By 1990, it had become possible to argue in the French press that ‘the recurrent theme of the noble savage who has been perverted by Western modernity and alienated by three-piece suits’ is a masochism that is ‘cultivated by the heirs of Frantz Fanon’.89 In 1962, these themes, and the underlying revisionism that suggests that colonialism was not so harmful, were those of the French right. So incensed by Les Damnés de la terre was one commentator that he reviewed it twice in different journals. With remarkable bad taste, he wrote: ‘In December, a mulatto from Martinique died of cancer in an American hospital, despite the efforts his doctors made to save him. Why did he ask the West he hated so much to prolong his life? His choice seems just as disturbing as his hatred, to judge by the written testimony he has left.’ In a second article, Comte opined that Fanon’s ‘brutal frankness and the pitiless hostility that screams in the mad darkness’ was reminiscent of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.90 Three decades later, alarmingly similar views were being expressed by the liberal left. Alain Finkielkraut, for example, accused Fanon of reviving a ‘European’ and völkisch nationalism,91 even though the most striking feature of Fanon’s Algerian nationalism is that it does not define ‘the nation’ in ethnic or völkisch terms.
In 1990–1, a French sociologist was involved in a study of a deeply unpleasant but frighteningly articulate group of skinheads in Paris. Their racism was predictable, as was their apologia for violence. They were convinced that violence was the motor of history, and that ‘it is because we live in a degenerate society that people reject violence’. Their violence was, they claimed, a creative force, and it would help to create or recreate a nation. On hearing this, the sociologist was reminded of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, and then of Fanon.92
In Algeria, Fanon’s fate has been still stranger. His writings on revolutionary violence could be invoked by the fundamentalist Front Islamique de Salut (FIS) (Islamic Salvation Front) in its journal El-Mounquid to justify the wave of appalling violence that was visited on that country when the elections of 1992 were annulled after it won a majority in the first round. The FIS’s war was, it was argued, a continuation of the war against France, and the same redeeming violence had to be used to win it.93
One of the striking features of many of the tributes to Fanon that were published immediately after his death is the stress placed on his fundamental humanism. The negative emphasis on the theme of violence is probably a reflection of the American reception and of the way in which Fanon is read by Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence. She looks at Fanon’s influence on the violence that afflicted American university campuses in the 1960s, but fails to make any mention of Algeria.94 The small group that worked on Partisans, the classic Third Worldist journal published by Maspero, read him in a different way: ‘On reading his work, it was clearly obvious to those who help to edit Partisans that Frantz Fanon has given a new meaning to their thinking, their political actions and even their lives. For us, it is very simple: anyone who has in recent years read those pages that blaze with lucidity, inevitably finds born in them a new vision of men and a burning desire to take the dimensions of this vision into the future.’95
Outside France, the most familiar image of Fanon was for a long time that created in the United States, where Grove Press advertised Constance Farrington’s flawed translation of Les Damnés de la terre as ‘The handbook for a Negro Revolution that is changing the shape of the white world’:
Here, at last, is Frantz Fanon’s fiery manifesto – which in its original French edition served as a revolutionary bible for dozens of emerging African and Asian nations. Its startling advocacy of violence as an instrument for historical change has influenced events everywhere from Angola to Algeria, from the Congo to Vietnam – and is finding a growing audience among America’s civil rights workers.96
The book was reviewed very widely in the American press, usually in terms of warnings about James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’ syndrome. A reviewer writing for the Durham Morning Herald, and identified only as ‘C.B.’, compared Fanon’s book to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood on the grounds that both described the same hatred and despair, and turned them loose amongst the population at large. He or she went on to state that the wretched of the earth ‘are not communists. They are quite simply at the extremity of deprivation and despair, but surrounded by affluence. And there is a moral. If you have what it takes to be interested in the Feature Section of the Durham Morning Herald, chances are you’ve got what they want. If not a pile of milo, then a pile of something. Don’t knock the poverty programme; the life it saves may be your own.’97 Nat Hentoff put forward a similar argument in the New Yorker:
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