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