Revolutionary Thinker Franz Fanon at 100
By Hélène Bidard, Party of the European Left
The Party of the European Left pays tribute to Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, revolutionary thinker, and freedom fighter. The theorist of human liberation was born one hundred years ago, on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France. He embraced the cause of Algerian independence and global emancipation. In an era of new global brutality, his reflections against colonialism and racism, and in defence of the universal, remain intellectually vital in a world ravaged by imperialist logics.
Across the vast expanse of a transatlantic geography, his journey was a “call to live,” as Aimé Césaire said of him. At the twilight of colonisation, Fanon’s thought—rooted in struggle—grasped a historical rupture. It remains a call to fight for the creation of a world free from domination, liberated from colonialism, and rid of the discourses and acts meant to reify human beings.
An anti-Nazi fighter at 18, then a medical student in Lyon, Fanon became a psychiatrist in Blida, Algeria. There, he practiced a form of clinical work inspired by institutional psychiatry. For him, colonization generates mental disorders in both the colonized and the colonizers. It alienates bodies and corrodes minds. His work charts lines of escape from that “zone of non-being” to which the colonized are consigned; these routes pass through a resolute will to be human—only human. This desire to rise into humanity underpins both his political project and his clinical practice. How can one not still feel the grip of this today, when in Gaza, war criminals call Palestinians “human animals” to justify genocidal machinery?
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon rejects all fixed identities: “The Negro is not. No more than the White.” He denounces the racial categories imposed by colonialism to divide humanity and defends a decolonial, radical, embodied humanism: “I am a man, and it is the whole past of the world that I must reclaim.”
In Algeria Unveiled, he shows how the colonial regime manipulates women’s bodies to fracture colonized society under the guise of emancipation. But unveiling can also become a revolutionary tactic. To those who dream of a return to religion, he replies: “My path stands in opposition to yours.” Emancipation cannot be nostalgia; it is invention.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon opposes a strictly economistic reading of oppression. He writes: “In the colonies, the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. Cause and consequence are one: one is rich because one is white, and one is white because one is rich.” Rejecting dogmatic frameworks, he weaves together Marxism, existentialism, and lived experience to think through liberation.
He had already denounced what we now call a permanent state of war: military domination, terror, censorship, exile, sanctions, and all the brutalities of the world.
Fanon said it clearly: “No peace without liberation.”
Frantz Fanon died at 36, but his humanist and combative body of work endures. It compels us. It continues to call us—to the decolonisation of thought and structures, to self-reflection and reflection on the world, and to the struggle.
- Hélène Bidard is a member of the European Left’s Executive Board and Deputy Mayor of Paris for Gender Equality, Youth and Popular Education- you can follow her on Twitter/X and Instagram.
- You can follow the Party of the European Left on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
- This article was originally published by the European Left on 16th July 2025.
