The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth examines how colonisation dehumanises both individuals and entire nations from a psychoanalytic perspective. It also explores the social, cultural, and political challenges involved in building a movement to decolonise a person and a people. The French title may come from the opening line of “The Internationale,” which also influenced the English version, but biographer Adam Shatz argues it actually originates from a poem by Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, “Dirty Negroes,” published posthumously in 1945.

Summary

The book critiques nationalism and imperialism while discussing personal and societal mental health. It looks at how language is used to create imperialist identities—such as coloniser and colonised—that psychologically train the native and the colonist into roles of slave and master. It also considers the role of intellectuals in revolution.

Fanon argues that revolutionaries should rely on the lumpenproletariat—the lowest, most degraded stratum of the working class in Marxist theory, including criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed—to provide the force needed to expel colonists. Unlike the urban working class, he sees the lumpenproletariat (especially the peasantry) as having enough intellectual independence from colonial ideology to revolt. One essay, “On National Culture,” stresses that each generation must discover its own mission and fight for it.

"On Violence"

The first section, “On Violence,” explains violence in relation to the colonial world and decolonisation. Fanon states that decolonisation is always a violent process, aiming to replace one group of humans with another completely. He describes colonial structures as nested societies that are not complementary, following a “principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” Settlers dehumanise natives, seeing them as incapable of ethics and as absolute evil, opposite to the Christian settlers’ goodness. This explains why decolonisation means population replacement and why natives, knowing they are not animals, develop rebellion.

Fanon identifies three temporary groups among the colonised. First, the native worker, valued for labour. Second, the “colonised intellectual”—more educated natives recruited by settlers to defend Western ideals, ready to protect the “Graeco-Latin pedestal.” Third, the lumpenproletariat, the poorest class outside the system. While Marxists dismiss them, Fanon believes they will be the first to discover violence against the settler.

Once revolution is accepted, Fanon describes how the idea of total change gets watered down through debate and real-world application, becoming a small power shift within the existing system. Pacifists and legalists demand only more power, while the native intellectual desires assimilation.

The colonialist bourgeoisie offers non-violence and compromise to blunt the movement. As an example, after Gabon’s independence from France in 1960, President Léon M’ba stated, “Gabon is independent, but between Gabon and France nothing has changed; everything goes on as before.” For Fanon, this shows a decolonisation movement weakened by hesitant leaders. He urges newly independent Third World countries not to emulate this pattern.