Battling for the New Man: Fanon and French Counter-Revolutionaries

There is a paradox at the heart of Fanon's vision of the future of newly independent societies: On the one hand, he had amply analyzed and documented the apparent "psycho-pathological" character of the colonized man (Black or Arab)--born of the ideational and material conditions imposed by European domination; on the other hand, he called for the emergence of a "new man" with a certain type of Europe as a model. How could the matrix, the nexus of pathology built into the colonized person over the years be overcome in such a way as to lead to the "invention" of a new man that would prevent the duplication of a sick Europe in her former colonies? Did Fanon, the activist, allow his political ideals to take precedence over his knowledge as a psychiatrist? Is Fanon's conception of a "new man" mere wishful thinking, a last warning and admonition to colonized people at a time when he knew he was about to die? I would like to suggest that Fanon's last entreaty was not only the logical conclusion of his analysis of the role of violence/ force in the process of decolonization, but also resonates with an important part of a secret French military strategy of precisely creating a "new man" in Algeria using methods of psychological action. In other words, both Fanon and the French civil/ military authorities were aiming for the same ultimate goal, the creation of "new men" albeit with different methods. The military had a plan for achieving this goal. Fanon proposed a few pointers that fell short of a program of action. More importantly, although he knew of some of the psychological action techniques used by the military in brainwashing, he did not seem to have appreciated their long-lasting effects on perceptions of self, or on the positioning of the self in relation to the post-independence socio-political order. In this paper I am concerned with understanding the gap between Fanon's knowledge of the psychopathology induced in the colonized person and his indeterminate conception of a "new man." I also seek to understand Fanon's apparent dismissal of the effects of military methods of psychological action, a program that combined propaganda, interrogation, and behavior modification. I do not wish to counterpose the French military and Fanon as an idle yet potentially misleading academic exercise. Rather, I wish to explore the significance of Fanon's conception of a "new man" in the context in which it was elaborated, namely the Algerian war, which informed the bulk of Fanon's work and ideas. In a way, anti-subversive war officers and revolutionary psychiatrist were engaged in a course of action that reflected to each a reverse mirror image of the other: military men used psychology for political gain; the psychiatrist used politics for psychological gain. This paper is divided into three parts: 1. The overlap and points of divergence in assessments of the nature of the colonized person in the writings of military strategists as well as Fanon; 2. The strategies used by the military to bring about a new man; 3. Fanon's conception of the "new man." (1) I. CONSTRUCTING THE COLONIZED SELF The Algerian war was defined by French military strategists as a "new war," or "revolutionary war" requiring unconventional methods with which to prosecute it (Lazreg 2007). As such, it was deployed on two main fronts: military and psychological. In fact there were two wars; one was fought with planes, tanks, and light mobile units, the other with psychological methods of propaganda and brainwashing in which torture figured prominently. This second and simultaneous war was appropriately called guerre psychologique (SHD 1957, 1959). While regular military propaganda targeted French conscripts whose commitment to the war was deemed weak, psychological warfare proper, which also included special propaganda techniques, but mostly torture, targeted the Algerian population only. In order to build an effective program of psychological action, military strategists constructed a psychological profile for use as a template by itinerant psychological experts, many of whom were intelligence officers. …