that took their distant ancestors from Africa to the Caribbean. Fanon’s first sight of France had been the invasion beaches of the south and the shattered city of Toulon. His second introduction to la métropole was another city in ruins. Le Havre – Bouville in Sartre’s La Nausée – had been badly damaged by Allied bombs and German resistance in the last months of the war. The docks the San Mateo had been unable to use in 1945 were now functioning, but the town itself was still a bomb-site. It was not an auspicious time to go to France. The economy was in as bad a condition as Le Havre. The Fourth Republic, which had been in existence for only two years, was already revealing its chronic instability and weakness. The transport system was still in chaos, and fuel supplies were poor. It was to be a cold, harsh winter. Food rationing was still in force, and by May 1947 the daily bread ration had been reduced to 250 grammes. In September, riots broke out when it was further reduced to 200 grammes per day – 75 grammes less than in the bleakest years of the Occupation.22 By the end of the year, or just as Fanon was settling down to his studies, a wave of strikes was in progress throughout the country. When the miners of northern France also struck in November, the government sent in troops and the mining areas were under virtual military occupation.23
For Fanon, Le Havre was no more than a staging post and he continued his journey by rail to Paris. He planned to enrol at the School of Dentistry there and, in the absence of any pre-entry selection or pre-enrolment, this was quite literally a matter of queuing up at the relevant office. The decision to study dentistry must have been taken suddenly; in September 1945, Fanon had spoken of becoming a lawyer. There are minor but unresolved discrepancies in accounts of Fanon’s experience at the dental school. According to his first biographer, he lasted three weeks before walking out, complaining that he had never met ‘so many idiots in his life’.24 According to his uncle, he did not even complete the enrolment formalities, and suddenly decided that he did not want to study dentistry and that he did not wish to be in Paris. All sources agree that he left Paris quickly. There were, he told both his brother Joby and his friend Marcel Manville, ‘too many negroes [nègres]’ in Paris.25 There were fewer of them in Lyon, and that was where he was going . . . to study medicine and not dentistry. The reported comment on the number of nègres in Paris may well have been a joke, but it is not easy to interpret. According to Manville, Fanon wanted to ‘lactify’ or whiten himself, ‘as though the man who had committed himself to France during the war was at once regretting and rediscovering his merits and qualities as a Frenchman’.26 His brother takes the view that Frantz wanted to get away from Paris’s resident Martinican community – a community at once cemented together and isolated by its ritual loyalty to a culture founded on rum, the beguine and accras – deep-fried fritters of cod or prawn. That was one of the possibilities open to the Martinican student in Paris: rejecting Europe, using Creole and ‘settling very comfortably into what we can call the Martinican Umwelt’.27 Fanon himself remarks that he disliked the Martinican students’ tendency to deflate anyone who attempted to initiate a serious discussion by accusing him of being self-important and cutting him down to size by reverting to Creole.28 The other possibility was to identify with and become part of the white host community: ‘I am French. I am interested in French culture, in French civilization.’29 Whilst he may have been reluctant to join in the classic expatriate culture of the Martinican community in Paris, when he did spend time there while visiting his brother during vacations, he spent it with that very community. He did, after all, enjoy rum, accras and the beguine. Edouard Glissant, who met him briefly in Paris in 1946, describes Fanon as being deeply concerned with developments in Martinique, which was now beginning the process of departmentalization. He was, according to Glissant, ‘extremely sensitive’. Fanon was un écorché vif, which literally means someone who has been flayed alive and whose every raw nerve has been exposed.30 Fanon’s attitude towards his fellow Martinicans was based upon a profound ambivalence and a deeply troubled sense of his own identity, but it was the characteristic combination of impulsiveness and determination that took him to Lyon, just as it had taken the teenage dissident to Dominica in 1943.
Fanon’s decision to read medicine may, according to his brother Joby, have been prompted by the mistaken belief that it required a shorter course of study than dentistry, but that does not explain the decision to leave Paris. Lyon was not the obvious place to study, though the fact that the cost of living was lower than in Paris may have been part of the attraction. Although the Lyon medical faculty was perfectly respectable, it did not have the prestige enjoyed by Paris’s Ecole de Médecine. A brass plate on a surgery door saying that Dr Fanon had studied in Paris and had worked in a Parisian hospital would have made a much better impression on Martinican patients than one describing him as a graduate of a provincial Faculté Mixte de Médicine et de Pharmacie. Joby Fanon suggests that his brother chose to go to Lyon because he had made friends in Nantua during his wartime convalescence, and had kept in touch with them.31 Lyon was close enough to Nantua to maintain the connection. Even so, he had no direct contacts in Lyon itself. In Paris, Fanon could have remained in close contact with friends and family. Mosole was studying dentistry in Paris and Joby was studying there in preparation for a career in the customs service that would take him much higher than his father. Manville was completing the final year of his law degree and would be called to the bar in October 1947.32 It would also have been much easier to remain in touch with Gabrielle. She was studying pharmacy in Rouen, which is a short train journey away from the capital. He did visit her when he could and may have had some further contact with the hospitable Lemonnier family, but travelling between Lyon and Rouen was far from easy.
Fanon had, probably without realizing it, chosen to live and study in a city which was – and is – notoriously unfriendly to strangers. Lyon was neither more nor less racist than any French city, but even white fellow students like Robert Berthelier, who was born in Royan, felt themselves unwelcome there. Berthelier’s outsider status, together with his love of jazz – he played piano – meant that he felt more at home with Fanon and the handful of black students at the university than with the native lyonnais students.33 Living in Lyon accentuated Fanon’s sense of isolation and estrangement. He was already familiar with the town-country relationship that existed between little settlements like Basse-Pointe and ‘the imposing Fort-de-France’; he could now detect a similar dialectic between Paris and Lyon. ‘Take a Lyonnais in Paris; he will boast of how peaceful his city is, of the intoxicating beauty of the banks of the Rhône, the splendour of the plane trees and all the other things that are praised by people who have nothing to do. If you meet him when he comes back to Paris, and especially if you do not know the capital, he won’t stop singing its praises: Paris-city-of-light, the Seine, the open-air cafés, see Paris and die . . .’34 Fanon could play all the parts in the scenario of exile and alienation.
Like the rest of France, Lyon suffered a severe housing crisis after the war. In Paris, the crisis was so acute that, according to urban myth, anyone who saw a potential suicide poised to leap into the Seine would run up to him – not to offer help, but to ask if he was leaving an apartment free. Matters were not quite so bad in Lyon, but the accommodation crisis does explain why Fanon found himself living in a former brothel requisitioned by the Ministry of Education and converted into rudimentary student housing.35 It was one of the famous maisons closes, or state-regulated brothels, which were closed in 1946 when the Assemblée Nationale adopted a bill pushed through by a zealous Communist Party member. Although Fanon’s accommodation was rather unusual, this was a convenient solution, as a lone black student with no contacts and little money would not have found it easy to obtain rented accommodation in the private sector.
There were indeed fewer nègres in Lyon than in Paris, but France’s second city stands at the junction of major trade routes and has absorbed wave after wave of immigrants. Italians, Greeks and Armenians flooded there before and during the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, the deteriorating economy of Algeria forced many peasants – the majority of them from Kabylia – to migrate and find work in Lyon’s factories. Others had simply stayed on after being demobilized during the First World War. In the early 1930s, the Algerian community in Lyon was estimated to be 2,200. Most were single men, living ten or twelve to a room in the slums of the rue Moncey and the Guillotière quarter, only a few hundred yards away from the city’s historic centre on the east bank of the Rhône.36 An Algerian