Original title and edition: Les Damnés de la terre, Éditions Maspero, 1961.

From his commitment “to the African revolution” (title of the posthumous book collecting letters and articles, 1964) and his psychiatric knowledge of the trauma caused by (anti)colonial violence in Algeria, Martinican author Franz Fanon affirms the need for violence in the process of national liberation of those people who try to throw off the yoke of the metropolis : the authentic “wretched of the earth”. In the decolonization process, violence not only frees the colonized from the administrative realm, it also helps him/her to overcome the feeling of epistemic, racial and cultural, inferiority. For Fanon, a struggling Third World should complete the European humanist project, Europe itself would have betrayed criminally. (J.A.)