Published for the first time in 1959 and constantly reissued since, this “classic of decolonization” remains highly topical for understanding the springs of the emancipation movement that led to the Algerian war of independence. This book was born from the experience accumulated in the heart of the fight, within the FLN. Because Frantz Fanon, born West Indian and died Algerian (1925-1961), had chosen to live and fight among colonized people like him, in Algeria, the country of colonialism par excellence. A militant text, this work was also the first systematic analysis of the transformation that was then taking place within the Algerian people engaged in the revolution.

This text, among the very first published by Éditions Maspero, describes from the inside the profound changes of an Algerian society struggling for its freedom. These transformations, the political and social maturation, ignored by the colonists when they were precisely the fruits of colonization and humiliation, nevertheless largely presided over the process which led to the war in Algeria, "the most hallucinating that a people has carried out to break colonial oppression".