Antoine Porot

Antoine Porot was a French psychiatrist. He founded what was known as the Algiers School of psychiatry, which attempted to justify the inherent racism in the French colonial mission in Algiers on the basis that Algerians, i.e. the Muslim non-ethnically French inhabitants, were biologically inferior. Frantz Fanon discusses his theories and the impact on Algerian colonial society in his book, The Wretched of the Earth, but does not reference Porot by name in any of his published writings.
Porot had a son, Maurice Porot, who followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a psychiatrist, teaching at Alger then at Clermont-Ferrand.

Psychiatric Philosophy

Porot portrayed himself as interested in understanding Algerian society. His assessment of it was that Algerian Muslims were hysterical, unintelligent, and innately more likely to be criminals. He also noted that Algerian criminals were relatively more likely to refuse to confess despite clear evidence of their guilt, and concluded that they had an ingrained inability to tell the difference between truth and falsehoods.
His philosophy was influenced by Arthur de Gobineau, who perpetuated white supremacy by claiming that racism was scientifically justified by biological differences between races.

Effects of the Algiers School of Psychiatry

In his 2006 book, La Dignité: les debouts de l'utopie, Bernard Doray discusses the eugenics-justified liquidation of some 40,000 inmates of French mental wards and hospitals under the Nazi Occupation of World War II. He says that the order for the extermination did not originate from any one person or authority; it grew almost spontaneously from "an accumulation of interstitial abominations", chiefly based on "indigenous psychiatry", of which Antoine Porot was the ultimate source: