DIACRITIK October 17, 1961: William Gardner Smith, fiction and the event Receive Mail alerts Legal mentions Navigation of articles
Some events resist being “told”. October 17, 1961 is one of them. However, as often, the fiction was already there. William Gardner Smith's novel, The Stone Face, has finally been translated into French: we then discover how a young African-American who came to Paris to get away from his country introduced into his story, in 1964, this that he saw and lived. French writers did not get started until later: Didier Daeninckx in 1984; but also Leïla Sebbar in 1999 and Thomas Cantaloube in 2019.
Back to the facts
We know everything we owe, about this event in the heart of Paris, to the obstinate research of Jean-Luc Einaudi (1951-2014). The first state of his research was published in 1991 by Editions du Seuil under the title La Bataille de Paris – October 17, 1961. This book was reissued in paperback with an unpublished afterword by the author in 2001 At the Papon trial in 1997, Einaudi had testified before the Assize Court of Bordeaux on the massacre of Algerians on October 17, 1961; Papon, if he was condemned for his actions for the deportation of the Jews, was never for the savage repression against the Algerians. Jean-Luc Einaudi, to continue his search for the truth, had filed an access request on February 8, 1998 at the Paris Archives, which was refused. On May 20, 1998, he published an article in Le Monde denouncing a “massacre”. Papon, who had been supported at the highest level of the state, filed a complaint for defamation.
In 2015, Fabrice Riceputi published Le Passager Clandestin, a book on the Einaudi investigation: The Battle of Einaudi. How the memory of October 17, 1961 returned to the Republic; more recently, in September 2021, Ici on drowned les Algériens was published with a preface by Edwy Plenel and Gilles Manceron. For those who want to be informed, there is no shortage of documents, especially since these books have provoked controversy and have therefore come out of the silence to which many embarrassing works are confined. But the fact of the massacre itself is no longer in question.
We will also refer to the magnificent photo report by Jean-Philippe Cazier, on October 17, 2021 in Diacritik, for the commemoration of this event, with this presentation: "On October 17, 1961, to protest against the curfew imposed on only immigrants from the Maghreb, in particular Algerians, a demonstration is organized in Paris. The French State repressed this demonstration with violence and bloodshed: arrests, beatings, murders perpetrated by the French police. The most chanted slogan during the commemoration this afternoon which took place in Paris is: “open the archives! "".
The stone face of William Gardner Smith
It is always fascinating to discover a work that retains all its relevance. This is the case of this novel published in the United States in 1963, 58 years ago… Thanks to the translation by Bourgois editions, it is now available in French. How to explain this omerta since, despite the request of the writer who lived in France, it was not translated? It seems that the reason is the event intimately woven into the fiction: this massacre of Algerians in Paris. The sentence that accompanied the launch of the novel in the United States highlights the funny feeling of a black American in Paris to be considered "like a white".
Michel Fabre’s book, La Rive noire. Black American Writers in Paris. 1830-1995, clearly indicates the place occupied by William Gardner Smith: “France represented for black Americans a land of freedom. Arriving on the battlefields of the Great War with jazz in their luggage, they subsequently represented a constant cultural presence. In the difficult hours of McCarthyism, expatriates gathered in the cafes of the Latin Quarter around Richard Wright, Chester Himes and William Gardner Smith while James Baldwin sought his identity in Belleville. Very dented by colonization, then by the Algerian war and the rise of racism, the myth of liberal and welcoming France for black American writers and artists still survived during the years of Black Power. It is noticeable through the prints and works of contemporaries. »
William Gardner Smith moved to Paris in 1951. He stayed there and resided in Île-de-France; he died in Thiais in 1974, at the age of 47 after brilliant years as an AFP correspondent from 1954, sent to various countries. On the cover of the French translation, it is a portrait of the author which appears, confirming what one senses when reading: Simeon Brown is his double and that, like him, he is haunted by a face of stone. that he paints constantly without managing to finish it.
The novel mixes with great tact and realism the liberated life of men and women who have escaped the daily, open or insidious racism they suffered in the country and the discovery that, under the appearances, other "niggers" are hunted down in this country of freedom, the Algerians fighting for their independence. In three parts with revealing titles, Simeon goes from the lightness of Parisian daily life to the unfair heaviness of the world with a question that seems central to us: “can we escape racism? » ; the titles of these parts underline a progression: “The fugitive”, “The white man”, “The brother”. One of the two quotes highlighted in a way announces the dominant impression of the story: “I was a stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus II, 22).
An American, a black man, named Simeon Brown, in his thirties, arrives by train at Saint-Lazare station, after having landed in Le Havre from America: “What a long journey! he thought. America was behind him, his past too; he was safe. Violence would not be necessary, nor murder. Paris. The peace ". In this month of May 1960, he observes with curiosity the crowd around him, these streets full of people. But there is already a discrepancy in the landscape: “And those men who were walking towards him in a group, with crimped hair and completely white skin, but certainly not black? They had a sad, dejected, furious look, a look that Simeon knew from having seen him on the streets of Harlem. Shapeless pants, worn shoes, a ratty shirt. They watched Simeon unsmilingly, and something that looked suspiciously like recognition flowed between them and him. Then they passed it and disappeared” (p. 15).
First “encounter”, first discomfort. Then on the terrace of a café where he tries to approach a young woman who rejects him, he thinks: “Racism. He was omnipresent. He was here too, in Paris. Even if, in this case, there is a misunderstanding, the reader adopts the constant suspicion, and unfortunately often well-founded, which is that of Simeon. After a first installation in a hotel and the recovery of the painting that he carries with him, that of a terrible face, Simeon goes out and captures a newspaper headline: “Riot of Muslims in Algiers. Fifty dead” (p. 18). The sun is shining and Simeon wants to savor the freedom; but immediately, a man crosses his walk: “A middle-aged man, with swarthy skin and long frizzy hair, was pushing a cart of fruit and vegetables. He could have been part of the group of individuals seen by Simeon in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare upon his arrival. Were these people Algerians? Sweating under the weight of the cart, he gave Simeon a look that was neither friendly nor hostile, only curious. For reasons he did not quite understand, Simeon felt a surge of guilt overwhelm him” (p. 19).
Decidedly, these different men are not letting him relish his escape from America! A compatriot he meets, takes him in and introduces him to the milieu of Black Americans in Paris and reminds him, without knowing it, of his reason for being there: "I like to see the little guys free themselves trouble. One less victim. Ah, if we could move all the black population away from the States! […] Some days, when we walk in the streets, we meet so many black Americans that we believe we are back in Harlem” (p. 20, 22).
While he has to find a place, Simeon distances himself from these men he does not know; and since he does not live in the same neighborhoods and does not frequent the same public places, it is quite possible. On the other hand, he meets Maria the Polish woman, with whom he will live an unusual love story and who tries to make him accept "normal life", based on the erasure of war, injustice, violence so as not to sink.
Simeon has integrated into the group of which Babe, his first interlocutor, is the pivot: he has, with him, his first experience as a "white man": in a club on the left bank, they are verbally attacked by white Americans and the boss kicks them out guarding Babe and her friends. The roles have reversed. But bad luck for Simeon, on leaving the club, he comes across a scene that plunges him back into racism: “At the crossroads, they saw a policeman bludgeoning a man. Although the latter had already fallen to the sidewalk, the cop continued to hit him with his long white truncheon, and the other tried in vain to protect his head with his arms. The man was shouting in a language that Simeon did not understand. He watched the beating until a patrol car pulled up, two policemen picked up the injured man, and the car drove off” (p. 58). Shocked, Simeon listens without comment to Babe's explanation: "There's a war in Algeria, remember? »
It is in chapter IV of this first part that Simeon finds himself at the heart of the group of Algerians (p. 71 to 77). His friend Harold, a musician, takes him to a "shabby cafe, full of men with dark curly hair, dressed in loose, unironed clothes" to listen to music: he seems to have his habits and to be known: "Simeon knew that there were five hundred thousand Algerians in France, but he had never set foot in their cafes". In the street, on leaving, he flies to the aid of a Dutch woman who is being attacked and hits the man. He then realizes that the man is an Algerian. The police arrive; the man explains why he was going after this girl. Simeon is all the more annoyed that, under the contemptuous gaze of the Algerians, he is not taken to the police station and a policeman explains to him the plague that the Arabs are and that he does not interfere in that.
Simeon's "political" education is not over. He had a bad night and the next afternoon, he was challenged by one of the Algerians from the day before who was going to ask him the question that froze him: “What does it feel like to be a white man? (p. 80). The man gives him no gift and sends him back in his good conscience of "white": "Here, it's us, the niggas! Do you know what the French call us? Bicot, melon, raccoon, nor’af. It means "negro" in French. Aren't you afraid of being robbed? Aren't you disgusted by our unironed clothes, our body odors? No, but seriously, I want to ask you a serious question – would you let your daughter marry one of us? (p. 82). The lesson was rough and Simeon continues his investigation by questioning two French students: one denies that there is racism in France; the other is more lucid. Those who deny affirm that with the Arabs, it is not the same, “they are different” (p. 88 to 90).
We have thus followed all the passages where the Algerians and what they represent in France in 1960 are introduced very gradually, coexisting with Simeon's contradictory desire to take advantage of this new freedom: the novel thus leads the life in parallel ease and pleasure of the protagonist and his gaze on the absolute Other that is the Algerian. And each time, memories of what he suffered in the United States come back with force, in comparison, with, in its center, the face of the racists of whom he was the victim.
In the second part, "The White Man", the novelist does not content himself with allusions but introduces sequences of life where Simeon can no longer simply be a surprised or compassionate observer: "The incident with the Algerians had changed his attitude towards Parisian life – he was more aware of the distance that separated him from the other white people he associated with, including the French. The buried hatreds were back; the forgotten walls stood again between the world and him” (p.94).
One afternoon when he was seated on the terrace of a café on Place de la Contrescarpe, an Algerian waved to him in a friendly way from inside the bar. They sit down and a friendship is born between the two men, Simeon and Ahmed. The latter did not approve of the way in which Hossein – now the novelist calls the Algerians by their name – jostled Simeon and treated him as a white man and, at the same time, he explains his attitude. He feels a strong affinity with Simeon, sensing in him a man who, like him, hates violence and racism but has no hatred. He also gives him information on the struggle of the Algerians and the role of the FLN (p. 110 to 115).
Second sequence of "Algerian education in wartime" by Simeon (p. 115 to 128): the next day, Ahmed takes him to the Algerian quarter to eat couscous: W. Gardner Smith qualifies this sequence of “Orpheus going down to Harlem”: as the bus goes up towards the northern districts, Simeon recognizes Harlem. Ahmed gives him other information on the war, the camps, the arbitrary arrests. They arrive at Hossein's and conversation and meal are interrupted by a raid of muscular cops. Once again the latter advise Simeon to keep his distance, not to meddle in French affairs. Later, when he questions Babe about his relationship with the Algerians, he reacts violently (p. 138). The third sequence is just as harsh, but this time on Simeon's "territory": he takes his Algerian friends to the Château club. They are thrown out and Simeon is stripped of his membership (p. 141 to 149). There is one more brief encounter between Ahmed and Henri, the French student aware of racism (p. 152). Ahmed takes the opportunity to further open Simeon's eyes to the reality of the war and the lukewarm support of the French leftists.
Lou, the white American that Simeon prefers, makes a very lucid analysis of the chain of racism, the gear in which individuals find themselves embedded. They are joined by Hossein, Ben Youcef and Maria (p. 161 to 168). Faced with the anti-Semitic remarks of the two Algerians that Ahmed disapproves of, Maria explodes. There is a painful point of misunderstanding for Simeon who, despite everything, continues his pleasant life with his friends, not without a bad conscience. The fight of the high school students of Little Rock and the death of Patrice Lumumba upset him: “Images swirled in his mind; the African students, the Algerians, his brother, Lulu Belle, the French demonstrators in the street” (p. 203). The life he leads seems to him more and more derisory. This second part of awareness ends with the departure of Ahmed (p. 204-205): he can no longer bear his life as a student and has decided to join the fight in Algeria: this departure strongly shakes Simeon in his friendship and in his decision to flee America.
While the second part was the longest, the third, "The Brother", is the shortest. Simeon takes a break after Maria's eye surgery and spends two months with her in Corsica. Ahmed gone, he very rarely sees Algerians. Nevertheless, he is sensitive to the change in atmosphere with the defeats suffered by the French Empire and the rage that this provokes among the colonialists; the police no longer seem as measured as he thought. OAS bombs explode. Simeon tries to have the quiet life that Maria wants, "but he couldn't escape the feeling of guilt every time he read the newspaper or met Algerians in the street, every time he met Ben Youcef" : Is Ahmed dead? Hossein, surely: “The foreigners – and Simeon with them – lived in an imaginary world, like the foam floating on the sea of French society” (p. 225).
The penultimate chapter, Chapter V is that of Ahmed's brief return, of which he sees the transformation thanks to his commitment: "Ahmed stood very straight, with pride, his skin was tanned, his hands once delicate were now muscular and calloused. His eyes had lost all of their youthful shyness and they shone with serene determination. Compared to him, Simeon felt like a sleepwalker" (p. 241) Back home, Simeon writes a breakup letter to Maria, feeling that he must make a decision to act, driven by what he Ahmed said. They see each other every day and Ahmed takes her to dinner at Ben Youcef's with two Algerian girls, Djamila and Latifa (p. 246 to 257). Besides the meal, it is the story of the horrible tortures they suffered that the two men tell Simeon without frills or metaphors but with precise details. When leaving, Ahmed informs him of the curfew decreed by the Prefecture of Police, only for Algerians: “We are going to challenge them! »
This is the subject of the last chapter: the facts are first recalled. Simeon searches for Ahmed; Babe warns him and advises him not to be on the street. The novelist gives a description of the demonstration, the number, the diversity of the demonstrators, the slogans and the repression. Here too, as for the evocation of torture, the narrator does not take gloves and describes the things seen. Recall that he wrote a few months after October 17. And during this time, the whole city continues its usual activities The bodies are bludgeoned, some thrown into the Seine: “A few tens of meters in front of him, a policeman brought down his truncheon on a woman who was holding a baby. She fell to her knees, leaned forward to protect her child, but the policeman's baton slammed down again and again and again. Simeon watched, realized he was crying, felt all those blows on his own body. Suddenly, he discovered the face of the policeman […] it was Chris, Mike, their face. The cop's features were distorted, contorted with the joy of destruction, his eyes narrowed, red spots of excitement spangled his deathly pale skin” (p. 262).
Simeon rushes at the cop and throws a punch with all his might. When he wakes up, he is crammed with others into a van. We make them all enter a stadium with fists and truncheons. It is there that a man greets him: “Hi, brother! ". Once again, his American origin pulls him out of the herd and the policeman who frees him lectures him: "We like niggers here, you know, we don't practice racism in France, it's not like in the States -United. We can understand why you prefer to live here. We would not like to be forced to expel you” (p. 268). Within days, Simeon says goodbye to his Parisian life and decides to return to America.
This balanced and touching novel strikes by its measure and its truth. Translated in 1963-1964, would it have touched a French public bruised by the loss of Algeria? Maybe not. And yet, it does confirm what Pierre Barbéris has analyzed in the relationship between History and the literary text: "At certain times, under certain conditions, because it is much less ideologically compromised than the historical text, because it is a means of transgressing the dominant ideology, it is it which gives a more adequate image of reality; it is he who "works" better with reality and makes it known. William Gardner Smith does not allude to October 17 in a peripheral and anecdotal way: he integrates it into the evolution of his character. It is a culmination of the ferment that was for him his gaze on the Algerians in these years 1960-1961, how the friendships created on the basis of a desire for justice helped the young man to look at his experience differently. This look, which is neither French nor Algerian, therefore acquires an intensity that the refusal of translation had clearly perceived as a danger of testimony and objectivity.
James Baldwin, Chassés de la lumière
Seven years after William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face, James Baldwin in turn echoed the condition of Algerians in France in his "Souvenirs de Paris, 1948-1952” in No name in the street (1971), translated by Stock the following year under the title Chassés de la lumière. This is another African-American look at Algerians. James Baldwin recalls his arrival in Paris in 1948: as he had no money, he lived "among the miserable and, in Paris, the miserable are Algerians". He describes their unenviable way of life, "treated like animals", "on the dirty and hostile pavement of Paris". The French with whom he discusses, accuse them of all evils: lazy, thieves, rapists. For James Baldwin, it's a familiar refrain!... He explains their presence in cafes by a need for heat to escape the freezing cold of the rooms and pushes his analysis further: "The French were still bogged down in the war in Indochina when I arrived in France and I was living in Paris when Dien Bien Phu fell. The carpet and peanut merchants who roamed the streets of Paris had nothing to do then with this military disaster; however, the attitude of the people, which had never been very friendly, and that of the police, which had always been threatening, became more sly and nasty. […] The Arabs were not part of Indochina but they were part of an empire that was visibly collapsing at full speed, part of a story that was coming to an end (in the literal and painful sense of the word ) and turned out to be the opposite of the myth that the French had made of it”.
So the French can't stand being criticized for France's work in Algeria, which brought civilization: "I was told, with a warm smile, that I was different: the American black is very evolved, let's see! The Arabs, no; they were not “civilized” like me. […] But the French had endured this with patience for a hundred years and were ready to continue thus for as long as Algeria was a heavy burden for the national economy. […] In short, the generosity of the French was so constant and exemplary that it was impossible to imagine its children ready to revolt”.
James Baldwin is not fooled because he knows how to look: “One sunny afternoon, I had seen in the street, the police beat up an old peanut seller who had only one arm and I I had also seen the indifferent faces of the French people sitting on the terrace of a café and those of the Arabs swollen with hatred. […] And the revolt came. Not without warning signs, without warnings. But only poets, whose job it is to unearth and recreate history, know how to decipher these messages. After four years abroad, I returned to New York in 1952 […]”.
Didier Daeninckx, Murders for Memory
In 1984, twenty years after the American novel and twenty-five years after the event, the first French novel on October 17, 1961 appeared; he received the grand prize for detective literature in 1985. Whoever dared, with courage and conviction, to lift the leaden screed that crushed the event, did not know The Stone face. He worked on archives. This detective story is called Murders for Memory. An investigation by Inspector Cadin; it appears at Gallimard. We can compare the title of the book and its epigraph: "Forgetting the past / We condemn ourselves to relive it" because the silence on October 17 is truly the annihilation of memory.
The novelist chooses to portray specific characters, taking “the Algerians” or “the Arabs” out of the anonymity that usually accompanies their mention. Chapter I immerses the reader in the preparations for a demonstration by following Saïd Milache, a printer worker, who leaves his job to go to the demonstration. The text notes: “At 7:25 p.m., Tuesday, October 17, 1961, Saïd Milache and Lounès Tougourd climbed the steps of the Bonne-Nouvelle metro station”.
The next character is a Frenchman, Roger Thiraud, a history teacher who is going to see a film. Before returning home, “he looked mechanically towards the metro, as he had done a few years earlier while waiting for Muriel. Two Algerians, collars raised to shelter from the wind, appeared at the same time. Roger Thiraud's watch showed 7:25 p.m. on Tuesday, October 17, 1961.
Kaïra Guelanine is the third character: she lives with her father and her brothers and sisters in the Nanterre slum and is involved in the resistance; she is one of the organizers of the demonstration. His brother takes him on a motorcycle to join Saïd: “At the front of the jewelry store at the corner of rue Notre-Dame-de-Bonne Nouvelle, an imposing clock marked seven twenty-five. October 17, 1961.
Chapter II is devoted to the demonstration itself: “at the sound of a strident whistle”, the demonstrators come out of everywhere and put themselves in marching order; “A thousand Algerians blocked the Bonne-Nouvelle crossroads” to cries of “Algerian Algeria”. Roger Thiraud observes, admiringly, “they had dared! “He is out of step with the other French people who say rather: “I hope that the army will come back to fire all these fellouzes for me”. Saïd and his friends are there, Aounit, Kaïra's brother too: opposite, the CRS who have specific instructions: "Break the movement, do not hesitate to use your weapons if the situation requires it. Each man is entitled to judge, in the event of physical engagement, the appropriate means of response.
The novelist describes, in great detail, the brutal charge of the CRS and notes that "it was almost eight o'clock". The repression was ultra fast: less than 30 minutes since the novelist had noted the time of arrival of the demonstrators at the rallying point. All those he named are dead or arrested. In half an hour, it is the carnage against peaceful demonstrators and without any negotiation. Roger Thiraud observed everything, horrified. He did not intervene. A man observes him and kills him. “In the early morning, all that remained on the boulevards were thousands of shoes, objects, various debris that bore witness to the violence of the clashes. Finally, silence had settled. A rescue team sent by the Prefecture of Police was looking for the wounded and the bodies. We did not bother with useless gestures, nor with problems of conscience, the bodies were piled up pell-mell, without distinction ”. This massacre in the heart of Paris has little echo in the press of the next day, neither story, nor photos... "Move around, there is nothing to see".
Twenty-five pages to tell this terrible evening and night: how will the novel bounce back? In Chapter III, we learn that Inspector Cadin is leading the investigation twenty years later when Roger Thiraud's son is murdered as mysteriously as his father, but in Toulouse. What link ? He cannot believe in a coincidence and seeks in the life of the father what would have caused his elimination. He has all the difficulties because October 17 has passed into the traps of history. The police colleague that Cadin sees in Paris urges him to let it go: when it comes to the Algerian war, it is better to be careful, you must not wake up the past. The file is classified "without follow-up". The official version to which we must adhere was thus formulated at the highest summit of the State: “The Parisian police had responded to their mission, by protecting the capital from a riot triggered by a terrorist organization”. During the investigation, Cadin meets Marc Roser, the only photographer whose photos we did not want to publish. His memories are very specific: "The Algerians took it seriously." He describes everything: the CRS and others armed to the teeth and white-hot to do battle; the dead, the embarked in the cellars, the vans, the drowned.
After this passage, October 17 does not return in the novel. The event covers about thirty pages out of the 196 of the novel. But its initial position is essential: we know how much the opening of a novel is decisive for the rest of the reading. October 17 is, in a way, the screen, in the foreground, on which Daeninckx projects the murderous actions of a police power supported at the highest level – we note that he does not give any name but the dates are enough –, and the sustainability of the protections deployed for the impunity of actors. Behind October 17 opens an investigation into the deportation of Jews to France which is gradually brought to light and the reason for the assassination of the father and the son who put their noses where it should not. In 1984, when no one dared to arouse the responsibilities of this repression – six months before the Évian agreements – this detective novel imposed a courageous denunciation based on "a prologue" linked to the sequel to the novel, two episodes little shining lights of recent French history.
Didier Daeninckx had first thought of relying on the Charonne metro case, February 8, 1962 and finally opted for October 17, 1961. Both crackdowns were led by Maurice Papon. Note that in 1999 (Maurice Papon was sentenced in April 1998 but not for his repressions against the Algerians), Leïla Sebbar published a short novel, The Seine was red. Privileged is the point of view of a young girl, Amel, who conveys the novelist's favorite motifs in her other writings: the absence of transmission from parents to children, ignorance of Arabic and Islam, the distance of the voice of the narration in relation to the Algeria-nation. The witnesses of October 17 summoned are not, in the majority of cases, militants convinced of the independence cause but either its opponents or its followers without conviction. The event is well reported but emptied of flame and conviction.
In 2019, October 17 comes at the end of Thomas Cantaloube's detective novel, Requiem for a Republic, as one more turpitude on the Vth Republic and its servants. The novel embraces the years 59-61; he names well-known actors, some of whom are still alive, and builds a captivating plot around the assassination of an Algerian lawyer linked to the FLN and his entire family, an assassination which turns into carnage, in the fall of 1959. A trio is launched on the investigation by the forces present: “Sirius Volkstrom, former collaborator, penguin who became an executor of low works for Papon, Antoine Carrega, former Corsican resistance fighter who became a drug courier and Luc Blanchard, a fairly naive young policeman. These three individuals who are total opposes will cross paths and will have to, in spite of themselves, work together to thwart this important political manipulation. October 17 is not treated in itself but as further proof of the bloody confusion of power.
In Poetics of the Event, Sabrina Parent writes that "a fact can be apprehended as an event insofar as "'what happens' upsets a horizon of expectation, leaving the one to whom the event happens in the expectation of a meaning to come”. She specifies that the privileged place of the event is the narration. The literary stories that we have just recalled, the first two in particular, may have upset a horizon of expectation and they are likely to shed another light on History.
William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face, translated from English (United States) by Brice Mathieussent, Christian Bourgois publisher, October 2021, 273 p., €21
