Paris. Peace. Or is it?

Just under sixty years ago, the American author William Gardner Smith published a novel whose guiding question remains as timely now as it was then: how do states that understand themselves as the bearers and defenders of human rights justify—or ignore—their flagrant disregard of those rights? William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963) is not a Thesenroman, but a tightly autobiographical narrative set in Paris in the early sixties. At its center is a young Black journalist named Simeon who flees American racism for the French capital, as many Black American artists and intellectuals did at the time.

The stories are familiar. For James Baldwin, Paris was the “refuge from American madness”; for Josephine Baker, a “fairyland place” without fear; and for Richard Wright, a “racially (…) free city,” in which a single city block contained more freedom than the entire United States. Smith—less famous, and indeed largely forgotten until NYRB Classics reissued the novel in 2021—shared with these celebrated Americans-in-exile both the experience of encountering American madness and the enthusiasm for a fairyland without racism. At least at first.

Traumatized by the regular and brutal experiences of violence in the United States, Smith’s protagonist Simeon initially struggles to believe the rumor of French color‑blindness. He is too haunted by the titular “stone face,” a grimace of “hatred and denial,” which he had witnessed in the United States in moments when latent prejudice tipped into manifest racism and then in turn into sadistic violence. As a teenager, a gang leader gouged out one of Simeon’s eyes, simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A police officer arrested him arbitrarily—the same had happened to Smith at fourteen—and beat him at the station for lacking the requisite “respect.” A sailor pummeled him in a bar for sitting with a white woman—Smith experienced this himself at nineteen. The examples are autobiographical and yet emblematic, revealing how the police, civil society, and sexual norms expose the fault lines along which racism persists even in times of nominal equality.

To Simeon’s surprise, the everyday experience of life in Paris initially seems to confirm the myths of French universalism: the French police appear as a guarantor of his safety rather than a threat; a bartender defends him against racist attacks by traveling Americans; and flirtation—or even a relationship—with white French women feels possible. Simeon quickly befriends the perpetually cheerful Babe, another Black American in exile whose enthusiasm rivals Richard Wright’s. He begins, at last, to believe in the “racially free city.” “America was behind him, his past was behind him, he was safe. (…) Paris. Peace.”

“You Don’t Know How They Are”

The joy doesn’t last. When Simeon meets a group of Algerians, he soon realizes that racism has not disappeared; it has merely been redirected. “How does it feel to be a white man?” spits Ahmed after he becomes the target of police violence while the very same officer fraternizes with Simeon: “You don’t understand. You don’t know how they are, les Arabs (sic!).”