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Cacucci, Pino. "Without a Glimmer of Remorse". 2006. Read & Noir (an imprint of ChristieBooks), Hastings, Sussex. Pbk, 364pp. Illus, bibliography. ISBN 1-873976-28-3. £9.99 / E15.00

At a time when governments are demanding an end to the glorification (or even justification) of "terrorism", it takes a brave publisher to issue a book about a famous anarchist bank-robber, one that attempts to understand what forces drove him to do what he did.

Yet here we have Paul Sharkey's translation of Pino Cacucci's novel about the life and times (and crimes) of Jules Bonnot, member of one of the most notorious (if short-lived) criminal gangs seen in France, in the period shortly before the First World War. And generally speaking the novel makes for a good read. It is fast-paced, informative, evocative and Sharkey's translation serves the original text very well (not that I have seen the original text or can read Italian, but the translator has produced a text that reads very well.)

For those who have little idea of who Jules Bonnot was, a short biographical sketch is appropriate. And here is one stolen from wikipedia:

"Bonnot was born on October 14, 1876 in Pont-de-Roide, a town in Doubs, France (the same département in which anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born). At the age of five, his mother died, leaving Bonnot in the care of his father (a factory worker) and grandmother.

As a teenager, Bonnot served time in prison on two occasions (the later, for assaulting a police officer) and was compelled to leave his work at the factory after being accused of stealing copper shavings."

Caccuci shows Bonnot at this time of his life very much as a victim of circumstance and of his own inability to ignore the painfully obvious nature of the brutal environment he lived and worked in.

"At the age of 21, Bonnot was conscripted for service in France's infantry, where he served three years as a truck auto mechanic. He was an excellent rifleman and left the army as a corporal first class."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Bonnot

His time in the Army seems to have been well-spent (and he may have wished to have served longer than he did) as it trained him in the use of firearms (he was crack-shot), explosives and auto mechanics.

However, even after leaving military service he found that his past kept catching up on him and he often found himself unemployed because of his criminal and political past, which saw him return precisely to those activities to sustain himself.

One such period of employment, in the book, is that as the chauffeur to the well-known writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Now I have had a problem finding out just how "true" this is. According to Richard Parry's book "The Bonnot Gang", this was nothing more than a folktale or legend. However (according to items on the net) in Peter Costello's book "The Real World of Sherlock Holmes", Conan Doyle discovered in 1921 that his former driver was indeed Jules Bonnot who had subsequently discovered another use for his driving skills. Strangely this revelation has yet to make its way into any other biographical material about either Conan Doyle or Bonnot, that I have accessed. However, rather than quibble about "historical accuracy", one should note that Caccuci makes good use of the story for his own ends, not least by it enabling a discussion about writing crime novels, crime and its causes etc.

According to the novel it was whilst in England that Bonnot met with another illegalist, the Italian Platano, and they decided to get involved in counterfeiting coinage. Other sources have this happening in France.

Bonnot became loosely associated with individualist / illegallist anarchists around the journal L'Anarchie, among them Victor Kibalchich (later better known as "Victor Serge"), who, in the novel at least, acts as a counter-point to the illegalists, pointing out the repercussions any active illegal activities such robbery (even if it is to raise funds for the "movement") would have on the wider anarchist scene. However, the illegalists were not prepared to wait out a lifetime for the proletariat to come round to their way of thinking, they were for living now, hoping that possibly they could light a spark of revolt that would set of something much larger. It should also be noted that their politics were of a "lifestylist" nature, many being vegetarian and tee-total, and keen on body-building.

As an aside, the novel does a good job of combining Bonnot's life story with those of other associates such as Victor Kibalchich and Raymond–la-Science, who first meet up as youngsters in Brussels. And interwoven with their lives are those of the policemen who were keeping an eye on the anarchist milieu, in particular the illegalists. It should be noted that there was considerable tension between the illegalists and the wider anarchist movement at this time and it's probably one of the few failings of the novel that in focusing so closely on Bonnot and his associates one doesn't really get an idea of the wider movement, in particular the large syndicalist movement that was proving so influential in certain sectors of the working class at this time. As the wikipedia on the Bonnot gang states:

"French anarchist communists attempted to distance themselves from illegalism and anarchist individualism as a whole. In August 1913, the Fédération Communiste-Anarchistes (FCA) condemned individualism as bourgeois and more in keeping with capitalism than communism. An article believed to have been written by Peter Kropotkin, in the British anarchist paper Freedom, argued that "Simple-minded young comrades were often led away by the illegalists' apparent anarchist logic; outsiders simply felt disgusted with anarchist ideas and definitely stopped their ears to any propaganda."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnot_Gang

The counterfeiting gang eventually progressed to robbery and there developed a spiral driven by several factors: the fact of illegal activity causing more such activity to generate the finances to continue the "struggle"; the illegal activity drawing increased police surveillance and repression of the wider movement leading to isolation of the illegalists; the police policy of letting the hares run until they had done something so outrageous that there was a widespread public clamour for repression; not to mention a sense of fatalism and inevitably amongst the illegalists themselves - the feeling that they were already beyond the pale and doomed but they would go down fighting, making as big an uproar as they could.

Having decided there was little to more to lose, the Gang, of which Bonnot was just an influential member, not the "Mr Big" much beloved of police everywhere, used Bonnot's driving skills to develop the armed robbery with added get-away car, apparently the first people to do so. Their raids drew such a response that the Police then mobilised their full resources to smash the gang and, whilst they were at it, engaged in widespread suppression of revolutionary activists and sympathisers.

As the opening of the novel makes clear, this is not a story with a happy ending, with the main illegalists all being either shot or executed, whilst other associates were jailed or transported for lengthy sentences.

Inevitably a novel such as this will raise all sorts of questions for readers, not least how far is it sensible to go in pursuing "revolutionary" goals when one is in a situation that shows no signs of approaching a "revolutionary tipping point"; what is the relationship between such illegalist groups and a wider movement; how far becoming an illegalist (or any form of revolutionary) a question of upbringing, environment, temperament or rational decision making?

It's to the credit of the text that it allows readers to make their own minds up about these matters. It doesn't engage in moralising, but rather tries to get behind the motivations of the participants and the political / economic / social background to what happened. It also fleshes out the lived experience of the illegalists by showing how their political acts impacted on their private lives.

This is a "crime" novel with a difference, in that it is also explicitly political, but it is so well-written that it should appeal to those who would not usually buy an explicitly "anarchist" title. One can only hope it does well enough to justify further titles in this series. The production values are good (economics dictates that the illustrations are printed on paper that doesn't do them justice) and the few typos are doubtless there for those nit-pickers who like to comment on such things.

Overall, reasonably priced and a cracking read.

8/10

Richard Alexander