Fractures d’une vie
Charlie Bauer
notice anglaise
A Fractured Life
New edition, revised and enlarged, with a postface “Fifteen years later”
Recounting nothing but his own life, Charlie Bauer looks back over nearly fifty years of French history, starting in the fifties in a working-class district on the edge of Marseille, when the major influence on his ideas and development was the so-called popular religion of the time, i.e. communism. This training was completed by petty thieving in organised gangs in shops and on trains. The Communist Party’s involvement in the Algerian War was behind the first of his ruptures – the author and his friends supported the Algerian FLN.
He was arrested and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. From then on, his daily life was marked by transfers from one state prison to another, often after one of his daring attempts to escape. He spent nine years in solitary confinement or in top security sections.
He was freed after fourteen years of detention, and was soon back to his clandestine occupations, where he came across Jacques Mesrine, especially in the struggle against top security prisons. Mesrine’s execution marked a new arrest for Charlie Bauer, who went down again for ten years, until 1988. This book was published two years later. Fifteen years further on, this new edition continues his eyewitness story of a lifetime’s resistance against the predominant social order.
Published: 20/04/2004 – French price: 20.00 Euro – 454 pages – ISBN: 978–2-7489–0025-5