Régis Messac

French teacher, union organiser, Résistance member, writer, novelist, poet, translator pacifist and anarchist, born. Like his parents, he was a teacher but suffers a serious brain injury during WWI. Demobilised in 1919 and disgusted with the war, he wrote two autobiographical novels: 'Le Voyage de Néania, à travers la guerre et la paix' (1926) and 'Ordre de Transport' (unpub.); a play, 'Phobie du Bleu' (unpub.); a pamphlet, 'Le Pourboire du Sang' (1936), and a small book of poems: 'Poèmes Guerriers' (1926).

Having learnt English from British troops at the end of the war, he went on to work and teach in various universities in England and in Canada. He returned to France in 1929, teaching at a college in Montpellier and obtained his doctorate in arts with a thesis 'Le Detective Novel et l'Influence de la Pensée Scientifique' (1929).

An anarcho-syndicalist and pacifist, he called into question the standard pedagogy and dogmas of official teaching, and as an active militant, became, in 1936, secretary of the Fédération Générale de l'Enseignement (General Federation of Teachers).

As a writer and poet, Messac published two science fiction novels 'Quinzinzinsili' (1935) and 'La Cité des Asphyxiés' (1937), as well pieces for various reviews, on libertarian and proletarian literature. In all, his work includes 30 books, one of which is a posthumous novel 'Valcrétin', a sort of sci-fi anti-colonial satire written in 1943, which was published in 1973. He also translated a number of American science fiction books and was a prolific user of pseudonyms (Robert Champagnac, Maxime Dolus, Mad Hobo, Jérémie Jéricho, Romain Lécapère, Sancho Llorente, Le Mandarin, Columbus North, L’Ours mal léché, Margarita Risa, Elsa Rothgemünde, Doctor Séraphicus, Laurent Zurbarran, etc.) for his numerous newspaper columns, his often controversial and satirical articles, and the incredible number of works of a scientific or philosophical nature that he produced in the 1920s and 1930s.

During the German occupation in WWII, Messac was a member of the Résistance, organising escape routes for those fleeing compulsory labour conscription, and wrote an anti-Vichy tract 'Pot-pourri Fantôme', a chronicle of the war and occupation between 1939 and 1942. Arrested on May 10 1943 during the German occupation and sent into the Nazi concentration camp system, Régis Messac is believed to have died some time during 1945 in Gross-Rosen or Dora. In a June 1946 judgment, the tribunal de Coutances set an official date of death as May 15, 1945. Messac was also awarded a posthumous Croix de Guerre by the French government.

Many of Messac's books have been reprinted by the French publisher Éditions ex nihilo, alongside a number of his previously unpublished manuscripts..

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