37 Facts About Pierre Messmer

Pierre Messmer was elected a member of the Academie francaise in 1999; his seat was taken over by Simone Veil.

Pierre Joseph Auguste Messmer was born in Vincennes in 1916.

Pierre Messmer graduated in 1936 in the language school ENLOV and the following year at the Ecole nationale de la France d'outre-mer.

Pierre Messmer then became a senior civil servant in the colonial administration and became a Doctor of Laws in 1939.

Pierre Messmer then hijacked in Marseille an Italian cargo ship, along with his friend Jean Simon, and sailed first to Gibraltar, then London and engaged himself in the Free French Forces as a member of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion.

Pierre Messmer fought at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt.

Pierre Messmer joined in London General Koenig's military staff and participated in the landings in Normandy in August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris.

Pierre Messmer was named the following year general secretary of the interministerial committee for Indochina and then head of staff of the high commissary of the Republic.

Pierre Messmer began his high-level African service as governor of Mauritania from 1952 to 1954, and then served as governor of Ivory Coast from 1954 to 1956, when he briefly returned to Paris in the staff of Gaston Defferre, Minister of Overseas Territories who enacted the Defferre Act granting to colonial territories internal autonomy, a first step towards independence.

That same year, Pierre Messmer was nominated as governor general of Cameroun, where a civil war had started the preceding year following the outlawing of the independentist Union of the Peoples of Cameroon in July 1955.

Pierre Messmer initiated a decolonization process and imported the counter-revolutionary warfare methods theorized in Indochina and implemented during the Algerian War.

Pierre Messmer served as high commissioner of French Equatorial Africa from January 1958 to July 1958, and as high commissioner of French West Africa from 1958 to 1959.

Pierre Messmer was confronted with the 1961 Generals' Putsch, reorganised the French Army and adapted it to the nuclear era.

In 1960, Pierre Messmer visited Lisbon and expressed lament for the United Nations resolutions against colonialism and approved of the Estado Novo regime's hardline stance against decolonisation on the grounds that Portugal represented the last vestige of white Western civilisation on the African continent.

Pierre Messmer gave permission for former Algerian War veterans to fight in Katanga against the newly independent Congo and United Nations peacekeeping forces.

Pierre Messmer confided to Roger Trinquier that it was de Gaulle's ambition to replace the Belgians and control a reunited Congo from Elisabethville.

Palewski died in 1984 of leukemia, which he always has attributed to the Beryl incident, and Pierre Messmer always remained close-mouthed on the affair.

Pierre Messmer became a personality of the Gaullist Party and was elected deputy in 1968, representing Moselle departement.

Pierre Messmer quit the government after de Gaulle's resignation and founded the association Presence du gaullisme.

Pierre Messmer occupied cabinet positions again in the 1970s, serving first as Minister of state charged of the Overseas Territories in 1971, then as Prime Minister from July 1972 to May 1974.

Pierre Messmer succeeded in this function to Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who had adopted a parliamentary reading of the Constitution, which Messmer opposed in his investiture speech.

Pierre Messmer had been chosen by Pompidou as a guarant of his fidelity to de Gaulle, and his cabinet included personalities close to Pompidou, such as Jacques Chirac, named Minister of Agriculture.

In 1974, when Pompidou died, those close to Pierre Messmer encouraged him to run for president.

Pierre Messmer accepted at the condition of Chaban-Delmas, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Edgar Faure's withdrawals.

However, Chaban-Delmas, despite the Canard enchaines campaign against him, maintained himself, leading Pierre Messmer to withdraw his candidacy.

Pierre Messmer served as prime minister for another few weeks after Pompidou's death, ending his term after the presidential elections.

Pierre Messmer remained a Member of Parliament for the Moselle department until 1988, and served as President of the Lorraine regional assembly from 1968 to 1992.

Pierre Messmer was mayor of the town of Sarrebourg from 1971 to 1989.

Pierre Messmer was president of the Rally for the Republic parliamentary group during the first cohabitation, under Jacques Chirac's government.

Pierre Messmer died in 2007 aged 91, just four days after fellow Prime Minister Raymond Barre.

Pierre Messmer was the last surviving major French Politician to have been a member of the Free French forces.

An important figure of the French Resistance during World War II, Pierre Messmer was a member of the Ordre de la Liberation, and the recipient of numerous decorations including the highest rank of the Legion d'honneur.

Pierre Messmer became elected as a member of the Academie francaise in 1999, replacing a Gaullist comrade, Maurice Schumann.

Pierre Messmer was a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences since 1988, and, since 1976, of the Academie des sciences d'outre-mer.

Pierre Messmer was named perpetual secretary of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1995.

Pierre Messmer was chancellor of the Institut de France before becoming honorary chancellor.

In October 2001, Pierre Messmer succeeded to the General Jean Simon as President of the Fondation de la France libre.