Pierre de Lescure (1891–1963)

Pierre de Lescure was born in Oran, Algeria, then a French colony, to a bourgeois family. He was the grandson of Jules de Lescure, director of Algeria's railways and a noted politician of the French Second Empire. He enrolled at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris, intending a career as a diplomat, but left due to illness. In 1911, he met the Dominican monk and scholar Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, whose influence led him work for the Catholic journal La Revue des jeunes (The Youth Review) and help found its bookstore and publishing company. He left the organization in 1923 and started another bookstore, through which he met Jean Marcel Bruller, who became his friend and colleague. Another publishing venture failed, and to make ends meet, he wrote two crime novels published in 1935 under the pseudonym Pierre Anzin. In 1941, following the start of World War II and the Nazi Occupation of France, he and Bruller joined the French Resistance and co-founded Éditions de Minuit, an underground press. The first work they published was Le Silence de la mer, a novella by Bruller using the nom de guerre Vercors. The book was clandestinely distributed throughout Occupied France although the Germans tried to stop it. The book's editor was arrested and executed. De Lescure took refuge for a while in the mountainous Jura region on the Swiss border. After the war, he left Éditions de Minuit after disagreements with Bruller and moved with Celia Bertin to Switzerland. There they started the literary magazine Roman. He continued to publish fiction under his own name. His namesake grandson Pierre Lescure is a journalist and television executive.