1918 -- [August 8] Michel Zevaco (1860-1918), French novelist, professor, publisher, film director, anticleric, anarchist.

Michel Zevaco founded the anarchist weekly magazine "Gueux" on March 27, 1892. A month later he was jailed for 6 months & fined for praising Pini & Ravachol.

Afterwards Zevaco wrote for Sébastien Faure journal, "Libertaire", as well as for the anarchist newspaper "La Renaissance".

In 1898, he edited "l'Anticlérical" (organ of the Anticlerical League of France), & was involved in supporting Dreyfus

Zevaco's famous cloak & dagger novels Les Pardaillanof, began to be serialized in the daily newspapers in 1900 to great popular success.

"Michel Zevaco and the Serial Novel"

The writer of the famous cloak and dagger series of Les Pardaillan, Michel Zevaco (1860-1918) is to-day quite unknown in spite of the new interest aroused by popular litterature.

A former school teacher, then an officer, he became a militant journalist, who wrote for various revolutionary newspapers, of anarchist tendancy. He became famous mainly for the part he played in the anticlerical struggles at the end of the last century. Then, as a writer of serial novels, he published works which had a great success in Jaurès' daily La Peite République, and he became appointed serial writer for Le Matin from 1906 to his death.

His already well-established poularity was made even greater by his promising beginnings as a film-director of movies in 1917. His novels first published by Fayard and Tallandier were republished several times and adapted for the screen. But the latest paperback edition only gives mutilated version impaired by many cuts.

He is the author of Les Pardaillan, Le Capitan, Borgia, Buridan, L'Héroïne, l'hôtel Saint Pol and Nostradamus, his most famous historical novels. But he also published novels related to his times. Some of his serials have never been published by any publishing house.