After World War II
After World War II, he returned to the colonies and was a prisoner of war of the Vietminh, during two months in 1945, after the outbreaks of the First Indochina War. He 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.
In the 1950s, he pursued his career in Africa as a colonial administrator. Messmer began his high-level African service as governor of Mauritania from 1952 to 1954, and then served as governor of Côte d'Ivoire from 1954 to 1956. He came back to Paris in 1956, in the staff of Gaston Defferre, Minister of Overseas Territories who enacted the Deferre Act granting to colonial territories internal autonomy, a first step towards independence.
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