Writer Stephane Hessel, the former French Resistance fighter whose 2010 manifesto Time for Outrage inspired social protesters, has died at the age of 95.
Stephane Hessel died overnight, his wife Christiane Hessel-Chabry told France’s AFP news agency in Paris.
A German by birth, Stephane Hessel was imprisoned in Nazi camps during World War II for his activities in France.
In Time for Outrage, Stephane Hessel called for a new form of “resistance” to the injustices of the modern world.
He expressed outrage at the growing gap between haves and have-nots, France’s treatment of illegal immigrants and damage to the environment.
The Indignados protest movement in Spain was inspired by Stephane Hessel’s manifesto, according to Spanish media.
His name was the top trending term on Twitter in Spain and France on Wednesday morning, as admirers paid tribute with quotes such as: “To create is to resist, to resist is to create.”
French President Francois Hollande said he had learnt “with great sadness” about Stephane Hessel’s death.
“His capacity for indignation knew no bounds other than those of his own life,” he said in a statement.
“As that comes to an end, he leaves us a lesson: to refuse to accept any injustice.”
Born of Jewish origin on October 20, 1917, in Berlin, Stephane Hessel arrived in France at the age of eight.
His parents Franz and Helen Hessel (born Grund) inspired two of the characters in Francois Truffaut’s classic romantic film Jules And Jim.
A naturalized French citizen from 1939, Stephane Hessel became a prominent Resistance figure, says French news agency AFP. He was arrested by the Gestapo and later sent to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps.
After the war, Stephane Hessel worked as a French diplomat at the UN, where he was involved in compiling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
However some, like the French Jewish activist Gilles-William Goldnadel, have accused him of exaggerating his role in the work.
According to Giles-William Goldnadel, France’s leftist press idealized the former Resistance fighter, a strong critic of Israeli policy, as a “secular saint”.
Stephane Hessel’s diplomatic postings also included Vietnam in the 1950s and Algeria in the 1960s.
In France, Stephane Hessel took up the cause of illegal immigrants and championed the rights of the oppressed.
Time for Outrage, which has sold more than 4.5 million copies in 35 countries, argues that the French need to again become outraged like those who participated in the wartime Resistance.
Whether Stephane Hessel inspired the global Occupy movement, as some have argued, is more open to debate.
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