Stéphane Hessel Born: October 20th, 1917 Died: February 26th, 2013Not many people find themselves propelled suddenly to worldwide celebrity in their 90s. This is what happened, however, to Stéphane Hessel, who has died aged 95.
Having had a distinguished career during the second World War in Gen Charles de Gaulles Free French movement and as an international civil servant after the war, Hessel in 2010 published a pamphlet, Time for Outrage (Indignez-Vous!), which became the manifesto for anti-capitalist protest groups such as the Indignados in Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. It is estimated to have sold some four million copies worldwide.
Hessel’s internationalism was rooted in his cosmopolitan background. He was born in Berlin to a bourgeois and intellectual Jewish family who had converted to Protestantism. His father, Franz, was an essayist and translator who had translated Proust into German. His mother, Helen (nee Grund), who had an intense liaison with a French friend of his father, Henri-Pierre Roché, was the model for Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau) in the 1962 film Jules et Jim.
Educated in France
His mother took the young Stéphane with her to Paris in 1925 when she decided to live with her lover. Stéphane was educated in France and acquired French citizenship in 1937. Already bilingual in French and German, he learned perfect English while studying at the London School of Economics in 1937. He mixed in London literary and intellectual circles, getting to know, among others, the writer Aldous Huxley.
Taken prisoner during the battle of France in 1940, Hessel escaped before he could be transferred to Germany. He made his way to Marseille, where he spent two very intense months with Varian Fry, who had been sent by the US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to organise the escape to the US of European intellectuals whose lives would be in danger if they remained in Nazi-occupied France.
In May 1941 Hessel arrived in London and signed up to work for the Gaullist secret services. In March 1944, in preparation for the D-day landings, he was flown to France as part of the Greco Mission to make contact with several resistance networks. This was a period when the Gestapo was engaged in ferocious repression of the resistance and many movements were infiltrated by traitors.
Hessel was arrested in July 1944 and tortured before being deported to Buchenwald. He managed to escape execution, with the complicity of one of the guards, by substituting his own identity with that of a prisoner who had died of typhoid, which was ravaging the camp.
Slave labour camp
Under his new identity, he was transferred to the camp of Rottleberode. In the Nazi camps Hessel was helped by his perfect knowledge of German. He escaped but was quickly picked up again, and transferred to the notorious slave labour camp of Dora. As the allies approached, the Germans evacuated the camp and the prisoners were loaded into a train to be transferred to Bergen-Belsen. This time, however, Hessel was successful in escaping, through a gap in the floor of his carriage, and fled into the forest. He made his way on foot to Hanover and was picked up by American troops at the end of April.
After returning to liberated France he embarked on a diplomatic career, working first at the newly founded United Nations. He was involved in the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He then spent most of his career representing France at international organisations devoted to human rights and development in Africa. In 1954, he was an adviser to the left-of-centre French PM Pierre Mendès, whose government put an end to the war in Indo-China. In 1977, he was appointed French ambassador to the UN.
After his retirement Hessel took up progressive causes, acting as an adviser to various socialist governments. What turned into the pamphlet Time for Outrage started life as a speech he made in 2008 to commemorate the resistance and oppose its exploitation by right-wing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy. The campaign took off in ways he had never predicted. Hessel saw his denunciation of international finance as a way of remaining loyal to the humanistic and progressive values of the resistance.
He was courteous but enjoyed provocation. And he basked in the international celebrity acquired so late in life.
He claimed that poetry was what had helped to sustain him during his captivity. At the age of 88, he published an anthology of the poems that had meant the most to him.
His first wife, Vitia, with whom he had a son and two daughters, died in 1985. He is survived by his second wife, Christiane.