PARIS – Stephane Hessel of France was a man of many talents.

As a spy for the French Resistance, he survived the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald by assuming the identity of a French prisoner who was already dead. As a diplomat, he helped write the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And at age 93, after a distinguished but relatively anonymous life, he published a slim pamphlet that even he expected would be little more than a vanity project.

Additional Photos

As a French diplomat, Stephane Hessel helped write the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Associated Press

Au contraire.

Hessel’s 32-page “Time for Outrage” sold millions of copies across Europe, tapping into a vein of popular discontent with capitalism and transforming him into an intellectual superstar within weeks. Translated into English, the pocket-sized book became a source of inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In the book, Hessel urges young people to take inspiration from the anti-Nazi resistance to which he once belonged and rally against what he saw as the newest evil: The love of money.

The book, called “Indignez-vous” in French, had an initial run of 8,000 copies in 2010 and sold for $4 before becoming a best-seller.

Hessel died overnight Tuesday in Paris at age 95.

“I’m eagerly awaiting the taste of death. Death is something to savor, and I hope to savor mine. In the meantime, given that it has not yet happened and that I’m generally getting around normally, I’m using the time to throw out some messages,” Hessel told RTL radio in 2011.

Born in Germany, Hessel and his parents immigrated to France in 1924, where they settled into an avant-garde life, hanging out with artists like Alexander Calder and Marcel Duchamp.

Hessel fled to London to join the resistance led by Gen. Charles de Gaulle in 1941, but snuck back into occupied France on a spying mission in 1944, where he was arrested by the Gestapo and shipped off to the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp. The day before he was to be hanged, he swapped his identity with another French prisoner who had died of typhus.

As a French diplomat after World War II, Hessel joined a panel that included former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt which wrote up the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Hessel “leaves us with the invaluable heritage of fighting for universal human values and his inalienable sense of liberty,” Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe said Wednesday.

A proud Socialist, Hessel said the aim of “Time for Outrage” was to convince adrift or discouraged young people that they can change society for the better — even if they feel the world is controlled by entrenched and financially powerful interests. But he hardly expected it would find a large audience in France, much less elsewhere.

Related Stories