Stéphane Hessel and Edgar Morin (pictured) formed a formidable couple when they launched, here on Mediapart, a joint appeal to candidates in France’s 2012 presidential elections. The pair, then aged 90 and 94 respectively, had lived through similar experiences: Hessel was a German naturalised French, former WWII Resistance fighter, survivor of Nazi concentration camps, while Morin, widely acclaimed as one of Europe's greatest 20th-century thinkers, was born to immigrant parents and also fought in the Resistance movement. In this tribute to Hessel, who died overnight on Tuesday, Mediapart republishes the text and video of their outline for a "path of hope" for a new society that shuns "the futile, the disposable, and the wasteful”, an end to economic policies "driving us to disaster", and for a return to values of social responsibility.
The outspoken French social and political campaigner Stéphane Hessel (pictured), whose recent best-selling manifesto Time for Outrage became an inspiration for social protest movements worldwide, died during the night of February 26th, aged 95. Born German, Hessel was seven years’ old when he arrived in France, becoming a naturalised citizen after which, at the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Resistance movement. He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp from where he escaped during transfer to Bergen-Belsen. After the war, he helped draft the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and was appointed as an honorary ‘Ambassador of France' for special government missions abroad. Hessel detailed his extraordinary life, his political engagement and his cultural influences in this revealing interview with Sylvain Bourmeau, first published by Mediapart in 2011. He began by explaining how his escape from execution in Germany in 1944 left him with a purpose he had to fulfil.
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