Stephane Hessel, the French Resistance veteran, concentration camp survivor and diplomat who wrote the anti-globalization essay Time for Outrage!, has died at 95.
His 2010 booklet, titled Indignez-vous! in French, was a call for action against a range of global problems that sold millions and helped inspire the Occupy protest movement.
Hessel died overnight, his wife Christiane Hessel-Chabry told the French news agency Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.
Born in 1917 in Berlin as the son of a German-Jewish writer, Hessel grew up in Paris, where his family moved when he was seven, and where he would spend most of his life.
He became a French citizen as a young man and during World War II served in the French army, then joined the London-based Resistance under General Charles de Gaulle.
In 1944, the Resistance sent him back into occupied France ahead of the Allied invasion. Hessel parachuted in and helped organize the underground network.
He was captured by the Nazis, who tortured him, using the technique now called water-boarding, and sent him to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
After several failed attempts, and having switched identity with that of a dead prisoner, he managed to flee while being transferred to Bergen-Belsen camp.
After the war, Hessel became a diplomat and, along with former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, helped edit the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
He later served as a UN ambassador in Geneva, and in the French Foreign Ministry under Socialist president Francois Mitterrand, who was in office from 1981 to 1995.
In 2010, he published the 32-page booklet Indignez-vous!, which called for non-violent action over global problems with the spirit of outrage that fired the French Resistance.
Hessel pointed at key challenges such as environmental destruction, the growing wealth gap, racism, the withering welfare state, and the plight of the Palestinians. His essay has been translated into more than a dozen languages and sold over three millions copies, becoming a central tract for the Occupy and Indignados movements.