FRANCE:Abbé Pierre, the priest who won an unrivalled place in the hearts of the French by campaigning for the homeless, died in a Paris hospital yesterday, aged 94, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
President Jacques Chirac announced the death, saying that France had lost "an immense figure, a conscience, a man who personified goodness". In 2005 Chirac promoted Pierre to the highest rank in the French Legion of Honour, that of grand-croix. When Pierre had been made a grand officier in 1992, he refused to accept the honour before 300 homeless African families were provided with lodging. His influence was so great that the Bérégovoy government found buildings within 24 hours.
The socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal said yesterday that Pierre's "long cry of anger against poverty must not be extinguished". Considered the social conscience of France, Pierre topped an annual opinion poll on the country's most popular personalities for 17 years, surpassing even the football star Zinedine Zidane. In 2004, he asked that his name be withdrawn from the poll, "to make way for younger people".
In a poll of the greatest Frenchmen of all time, conducted by French television last year, Pierre came in third, after Charles de Gaulle and Louis Pasteur. Already, in 1957, the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes had listed Pierre - along with steak frites and the Citroën DS car - as a French icon.
Pierre's extraordinary life started in Lyons on August 5th, 1912. He was born Henri Grouès, the fifth child of a wealthy silk merchant. (Abbé Pierre was his nom de guerre in the Resistance during the second World War.) He found his vocation as a child, accompanying his father to wash and clothe poor men on Sunday mornings. He went to Jesuit schools and was overwhelmed by a powerful spiritual experience when praying at Assisi at Easter in 1927.
Pierre gave his inheritance to the poor of Lyons and spent seven years in a Capuchin monastery.
But his fragile health made him unsuited for monastery life, and he went to Grenoble where as a parish priest he organised the exfiltration of Jewish families and founded a refuge for escapees from Nazi labour camps. He was twice imprisoned by the Germans, and twice escaped. After the liberation, Pierre served for six years as a centrist deputy in the French National Assembly, where he made a colourful figure, sitting on the red velvet benches in his black cassock and beret.
In the summer of 1949, he met an ex-convict named Georges who had tried to commit suicide. "You have nothing to lose since you want to die. So help me help others," Pierre said.
Together they founded the Companions of Emmaus, named after the town where Christ appeared to the apostles after his crucifixion. French social services began directing the homeless to them.
When the group ran out of money, Pierre begged on Paris's grands boulevards. Today the charity counts 350 "communities" the world over, including 110 in France.
On February 1st, 1954, Pierre went on the radio at lunchtime and announced: "My friends, help! A woman has just frozen to death . . . In Paris tonight, there will be more than 2,000 people huddling in freezing temperatures, without bread, many of them nearly unclothed." It was an unusually cold winter, with temperatures of minus 15 in Paris. Abbé Pierre said: "There must be voices for voiceless men, which prevent people sleeping." He called the 300 tonnes of blankets, tents, clothing, food and gas heaters that flooded in "the insurrection of goodness". Pierre also received 300,000 letters, many with cheques.
Charles de Gaulle, Yves Montand and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium sent money. The owner of the hotel that served as Pierre's headquarters was summoned to the Crillon Hotel, where a shy, short man gave her two million francs in cash. "I'm not giving it; I'm returning it," Charlie Chaplin said. "It belongs to the vagabond I was, and who I personified."
Pierre disliked media attention and all but disappeared from public view for several decades. Yet when he re-emerged in 1994 to again sound the alarm for the homeless, the French had not forgotten him.
The French forgave Pierre's mistakes. In 1996, he defended Roger Garaudy, a communist philosopher who converted to Islam and questioned the Holocaust. After months of controversy, Pierre admitted he had not read Garaudy's books, and apologised.