Henri Grouès, who died yesterday at a Paris hospital, was the activist priest whose “holy anger” at poverty and homelessness forced the French politicians to address the nation’s problems and inspired the international Emmaus Community for the poor, now in 39 nations. He was 94.

A member of the French Resistance who once carried General Charles de Gaulle’s brother to safety across the Swiss border, Grouès continued in peacetime to be known by his nom de guerre, Abbé Pierre.

Abbé Pierre leapt to international fame during the frigid winter of 1954 with a radio appeal to France to come to the aid of the homeless. His appeal set off a wave of donations, and the French government responded with new programs to help the homeless and a law, still on the books, forbidding wintertime evictions.

Emboldened, Abbé Pierre became to many the conscience of the nation, speaking out on issues of poverty and civil right for immigrants. He brought strident advice to churchmen and to world leaders, including President Eisenhower, whom he urged to make war on poverty.

On a tour of South America in 1959, Abbé Pierre told an Ecuadorian bishop to scrap plans for an elaborate cathedral and give the money to the poor. And he urged Pope John Paul II to retire at age 75, which, given the pontiff’s popularity, must have taken guts. The pope evidently liked Abbé Pierre and had four audiences with him, which was surprising, as Abbé Pierre called for the right of priests to marry and for the church to ordain women. He even admitted that he had broken his vow of chastity “on rare occasions” when he was a young priest.

Abbé Pierre was the son of a wealthy silk manufacturer in Lyon. Inspired while still a teenager by St. Francis of Assisi, he renounced his inheritance, distributed his belongings to the poor, and at 18 entered a Capuchin seminary. He was ordained as a priest by the inspirational theologian Fr. Henri de Lubac, who, Abbé Pierre said, advised him to “make just one prayer to the Holy Spirit: ask it to grant you the anticlericalism of the saints.”

Mobilized as a noncommissioned officer in the Alps at the start of World War II, Abbé Pierre fell ill, and was eventually made curate of the cathedral at Grenoble. Active in the Resistance throughout the war, he taught seminars in document forgery and worked to smuggle Jews and others across the Swiss border. After being arrested by the German army and escaping to Algiers, he served in 1944 as a chaplain at the naval academy in Casablanca, then returned with the Army of Liberation to Paris.

Abbé Pierre was elected to the French Parliament in 1945 and served for six years. During that time, he purchased an old estate at Neuilly-Plaisance, near Paris, and made it a haven for the homeless. He named the place Emmaus, after the village where Christ first appeared after his resurrection. He rousted his tenants from the streets of Paris and after a few years hit on junk collection as a means of supporting it. He purchased a truck with funds he won on a radio quiz show.

It was as leader of the Ragpickers of Emmaus that Abbé Pierre launched his 1954 radio appeal. Celebrities rushed to donate to the cause, including Charlie Chaplin, then living in Paris in exile, who declared that the 2 million francs he donated “belongs to the vagabond I portrayed.” Abbé Pierre became internationally known, too, and he began to travel the world in his distinctive get-up of a cape, blue beret, and crookhandled cane.

Emmaus communities were established in Europe, Asia, and South America. During a visit to Argentina in 1963, he was shipwrecked and believed dead, an event that spurred Emmaus communities worldwide to organize more formally, as Emmaus International. Emmaus remains a loose confederation of more than 300 organizations in 39 nations.

Abbé Pierre remained a feisty voice for the downtrodden, but was disappointed when his 1991 fast on behalf of international asylum-seekers was ignored in the uproar surrounding the first Gulf War. In 1992, for the first time in recent years, he fell to second place in the annual Journal du Dimanche poll naming the 50 most popular French citizens (Jacques Yves-Cousteau was first).

In 1996, his knack for controversy bit back when he made comments supporting a friend, Roger Garaudy, a Marxist turned Muslim whose writings got him convicted by a French court of denying the Holocaust. Abbé Pierre later apologized and said he had not read the book.

It was an unlikely imbroglio for a man who had helped many Jews escape France during the war. He weathered it well, and by 2003 was again first in the French popularity poll. In an unlikely turn of events, the conscience of a nation was also its most popular citizen; the following year he asked not to be included in the poll.

Henri Antoine Grouès
Born August 5, 1912, in Lyon, France; died January 23 at a military hospital in Paris.