The frail, stooped figure of Abbé Pierre, with his white beard, black beret, thick walking cane and mountain boots, was familiar all through France where, for four decades, he acted as the national conscience towards the homeless and the poor.

Often, measures to help the deprived came only after the Abbé had driven home a political and moral message to governments. Over the years, this former Capuchin monk turned himself into a media star to support his causes and Emmaus, the international movement which he founded on the principle: “Serve first those who suffer most.”

After years of struggle during which the Abbé’s growing army collected huge amounts of secondhand furniture and household goods to finance cheap housing, support began to come in the form of growing public donations. The Abbé preached: “I don’t say to the rich, ‘It is wrong to be rich’. I say, ‘What do you do with your wealth?’”

Senior politicians in France, including President François Mitterrand, would call on the Abbé to receive moral uplift and a boost in the polls. In exchange the Abbé would obtain pledges — an easing of expulsions here, more social housing there. In 1993, for example, the new Minister of Housing, Hervé de Charette, went to Esteville, near Rouen, to see the Abbé in his tiny room in an Emmaus retirement home.

“You have launched an appeal for the poorly housed that has moved the entire nation,” he told the priest. “I wanted my visit to you to be my first important act as Minister.”

The Abbé, a former Resistance leader and a member of the French Parliament from 1945 to 1951, was never taken in by flattery — for nine years he refused to accept proferred appointment as a Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur in order to put pressure on the Government. He continued to campaign into extreme old age, notably via his bestselling book, Dieu et les Hommes, a series of conversations with Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins sans Frontières and a former minister for humanitarian action in the Socialist Government.

The popularity of this lifelong champion of the disinherited outshone that of presidents and film stars. Every year for more than a decade — until he asked for his name to be removed from the lists in 2004 — he was voted the most popular person in the nation in a newspaper poll, outscoring such household names as Jacques Cousteau, the film-maker and oceanographer.

The Abbé’s reknown in France was akin to that of Mother Teresa and was based on the same selfless humanitarian actions. In recent years he had limited his work to France, but by the time of his death the Emmaus movement had 350 communities in France and member associations in 39 countries around the world.

Henri Grouès was the son of the prosperous director of a Lyons silk company. An influential factor in his childhood was the charity work for the poor undertaken by his father. It provided the future Abbé Pierre with his lifelong vocation.

On a visit to Assisi at 14 he discovered St Francis and decided to become a monk. At 19 he told the young woman who was his dance partner one evening: “This is my last dance for I am joining the Capuchins tomorrow.”

In 1931 he gave away his worldly goods and spent eight years with the Capuchins, being ordained on August 14, 1938. An assistant priest at Grenoble Cathedral at the time of the 1940 armistice, he started to help Jews to cross the Alps to Switzerland. On another occasion he carried Jacques de Gaulle, the paralysed brother of Charles de Gaulle who was being hunted by the Gestapo, across the barbed wire of the Swiss border and to safety in Geneva.

He ran a clandestine printing plant for false documents from his Grenoble home and organised the theft of arms from Italians occupying Grenoble. The weapons were used when a Resistance movement was later set up by the Abbé and others in the Vercors mountains. These units engaged in sustained armed conflict with the Wehrmacht.

The Abbé, arrested by the Italians, managed to escape and join the Maquis in the Vercors. He ran a clandestine newspaper and formed networks to help young men fleeing the German-imposed service du travail obligatoire, which usually meant working in German arms factories.