Jean Ziegler died last week.

He was 92, and Parkinson's finally got him after Geneva, the UN, and half the Swiss banking establishment couldn't.

I never met him. But I grew up on some of his sentences, that particular way he had of turning a statistic into an accusation. A child dies of hunger every few seconds, he used to say, and on a planet that produces more than enough food for everyone, that child isn't a victim of fate. That child is murdered. He spent his whole life refusing to let anyone soften that sentence into something more comfortable.

Born Hans Ziegler in 1934, in a stiff Protestant family near Thun, of all unlikely starting points. Studied law, drifted into sociology, ended up in Paris where Sartre and de Beauvoir got their hooks into him, de Beauvoir apparently talked him into the name Jean.

He joined the French Communist Party, came back to Switzerland, and at 30 found himself, almost by accident, driving Che Guevara around Geneva during a UN conference. He thought about following him to Latin America. Guevara told him “no, stay here, this is where the brain of the monster lives, fight it from inside.” So he did. For the next fifty-some years.

He became a Social Democratic MP for seven terms, but what he's really remembered for is going after the Swiss banks directly, naming names, naming numbers.

Une Suisse au-dessus de tout soupçon in 1976 tore into banking secrecy and dirty money sitting comfortably in Swiss vaults. It got him sued into the ground at home and made him famous everywhere else. He kept going, La Suisse lave plus blanc, then La Suisse, l'or et les morts on the country's wartime conduct. Something like twenty books total. He called them his weapons, and he wasn't being poetic about it, the lawsuits, the loss of parliamentary immunity, the damages he had to pay, those were real costs for real fights.

Then from 2000 to 2008 he was UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, which is maybe where his whole project crystallized : hunger isn't weather, it's policy. You can argue with how he framed things, plenty of people did, loudly. But you can't argue that he ever shut up when it would've been easier to.

The farewell was Thursday, at St. Pierre Cathedral in Geneva, packed.

They played the Internationale on the cathedral organ, which apparently had never happened there before, and the whole room sang it. The pastor warned everyone the service would run "as long as a Fidel Castro speech," and he wasn't wrong, two and a half hours of tributes and protest songs.

Geneva's mayor said the city had lost one of its great consciences. Micheline Calmy-Rey, in tears, pushed back on the old accusation that he'd betrayed Switzerland by going after its banks, no, she said, he loved this country, just with the kind of love that expects better.

Francesca Albanese sent a letter calling him not a predecessor but a giant. Mélenchon couldn't make it and sent a video instead.

What got me, reading about it after the fact, was this : since his death was announced, entire sacks of letters have been arriving at his family's house outside Geneva, from everywhere. And at the ceremony itself, people stood up representing Chilean exiles, Congolese communities, Palestinians, Iranians, Sahrawis, all saying some version of the same thing, that this one Swiss sociologist, from this one small city, had mattered enormously to fights happening on the other side of the world. That's internationalism, basically: just a fact about who shows up to mourn you.

He wasn't always right, and he wasn't always careful, and he clearly enjoyed his own legend a bit too much sometimes. None of that cancels out the main thing, which is that he refused, for fifty years, the comfort of staying quiet, comfort that Switzerland and the UN system would have handed him on a plate if he'd just kept his head down.

His line, the one that keeps getting quoted this week, is simple: we have to keep fighting. Worth holding onto.