Resistance leader who helped rebuild France in peacetime When Pierre Sudreau had nightmares in later life, it was not the agonies of his torture and incarceration at the hands of the Gestapo that haunted him. Instead, the former resistance fighter and minister wrote in his memoirs, he would dream that he was back at boarding school. Sudreau, who died last month at the age of 92, took refuge from this bleak adolescence - the consequence of his father's early death and mother's work - in the books of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the pilot who wrote of adventure, friendship and the limits of human endurance. Aged 12, he wrote to the author - and was overwhelmed to receive a reply, followed by invitations to lunch. It was the start of a long friendship that helped inspire Saint-Exupéry's best-loved book, the gently allegorical Le Petit Prince. Yet by the time Le Petit Prince was published in 1943, Sudreau was already rivalling the adventures of his childhood hero. He had been training as a fighter pilot near Bordeaux when France succumbed to the German advance, and chose to remain with his wife and child rather than trying to escape with friends to London. Before long, he had met André Boyer, leader of the underground Brutus network that later became famous, and became the youngest regional head of a resistance movement. Crossing into the occupied north, he took part in night attacks on trains and the desperado rescue of a resistance leader from prison. Yet he was eventually betrayed, arrested, interrogated under torture and dispatched - after months of solitary confinement - to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he escaped execution only by posing as a prisoner who had died. "Descent to hell is rarely uplifting," he later wrote. The camps made us aware of things a man should neither see nor know. An experience that follows you through life. It sometimes gives you . . . a sense of perspective, but it does not bring peace. His wartime sufferings did, however, catapult him into a career in public life. In May 1945, Charles de Gaulle met the handful of resistance leaders who had just been repatriated from the camps and, asking about the emaciated "kid" (after his privations Sudreau looked much younger than his 25 years), declared: "let him serve the state." A rapid ascent through the bureaucracy followed. At 32, he was France's youngest préfet, the state's representative in the region of Loir et Cher - where he staged the first ever son et lumière show, at the Château de Chambord. From there, he went to head an urban planning commission in Paris where, with an enthusiasm for grands projets, he won a reputation as a technocrat for launching developments such as the RER rail network, the périphérique and the La Défense business district. Invited to head a ministry for reconstruction when de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, he roundly told the general it should be named "ministry of construction," with an eye to the future. And as a minister, he refused to defer to party political lines - publicly showing his affection, for example, for former resistance fighters who had entered politics as communists. In 1962 he defied de Gaulle, resigning his post in protest against the introduction of a popular vote for the presidency. "Every apprentice dictator can become dangerous," he later wrote. Refusing demands to return to frontline politics, he served instead as a Loir et Cher deputy and three times mayor of Blois, where he threw himself into municipal affairs and is now buried. Locals say his highest term of praise was: "You are an independent, like me!" Yet a lack of ideological conviction did not stop him campaigning passionately on certain topics: nuclear disarmament, housing, unemployment. A Blois journalist notes that a constituent complaining about dog fouling might easily receive in response a discourse on the international arms race. Sudreau was also a committed pro-European and he must have been horrified at the eurozone's inability to forge a united response to its current crisis. Even in 1981, he wrote in Le Figaro that Europe looked "more and more like a Byzantium under siege among its comforts, its customs and its routines." In his ability to engage on matters great and small, Sudreau was typical of a generation that fought as hard to resolve the problems of peacetime as they had to end Nazi occupation. He was a life-long friend of Stéphane Hessel, with him in the resistance and at Buchenwald, who last year sold more than a million copies of his book Indignez-Vous, a call to the post-crisis generation to rediscover activism and political commitment. Sudreau expressed his own activism by citing a line from Saint Exupéry: "To be a man is above all about being responsible . . . It is to feel in putting down a stone that one is contributing to building the world.