At the end of his life, the image of Stéphane Hessel (1917-2013) was in many ways akin to that of the engaged intellectual, uninvested activist for universal human values. The engaged intellectual draws his authority from a symbolic capital acquired elsewhere than in the institutional or political sphere : he relies on the legacy of previously recognized work. Stéphane Hessel, as yet unknown when he undertook his Memoirs in the mid-1990s, held only institutional capital. A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he had been a senior civil servant and diplomat. However, in Danse avec le siècle (1997), he adopts a posture likely to give him the charisma of an engaged intellectual. In it, he inserts his place in history and in a most prestigious intellectual world. His past as a Resistance fighter and deportee also made him the bearer of a cause. The description of his career, not only at the UN, allows him to present himself as a born activist whose itinerary is deeply coherent. The political positions taken and intellectual activities that followed the publication of the Memoirs can be analyzed as attempts to consolidate his image. But such a position is not without its weaknesses, the stance of prophetic engagement being particularly vulnerable to the accusation of posturing.