Resistance heroine and poet, Madeleine Riffaud died at 100

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She was a face of the Resistance. Madeleine Riffaud died in Paris at the age of 100announced its publisher Dupuis on Wednesday November 6, 2024, confirming information from the daily Humanity for which she was war correspondent.

Interned in Fresnes during the war

Journalist, war correspondent in Vietnam and Algeria, Madeleine Riffaud was also a recognized poet. An emblematic figure of the resistance against the Nazi occupiers, she joined the Resistance while she was a student in Paris and followed a midwife training at the medical faculty.

Arrested after shooting dead in broad daylight two bullets in the head an officer of the occupying army on the Solférino bridge, she was interned in the prison of Fresnes (Val-de-Marne) and tortured for several weeks without speaking. “I regret, moreover, having killed this man. You are here. You were looking at the Seine. Can we be bad, when we look at the Seine ? Maybe he was a good guy. But that… well, it’s war,” she said.

Swindled by her caregiver

In 2023, his caregiver was judged by the Paris criminal court for abuse of weakness with aggravating circumstances. The defendant, who allegedly took more than 140 000 euros to his patient, was asked for a three-year prison sentence, two of which were suspended.

On August 23, 2024, the day of her 100th birthday, Madeleine Riffaud published the third and final volumeof Madeleine, resistanthis war memoirs published in comics.

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