“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the resistance fighter, poet, writer, journalist and war correspondent Madeleine Riffaud,” publisher Dupuis said in a press release this Wednesday. “She passed away this morning, peacefully in her bed, surrounded by her loved ones,” he added.
“A heroine is gone. His legacy: a whole century of fighting”, praised for his part Humanity, for whom she covered the Algerian and Vietnam wars. “She was a character in a novel, with an existence woven by struggle, writing, three wars and a love,” the daily underlined.
“Thinking at fascists of all kinds”
The national secretary of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, noted that Madeleine Riffaud had died “on the day of Trump’s election. » “As a final snub to fascists of all kinds, whom you will have fought all your life,” he wrote on X.
On August 23, 2024, her 100th birthday, Madeleine Riffaud published the third and final volume of Madeleine, resistant (Dupuis editions), his war memoirs in comic strip, with Dominique Bertail on the drawing, and Jean-David Morvan on the script.
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“I salute the memory of this heroine of admirable and exemplary courage,” reacted the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati in a press release, recalling that Madeleine Riffaud was also a poet and close to Paul Eluard, who published her works.
“I regret, moreover, having killed this man”
Born in 1924 in the Somme, this only daughter of teachers joined the resistance at the age of 16, in Paris, where she became a liaison agent with her fellow communists from the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) at the medical faculty. She takes the code name “Rainer”, in homage to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, to signify that she “is not at war against the German people but against the Nazis”.
The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, a village of his youth decimated in June 1944, provoked his passage to arms. On July 23, she shot a Nazi officer twice in the head on the Solferino bridge in Paris. “I regret, moreover, having killed this man. You are here. You were looking at the Seine. Can we be mean when we look at the Seine? Maybe he was a good guy. But that… well, it’s war,” she said.
