Madeleine Riffaud died at the age of 100, her publisher announced this Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud died at the age of 100.
War correspondent for Humanity
It was its publisher Dupuis who announced the news this Wednesday, confirming information from the daily Humanity for which she was war correspondent.
Also read:
24 hours in the emergency room “without eating” and with “half a glass of lukewarm water”: the poignant letter from Madeleine Riffaud, 98 years old
On August 23, 2024, her 100th birthday, she published the third and final volume of “Madeleine, resistant” (ed Dupuis), her war memoirs in comic strips, where she delivered what she had not “Never” meant before.
“A heroine is gone. Her legacy: a whole century of fighting”praised L'Humanité for which she covered the wars in Algeria and Vietnam. “She was a character in a novel, with an existence woven by struggle, writing, three wars and a love. A life of crazy intensity, after childhood in the rubble of the Great War, since her first not in the resistance until the maquis of South Vietnam”underlined the daily.
“It’s war”
Born in 1924 in the Somme, this only daughter of teachers joined the resistance at 16 years old.
A student midwife in Paris, she became a liaison agent with her fellow communists from the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) at the medical faculty. She becomes “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 there. You were looking at the Seine. Can you be bad when you look at the Seine? Perhaps he was a good guy. But that… well, it's war”she said.
