Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud died on Wednesday November 6 at the age of 100, announced her publisher Dupuis, confirming information from the daily Humanityfor which she was war correspondent. “A heroine is gone. Her legacy: a whole century of fighting”greeted Humanity for whom she covered the Algerian and Vietnam wars.
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. The latter paid tribute to her on Facebook by publishing a photo of her, aged, posing on a sofa.
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.
After the Liberation, she wanted to join the army but was not 21 years old. His commitment ends there. Without news of her deported friends, haunted by the memory of the jails, she plunges into depression as she recounts in We called him Rainer. Touched by her distress, Paul Eluard takes her under his wing, prefaces his collection of poems The closed fistin 1945. He took her to Picasso who painted her – a determined little face framed by thick brown hair – and introduced her to the writer Vercors.
It then begins at This eveninga communist newspaper edited by Aragon. Then for Humanityshe covers the war in Indochina where Ho Chi Minh receives her as “his daughter”. She goes clandestinely to Algeria where she escapes an attack by the OAS (Organization of the Secret Army). She denounces the torture practiced in Paris against FLN (National Liberation Front) activists. Then she returned to Vietnam and covered the war for seven years. On her return, she worked as a nursing assistant in a Parisian hospital and denounced in The Cloths of the Nightsold a million copies, the misery of Public Assistance.
